Harvard Center for Textile & Apparel Research

B.Tan Overview of the Turkish Textile and Apparel Industry 46
Marine transportation is also available from some authorized and equipped harbors.
However, truck transportation is preferred over marine transportation for the European
destinations due to its flexibility, availability, cost, and ease of arrangements. However, for
the United States, marine transportation is the preferred mode of transportation. On the
average, it takes 16 days for a ship to deliver to the United States. As a result of increasing
exports to the US market, a direct ship service to the United States has started recently. It
takes 10 days to deliver by using this service.
7.4. 7.4. Flexibility Flexibility and and Quality
Quality
There is no thorough study on the flexibility and quality of the Turkish textile and
apparel industry. Especially, since the apparel industry is composed of thousands of
small- to medium size companies, orders of different sizes, from very small to very large, can
easily be accommodated by contracting some of the work outside or by adjusting the work
hours when it is needed. Existing of a competitive textile industry also allows the fabric
producers to adopt new models within a short time period and feed the apparel industry.
It can be argued that as one of the major contractors of world brands, the textile and
apparel industry accumulated knowledge and experience to produce quality products.
Furthermore stringent end-product quality standards of the buyers and also the
requirements of European Union on process quality, e.g., ISO 9000 standard, had a positive
impact on the quality of the products produced.
Continuing export-oriented production also increased the source of skillful workers.
However, the supply of white-collar employees including qualified managers, engineers,
designers, etc. is still limited.
In addition, the production in Turkey complies with internationally accepted
ecological standards and does not use harmful materials in dyeing. These standard are
regulated by laws that are in accordance with the ones in the European Union.
Furthermore Turkey meets social audit requirements.