Being established for the coloring and finishing of the knit fabrics in Çerkezköy Organized Industrial Zone in the year 1984, Temtaş Tekstil reached 750 tones capacity a month by renewing it equipment pool couple of times in the past years.
Having provided service for its customers as 100% dye house up to year 2013, the company directed 20% of its capacity towards fabric sales with mainly focused on abroad for the last two years as a result of the changing demands of the customers. Always aiming to stay in the top segment and to determine its specialty as “knit fabric”, Temtaş Tekstil is trying to follow the modern management philosophy and production technology at a close hand and to adapt to the innovations. Temtaş Tekstil owner Kemal Oğuz answered our questions about his works and the condition of the sector.
What is the importance of finishing in textile? What kind of value and qualities are added to the product with the finishing process?
“All the links are very important in every sector. For the textile sector, fiber, yarn, knit, color-finishing, confection and of course marketing – merchandizing each have importance. The importance of finishing comes from the complexity of the job, and its direct impact on the processes before and after. There is not a single field of specialty like the other jobs in the dye house. If 30% of the job necessitates textile and its engineering, the other 70% necessitates chemistry, machine and business administration along with the engineering. Improving / polishing or worsening / darkening the previously made works are directly the work of finishing sector. The job is not over only through investments, it needs an attention and follow up for 24/7. As one of the businessman among the leaders of the sector; while there is a potential to build a yarn factory in every city and operate them, one color – finishing business may take most of your time. The success of one country’s textile sector is determined upon analyzing consciously or unconsciously but directly through finishing sector. There are many confection facilities in Russia as well, but nobody talks about the success of Russia in textile sector because they do not have finishing sector and supporting sectors.”
There is a need for machinery and chemicals for the finishing process. What are your expectations from machinery and chemistry producers at this stage?
“What makes one sector successful is the success stories of its sub/supporting sectors as well as their own success story. The supports of the finishing sector are machinery and chemistry sector. Both sectors have written their own success stories throughout the years. Machinery sector became a sector that operated mostly abroad for majority of the fields. Of course, it is not possible to expect the opposite from this sector of 100 year-long with providing minimum of 50 years for the textile sector. However, there are many things to do in terms of marketing and product choice. The ability to produce machines better than the ones built by Italians and Germans in Turkey exist in the bosses of this sector as well as its manpower and substructure. Selling the same machine you sell abroad, for a more expensive price for a local company 10 kilometers away from your factor “hurts the trust”. I think that everybody’s trying to create only dying machine or stenter, and being dependent on abroad for products like topstitch and mercerized do not befit neither Turkish industrialists nor Turkish mechanics. Similarly chemistry sector is based on bringing the raw material to Turkey and diluting it instead of finding something new. In that case, it is dye houses’ responsibility to use the machines and chemicals found and developed by others and to produce the products needed again abroad relatively cheaper in Turkey. Everybody knows that there are many things to do in textile through cooperation, but unlike rest of the world the logic that “it can be small as long as it is mine” cannot be erased from our genes. Our fabrics are still tested by foreign institutions; our certificates are still given to us by foreign institutions. The study to determine the possibility of giving different results for the same fabric observed among these institutions from time to time, causes very delayed results regardless of the intensive dialog seeking conducted by the related trade bodies.”
Do we have sufficient know-how for the desired quality finishing of the different fabric or yarns? What are the conditions of finishing and our dye houses?
“Turkey has made a huge progress in the finishing sector in the past 20 years. This is of course very much related with the kilometer that was created. Just like when we are having a heart surgery we trust an operator that has conducted this special operation many times, finishing sector also gained a lot of experience due to the decrease of focus that took place in this sector in Europe. Until the last 10 years, the retired textile businessmen of Switzerland and England used to come to Turkey and gave consultancy by sharing their knowledge and experiences. In the recent years we do not hear of such things because Turkey started transferring know-how to countries like Uzbekistan, Syria, Russia and Algeria. It learned to become victorious after many defeats. Today the majority of the dye houses we have got much higher above the middle scale with their new equipment pool.”
What should be done for the environmental and human health? What does sustainability mean for you?
“Just like every blessing has its own inconvenience, and every medicine has its side effect, the production can have of course some effects on the environmental and human health. What needs to be done here is regulated in our country through laws and legislations. The subject to pay attention to here is to organize the transmission very well and not to give in the competition supremacy for no one by avoiding the exaggeration. Environmental and human health awareness has risen in every part of the society and everybody is aware of the world they live in. We constantly encounter the concept of sustainability. The terms majority of us did not know 10 years ago are now given as assignments for the elementary school children. The correlation between the economic progress and environmental and human health is in short known as sustainability. We should do our job without letting any of them go, and we have to work with this purpose in mind and whatever is needed must be actualized.”
What is the qualified employee condition of the sector? What are your views on this subject and what must be done?
“As I stated earlier, the more operation the doctor performs much better he makes progress in that field. We made a big advancement concerning the staff. The problem is no longer about having a qualified employee but the mentality has to change. Bosses, managers must keep their staff open for innovations. We must stop thinking like Turks. We can stick to our traditions but we have to change the operational systematic. Of course there are habits within our genes, we can always listen to the person “brining new wines into the old bottles”, we can protect the one leaving the flock from the wolf and we can listen to the ones thinking differently. Otherwise “innovation” “development” cannot be more than a fantasy spoken in the Universities, institutions like TÜBİTAK or televisions spoken by the statesmen.”
When the world finishing industry is considered, what would you like to say about the future of Turkish finishing industry?
“When we consider the market, manpower and substructure, alternative to Turkish finishing sector cannot be found.”
