We toured a factory in Bucharest making fashion goods for luxury brands.
Maria Udrea is sewing a piece of clothing at a machine. This job, she has held it for 42 years. “We used to work only for exports. One unit worked for the Soviet Union, one for Italy and another one for the UK,” she recalls. We are at Faberrom, one of the biggest garment business in Romania located in a converted industrial plant in Bucharest, which used to be known as APACA.
Twenty thousand workers used to work here. 1380 people in her section alone (clothing and knitwear). Following the fall of communism, APACA was privatized like most state-owned companies, and reborn as Faberrom in 1991. Today, less than 200 people work in the textile department, sewing pieces of garments for prominent luxury brands from the West.
Romania in the global garment market
At 59, Maria Udrea is now Chief of the Confectionery section at Faberrom. “It takes approximately 8 hours for a suit comprising a jacket and trousers to be completed” she describes, “and thirty different people are going to work on it.” she adds. Efficiency, long-learned skills and relatively cheap costs make Romania particularly attractive.
“Today, we cannot say that we are very cheap compared to the global garment market. However, we offer high quality craftsmanship and proximity to the main European markets, which means that we are able to deliver an order within a week. This would not be possible for a garment produced in Asia,” explains Daniela Schoppmeyer, Faberrom General Manager.