KEY POINTS:
In Guangdong last year, seeing thousands of homogenous factory complexes, I was curious to see what they were like inside and to get a glimpse of what life was like for their workers.
This week I got my chance with a visit to the Guinness Peat Group-owned Coats'
thread spinning, dyeing and zipper manufacturing plants in the province.
But before heading out to the factories, Coats staff gave a presentation about their operations to a 50 strong audience comprised mostly of equity analysts from New Zealand and Australia, with a sprinkling of others from Singapore and the US.
This is the first time GPG has really thrown open the doors at Coats for the market to take a look at the business and how its restructuring of the venerable British company, which it bought in 2003, is shaping up.
Most people probably don't give much thought to the thread which holds their clothes, shoes and furniture upholstery together.
In order to tackle what is probably a broad-based ambivalence toward industrial thread, the Coats crew have a battery of "gee whiz" facts to sex up their yarns such as the number of times the thread manufactured each day would reach from the earth to the moon.
But what is probably their ace today is "The world's fastest shoe".
The Nike "Zoom Victory" at just 90 grams is the lightest running shoe ever, and it's probably safe to say there will be some disappointment at Nike and Coats if the someone wearing it doesn't win gold at the Beijing Olympics.
The shoe is made from next to nothing, reinforced with Coats' Atlantis thread.
Atlantis is spun from liquid polymer crystal and is stronger than steel or even kevlar. Try and snap it with your bare hands and you'll lose some fingers.
But the company's bread and butter is the industrial thread which holds together a significant proportion of all the clothing in the world.
After a brief presentation on how the "grey" or undyed thread is manufactured, we move on to the dyeing process, which as things go, is surprisingly interesting.
You might buy a garment that doesn't quite fit right, says Coats' colour guru Andrew Morgan. You might even buy a garment styled in a way you don't entirely like, but there's no way you're going to buy a garment that is the wrong colour.
It quickly becomes apparent that the colour of its thread is something of a key concern for Coats and it has become so adept at making sure its colours are right, that the wider textile industry draws on its expertise. Its work on "human colour perceptibility" expressed in an equation called JPC79 has become a textile industry standard.
Coats has an impressive system for ensuring that it dyes its threads, exactly how its customers want them, right first time and any failed batches provide clues that help get things right next time.
Information from Coats' dyeing plants around the world is collated at its "virtual dyehouse" in Paisley, Scotland, the place where the company began in the late 18th century.
While a success rate of 80 per cent is not bad in the industry, Coats' pass rate is 97 per cent.
Using information from Coats' "CF2000e" colour management system, Morgan shows us which colours are the company's biggest sellers. This provides some indication of what colour clothing the world is wearing right now.
It's a bit anticlimactic to hear that after basic colours like black and white and then the gold thread used in jeans, the most popular shades are essentially beiges and greys.
Morgan's presentation is followed by another about Coats zipper business, but by this stage the audience is getting a bit restless - we want to experience the sights, sounds and smells of Coats' production facilities first hand.
COATS
* Manufacturer of sewing thread, zip and needlecraft products.
* Has over 25,000 employees in 65 countries around the world.
* Established in Scotland in 1755.
* Bought by GPG in 2003.
Adam Bennett is in China as a guest of GPG.
