Ready for another interesting day we left Shanghai early in the morning. After a long bus ride, we arrived at the company Artwell, which is located in the city of Jiaxing, in the Zhejiang Province. The company got a history of over 28 years and is experienced in high end production of cashmere sweater, knitted garment and accessories. Thanks to good relationships with cashmere goat herders from the Inner Mongolia Artwell is able to serve the needs of name brands from all over the world. After a short introduction of the very friendly General Manager, which was introduced to us as Eric, we had the opportunity to visit their modern cashmere manufacture including the main steps of dyeing, spinning, knitting and linking. As we all may get in touch with cashmere products in the future, it was enriching to have a closer insight of all required adding value steps. After the compulsive group picture taking and the “winkiwinki” we travelled to the next company called Haining Nicelink Furnishings.
We were warmly welcomed by the Account Manager Frank Chen. After a very short introduction about the company, we moved to watch the production plant. We had a closer look at the production workshop of home furniture mainly producing for the export to the USA. The scale of the production plant and the amount of required labours were impressive and exciting to observe. Due to the fact of increasing labour cost in China (10% over the last 3 years) the company is facing new challenges.
Overall it was new to us to get an insight of two pure Chinese companies and compare them with foreign or mixed companies from other industries.
After a long day, the group was happy to reach Yiwu City, especially the fabulous hotel pleased the whole group. Some of us enjoyed doing workout for the first time since 2 weeks.