Joe Yuen, Executive Vice President of Lever Style, told ATA Journal that the company has devised a number of management approaches to reflect its sensitivity towards the contemporary issues of a global corporate citizen, especially social compliance and environmental protection.

First established in 1956, Lever Style has specialized in the manufacture of middle- and high-end shirts for overseas markets. It started to branch out to the production of suits of both men and women, as well as outerwear and etc, two years ago when it acquired the Chinese garment-making operations of Trinity Textile Ltd. The annual capacity of Lever Style reaches about 10 million units.

Its major clients include Ann Taylor, Calvin Klein, Cerruti 1881, Giorgio Armani, Hugo Boss and Paul Smith.

Adsal: Adsale ATA Journal
Yuen: Joe Yuen

Adsale: What has the company done in the area of social compliance?

Yuen: We took the initiative to complete the adoption of the SA8000 certification years ago, which is an international standard for improving working conditions.

Some of the terms in this international certification are more stringent than those being required in China. As a consequence, we felt meager impact when the new Contract Law introduced last year in the country. We are among some 100 enterprises in China given this certification, which has applied principles of international human rights conventions into practical work-life situations.

We find this is a strengthener of trust among our clients: We were selected as a model factory by Gap with our strict social compliance. Instead of spending time on dialogues of labor issues, we concentrate on product offerings and improvements in our business discussions.

With reasonable rewards and better working conditions under the SA 8000, we are able to improve the labor turnover at our factories, where employees are mainly migrant population from outside the Guangdong province.

After we improved our labor and social compliance, the issue of environmental protection has been placed on our management agenda more recently. We adopted measures to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. These measures provide not only benefits to the community and the world at large, but also savings in energy bills we pay.

Adsale: What has Lever Style done to reduce energy consumption?

Yuen: About three years ago, we joined the Business Environment Council (BEC) in Hong Kong and experts from the council came to our offices and factories to conduct energy audits.

They identified such areas for improvement as boilers, lighting, electricity power for workers’ dormitory, electricity generators and insulation. The BEC and other external consultancies recommended us a) the use of solar-thermo panels to generate electricity, b) the replacement diesel boilers with heat pumps, and c) heat recovery of industrial boiler for the use of workers in dormitory. In addition, d) better building insulation is suggested to reduce the demand for air-conditioning, whilst air circulation should be enhanced to lower the level of carbon dioxide indoor.

These are measures we have done in our existing factories in Guanlan town and Yuantian distrcit in Shenzhen city.

More thoughts have been given to the new factory now under construction in Huizhou city, Guangdong province, including building orientation, shading devices, cooling, ventilation systems, insulation materials, etc, to enhance energy efficiency. The new site is expected to be completed by year-end 2010.

Furthermore, we joined the pilot program of WWF Hong Kong last year, with an aim to reduce carbon emissions among the Hong Kong-invested manufacturing facilities within the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China.

Prior to joining the program, we knew we had made some differences, but had no idea how far we have done. In the program, we focused on carbon accounting and various performance benchmarks in our daily operations.

Adsale: How about the cost?

Yuen: These measures involve relatively limited investment, and the pay back period is not long. The investment of heat pump, for instance, is expected to recover (by savings achieved) within one to two years, depending on what was used previously.