"Out of 30 per cent of the total fabric export, 10 to 15 per cent goes to Bangladesh. Bangladesh is its largest export destination. Other than Bangladesh, the company exports to Turkey and Latin America. Since Bangladesh is now able to manufacture premium jeans products with capacity to handle good washes, Soorty Mills has expanded into garmenting in Bangladesh"

Soorty Mills is known for its variety of denim fabrics. The Pakistan-based company Pakistan with offices and manufacturing in Bangladesh produces fabrics under three categories: basic, high fashion and premium. “Our basic is not really basic but a bit higher than standard basic,” says Dhirendra Lodha, GM, Marketing and Merchandising at the company’s Bangladesh office, adding, “Our strength is more on stretch. We manufacture bi-stretch fabrics as well, which has Lycra in weft and warp, in both directions. It is a four way stretch fabric, very comfortable and is emerging as a big category.” The company has also extended its production to garmenting in Bangladesh.

Making a mark with stretch denim

In stretches, Soorty Mills has three categories. Cotton poly spandex, which is high stretch having fabric stretchability of 35 to 75 per cent and used for products like jeggings, the second category gets higher in weight and is meant for true five pocket jeans. “In the true five pocket for women, you will have cotton stretches and blended fabrics. The poly percentage goes down and the stretchability is about 25 per cent. The third category is for premium five pocket, essentially the blends and coatings on a basic denim. These are typically 10 to 10.5 ounces. In volume terms, it is lower but in value terms it is significant,” explains Lodha.

The company has the capacity of carrying out any denim processing technique from basic denim, coated denim, overdyed, multiple fibre blends, to specialty fibres. Elaborating on the Soorty’s USP, Lodha says, “All our products are made of branded Lycra. We don’t use spandex or elastane. We do a lot of our products on dual effects, which is a new age fibre blend with better recovery properties. We do modal blends, bamboo blends. We do special coatings like colour coatings, transparent coatings, all over prints, green cast denims, domo shades, lurex blends, metallic blends, special finishes, garment dyeing and so on.”

Expansion into garmenting in Bangladesh

Out of 30 per cent of the total fabric export, 10 to 15 per cent goes to Bangladesh. Bangladesh is its largest export destination. Other than Bangladesh, the company exports to Turkey and Latin America. Since Bangladesh is now able to manufacture premium jeans products with capacity to handle good washes, Soorty Mills has expanded into garmenting in Bangladesh. “Fashion is becoming very fast now. Every brand wants to do 12 to 14 collections a year. So you can’t keep increasing your lead time. And the lead time is getting impacted by the poor infrastructure. But there is no substitute for Bangladesh in the near future,” exclaims Lodha.

Its garmenting factory in Bangladesh is spread across two floors and has state of the art facilities. It is a Leed certified sustainable design with a focus on recycling and reusing. It uses wind energy and recycled water. Six months from now, the company aims manufacture 50,000 denims a day at this factory.

“Soorty is more into value added products. We are 35 years old company. We are more into denim but non denim is a small part of what we do and is more for in-house consumption. We started as a garment manufacturer in Pakistan. Now we have multiple facilities across Pakistan. We have a capacity of producing 2.5 million garments a month. Soorty is a vertically integrated unit having all processes from spinning to garmenting. In our denim facility, we produce 3.5 million meters of fabric a month. Another mill is in the establishing stage, which will add two million meters a month,” informs Naveed Ahmed, Manager Marketing and Public Relations, Soorty Mills.

While increasing its fabric production capacity to 5.5 million meters a month by next year, the company aims to increase its exports from 30 per cent to 50 per cent in the near future. www.soorty.com