(for more information about AAPN please go to their website at www.aapnetwork.net)

Todaro - Jan 22, 2008

Jacky Clyman of CockpitUSA – www.cockpitusa.com – is donating a designer flight jacket (see attached photo) to be raffled at our meeting Feb 24-26 in Newport Beach, CA.

If any of you wish to bring focus on the quality and uniqueness of your products, donate something for an even wider raffle. We used to do this at meetings years ago when all of our Made in USA members would bring boxes of shirts and other items. Two years, in San Antonio, everyone left with a “bullet proof” Dickies placket work shirt, and some even left with their jeans! That was a great gift from Dickies’ Wayne Gray.

Join Jacky in bring something neat to Newport Beach.

On a related note, we are beginning to build “bios” on our wiki website. You can see David Sasso’s on http://aapnetwork.pbwiki.com/David+Sasso?full_access=hRm6kB1gwH&l=S.

Our goal is not only to have a bio on each of you, but one that shows what meetings you’ll be attending and when so others can plan to meet you throughout the year. In the case of our meeting at Newport Beach, we will eventually have a database of who will be there, with links to their bios – and conversely from each bio, a link back to a list of our members who will be at each industry event all year long.

This project is 100% the idea and work of Sue Strickland here on staff. While she is very technical, her idea is to see if she can create a leading edge, wiki-like industry site that engages each of you.

Todaro - Jan 18, 2008

Forgive me for being “off the air” for a couple of days. Yesterday, I had a good excuse – waking at 4 AM in New York and flying connections to Cleveland, New Orleans, Houston and my current local – Del Rio, TX.

This morning, my nephew gets his Air Force wings pinned on. This is a spectacular achievement. Coming back to an Air Force base, being the retired AF LtCol that I am, floods me with memories. Chief among them is the sign that hung over the bar in the Officers Club last night. It hangs over every AF ‘O Club bar and it has since 1947 when the USAF was formed out of the Army Air Corp. It is short sign, simple and to the point. It says, “The Mission of the Air Force is to Fly and Fight and Don’t You Ever Forget It”.

That’s a left handed way of saying, “if you ain’t a pilot, you ain’t s...”.

The reason they train pilots in Del Rio is because if for any number of reasons these hundreds of student pilots happen to crash, there ain’t nothin to hit, nothin. Despite that, when they DO crash, as the saying goes, “they bought the farm”.

In NY this week, I met the pilots of our industry – retail and brand executives. I’ll bet their mission statement says something about “.....selling at the highest possible margin”. And given the almost unprecedented weakness of December’s apparel sales,  if any of you own any farmland, hold onto it as its about to be bought - seriously. We’re about the learn the REAL margins of December and, this is going to hurt.

This was a week in which I could seriously have shot you an eye-popping, mind-bending, adrenalin-shooting email every 4th or 5th block in the city. So much is happening.

For example, I finally finished the amazing book, “COTTON: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber”, by Stephen Yafa. I doubt if there’s anyone in the world of cotton who doesn’t both want to shake his hand and kick his butt. Its an amazing book, truly. I LOVED seeing, as I usually do in industry publications, a comment by my friend and hero Jim Chesnutt of National Spinning. Jim will be joining us in Newport Beach next month.

And that’s another point – I ran into members John Simon of Green Textiles and Kim Hall of RadiciSpandex at the DIRECTION show at Penn Plaza. Now, all of you please rotate your office chair and look at the wall where you have mounted David Birnbaum’s 101 steps in apparel production flow chart. You will see that step 1 of these 101 is a fabric show. That is what DIRECTION was. It was booth after booth of fabric swatches, often really paper prints, of what these designers felt was next in fashion.

While with John Simon, we talked about his organic cotton panel next month in Newport Beach. Later, as I finished the COTTON book yesterday on one of the flights, I came to the section in COTTON on organics. On page 297, you meet LaRhea Pepper, an organic cotton grower down here in West Texas, who has become ”..the reigning sovereign of the (organic cotton) movement”. Well, low and behold, LaRhea is on John’s organic cotton panel next month in Newport Beach!

COTTON also talks about “sustainable” business models like Patagonia and Timberland. Rick Horwitch of Bureau Veritas will host a panel on this subject as well.

In effect, those of you who come to Newport Beach will “get your wings” next month. You’ll be the captains of your own destinies. You’ll leave that meeting more powerful, informed, networked and confident than all of those out there who, in the shake out of December, are worried sick about their jobs. If there was ever a time to learn the jungle survival tricks Air Force pilots are schooled on in this trade, AAPN is where you get yours for our trade.

So, down here, its time for breakfast then off we go, into the wild blue yonder.....together.

Register now for the protected room rate we negotiated with The Island. You’ll see why when you walk into that amazing room next month.

Todaro - Jan 8, 2008

I know that Ted Sattler of PVH, Heather Cameron of Nordstrom and Teresa Nersesyan of PacSun will be attending our meeting in Newport Beach Feb 24-26. As a result, we anticipate really focusing on “full value costing” and other sourcing criteria. Frankly, if this topic takes off and dominates the entire 2 days, I’m OK with that.

We’ve had the pleasure of working at the very top of this industry on this “full value costing” business, including KSA, David Birnbaum, Barbara Zeins and many others. In addition, we were allowed to test drive this concept with the senior most sourcing executives at both Chico’s and PacSun. Thanks to them, we now have “the story”, one we’ll bang together more tightly next month.

Again, the major benefit of our meetings is who else is in the room, smart skill workers you normally would never have reason to meet, across the entire chain. The benefit is a proven business advantage you have over those who do not enjoy the power of such a network.

Our strategy in 2008 is to have as many one-on-one confidential meetings with retailers and brands as we can schedule. The rationale and content of these meetings will develop in Newport Beach.......

Todaro - Dec 18, 2007

Over the past several weeks, I’ve met with the following:

Janet Ydavoy, Ron Shulman and the sourcing and production team at Chico’s

Teresa Nersesyan and Jon Brewer at Pacific Sunwear

Kurt Cavano of TradeCard

The private label design staff at Macy’s where they were learning about FastFit

Ted Sattler, VP of Foreign operations, PVH

Jeff Streader, President of Kellwood Global

Jennifer Knight, President of Premier Narrow Fabrics

Barbara Zeins, President of Gerson & Gerson

As important as all of these people are, I also met for a long day with David Birnbuam, author of Birnbaum’s Global Guide to Winning the Great Garment War. He was in New York doing the final editing for a second book. The subject of both books is his concept called “full value costing” or FVC. In FVC, he forces you to look beyond the usual cost worksheet of “direct costs” (fabric, trim, labor) and include indirect as well as “macro” costs, which are dictated by the country where you do your production.

He also forces you to acknowledge the impact of markdowns and stockouts on retail margins. In fact, here are several quotes from my meetings with David:

Most people in retail view mark downs as an Act of God, completely beyond their control. But actually it is the biggest cost. You have to account for it and the full range of other significant costs.

Today, it is not retail competing with other retailers or suppliers with other suppliers. It is retailers competing with their own suppliers.

“As for “full value costing”, why do we have a special name for a cost sheet that shows the actual costs? CEO’s understand these costs but few below them do. You’ll never convince a sourcing person to look at their value chain this way – in a way that attacks the biggest cost of all, one bigger than the FOB – the markdowns, not to mention the stock outs.

There is only one cost – the retail price of the garment minus the profit.

There has been so much interest in really understanding this concept. Barbara Zeins of Gerson & Gerson spoke on this topic in August at our meeting in Antigua. Six AAPN members met to follow up last month in Miami. A dozen of us are meeting on this next month. And in Newport Beach February 24-26, this may end up being all we discuss, openly, interactively and at a very high level until we al understand it and can explain it to our customers.

You can not really sell your value (of not being the low cost vendor) unless your customers know how to buy on that basis. This is what we will discuss, with an entire supply chain in the room. There’ll be no other meeting in 2008 in our industry like this one.

Mike