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Vale & Vilas began its activity with its own brand – Ditchil. With time it moved on to private label and today it divides itself between these two worlds, always focused on creating sports products for women that stand out for their design and quality of the materials. The company recently launched the ‘Natural Energey’ collection, which accentuates the female figure, particularly by high compression lycra.
‘Ditchil is currently in more than 100 multi-brand shops,’ says Carla Macedo, managing director. It also has a considerable presence in the Spanish market, but it wants more – to move into other European countries, counting on a highly qualified design team and six seamstresses.
‘The seamstresses are almost like an architect, but for clothes,’ says the manager, who is keen to grow the company in the private label sector as well. ‘At the end of 2024, and at the beginning of this year, we began to feel a greater demand for private labelling that we weren’t prepared for. We received a lot of requests from new clients who wanted to move into production, which is good. We’ve accepted a few and we’re working to increase our capacity and accept more in the future,’ she says.
For Carla Macedo, word of mouth works very well and internationalization efforts are also starting to bear fruit. ‘Several old contacts have reconnected with the company to start projects,’ she adds.
‘In terms of business, our company is very healthy and we’ve invested in becoming more and more sustainable. We even have part of the premises covered with solar panels, and we’re in the process of changing the vehicle fleet so that all vehicles are electric. Last year we were PME Excellence, this year we were PME leader…’ she adds with satisfaction.
Vale & Vilas is focussing this year on meeting the conditions to once again invest heavily in international forays, on increasing its response capacity and on making the national economy evolve.