Pants put stockings out of business

Embracing the Western fashion, Romanian women are leaning towards comfortable clothing and tend to forsake elegance. They favour pants over skirts, which has led to dwindling sales of stockings over the last few years. In addition, producers were dealt another blow this year by the quick transit from winter to summer.

Sales of stockings dropped approximately 20% in May alone, according to the VP of the Bucharest-based pantyhose maker Adesgo Elena Ghiurutan.

The Romanian stockings market amounted to approximately $50 million, as shown by estimates. This value does not include stockings only, but also men’s and children’s socks.

“Our first-half results did match expectations, but we would have liked them to be higher. Only that this excessive heat arrived on such short notice and instead of having sales peak in May, they dropped,” Ghiurutan said.

Therefore, fashion is the not the stockings’ only enemy, as the last years’ increasing temperatures are also to blame, because they’ve shortened the transition seasons, i.e. the best times of the year to wear stockings.

Dumitru Simion, vice-president of the Gimsid Company, which includes the Bellatex pantyhose maker, says both the production and the sales of such products have sharply declined in the last couple of years.

“The pants being trendy for women, the low purchasing power of the Romanian female consumers along with them not knowing how to tell the quality of a specific pantyhose, as well as the sales of stockings not registered with the customhouse have driven the domestic sales and production very low over the last two years,” Simion said.

He added Bellatex had seen sales shrink by about one third in the last couple of years. Bellatex was established in 1995 and makes the Bella stockings brand.

“Quality remains of rather little consequence in Romania. It is the price that counts, albeit a very high quality product comes with the matching price tag,” Adesgo’s Ghiurutan said.

Adesgo, a company set up in 1926, is known on the domestic market due to its two brands, the low-end Elegant, and Diamond, which targets the medium segment.

According to the Stockings Makers Association chairperson Maria Buzdugan, the biggest problem of the domestic producers consists in the cheap imports, from the Chinese market mainly.

Buzdugan says the Romanian market imported 99 million pairs of stockings from China at $0.015 (500 ROL) a piece on the average last year.

“The price should be at least ten times higher,” Buzdugan adds.

She explained the domestic producers were importing the raw material and the price they paid for one thread was of about 5 euros.

“The cold season hasn’t shortened that much, and if it weren’t for this unfair competition, we could apply our own strategies to help us. On the other hand, it is true that the purchasing power has gone down,” Buzdugan said. claudia.covaci@zf.ro