Comment by danpalmer
8 days ago
I heard a great story from a colleague that worked in fashion development in the UK. There's a big push for "Made in the UK" clothing and consumers associate it with quality, but the items are lower quality, because the UK lost its garment manufacturing skills 50+ years ago. Meanwhile Asia has gained those skills, so if you buy clothes from China they are likely higher quality than you'd get here and cheaper.
This is not always the case, Italy still makes high quality leather goods, Portugal is still making good shirts and trousers etc, but for the most part as economies have moved away from manufacturing into services they have lost the skills and to force manufacturing to happen there means accepting higher priced, lower quality products.
This has probably little to do with skill being lost, and more with how little one gets paid to do this kind of work. Skilled people can get jobs in other fields that earn a lot more.
Skilled people don’t just appear out of thin air. Skilled people need years of practice, and advice from a network of adjacent skilled people to become skilled in a particular craft.
You can be skilled at Excel and be 10 years away from knowing how to make even mass produced low quality clothing.
No no, it's the skills. My colleague worked for a very high priced fashion brand who were able to pay high rates (and indeed did for this and other parts), but they couldn't get the quality they needed.
At the low end, sure, it's obvious you'll get more for your money abroad. The point here is that the skills are lost and you can't pay any amount anymore, at least not at scale (there will always be artisans who can produce extremely low volumes but these don't affect the market much).
Skilled people are still mortal and after a couple generations, they do pass away. They won't be replaced by new skilled apprentices if the industry hasn't been hiring.