As a key player in the apparel supply chain, MAS Holdings has observed, and worked to overcome, many of the industry’s deepest and most acute challenges over the last four decades. Today, at a moment of peak unpredictability for the wider fashion market, those capabilities are more essential than ever, and hundreds of leading brands trust MAS with their most mission-critical processes and their hero products – far beyond the remit of a traditional contract manufacturer.
The company has risen to meet that expectation, in part, by making extensive use of software, equipment, information and services from Lectra, making it a perfect case study in the practicalities of real, end-to-end, market-driven digital transformation taking place at the heart of the fashion supply chain.
After both sharing perspectives in the recent “Meeting The Moment” whitepaper from Lectra, The Interline sat down with MAS COO Shakthi Ranatunga to understand what the company really sees from its strategic seat at the centre of the machinery of fashion, and to obtain an inside look at where, why, and how the infrastructure that can support the industry’s future is being built, tested, and refined.
At a unique and decisive turning point in fashion’s history, the companies that are the deepest-embedded into the industry’s global infrastructure have a unique vantage point on its future. As well as being exposed to the full spectrum of external forces, internal priorities, and opportunities for innovation, fashion’s biggest and best-established players are also the companies working to define and develop an agenda that the wider sector will follow.
For many people, that description would bring to mind international mega-brands, storied luxury houses, and the leading labels that have set, reset, and elevated consumer expectations. But the best-informed perspective on where the industry is headed, and the most compelling examples of what it means to get ahead of that transformation journey, often come from the forward-thinking, full-service companies that are operating on fashion’s industrial edge.
These unsung giants are out there, meeting rising expectations for quality, price, sustainability, and innovation at historic speed and scale – and working with key technology partners to forge and stress-test new solutions to both fashion’s long-standing issues and its newest, unprecedented challenges.
And few upstream companies are as global, as digitally advanced, or as deeply integrated into the mechanics of the apparel sector, as MAS Holdings. As the largest “apparel tech” company in South Asia, MAS (pronounced M-A-S) employs more than 95,000 people across 38 manufacturing locations, and has become a vital partner for more than 100 of the world’s best-known brands, low-compromise product categories like performance apparel, intimates, lingerie, and athleisure.
MAS is also at the forefront of a growing cohort of multi-hyphenate, innovation-first businesses that defy easy categorisation and transcend traditional definitions of “suppliers”. Far beyond the scope of contract manufacturing, MAS and similar companies are providers of what they refer to as “apparel solutions” – a definition that captures everything from specialist design services, digital product creation skills, and expert sewing and production, to sustainable, localised sourcing solutions and international logistics and distribution.
In that extended capacity, MAS is also one of a small number of companies to see and feel the real scope and complexity of the interconnected, international challenges fashion brands face, and to be charged with finding solutions to them. If consumer demand, macroeconomic forces, geopolitical uncertainty, and digital-native competition are creating the mandate for brands to respond to, then partnerships with key suppliers like MAS are the machinery they rely on to take action.
This is something that Shakthi Ranatunga, COO of MAS, is keenly aware of. From his position, he has observed how intertwining geopolitical forces, evolving markets, sustainability imperatives, and fast-changing consumer expectations have upended and intensified the priorities of brands big and small – moving from incrementally increased demand to more fundamental business disruption.
“Our position as a key partner to many of the world’s leading brands gives us a long-term perspective, and from that vantage point it’s become clear just how significantly the market has changed, and how much that pace has increased recently,” Ranatunga says. “For a while now, the bar has been constantly raising for speed to market, and newness, at the same time costs have been rising and competition from pure-play online brands and digital disruptors has been intensifying. Today, those forces have reached a tipping point: consumers are not in a position to bear price increases or accept compromises to quality or trend, but the market has conditioned them to expect rapid responses to cultural moments, value for money, and high quality products all the same – and those expectations are then being passed on to the brands and the retailers that cater to them, who are under more scrutiny than ever.”
“As a consequence,” he continues, “every product that makes it to shelves matters more than ever, and that continuous drive for greater profitability places a lot of emphasis on upstream infrastructure – and on the ability of companies like MAS to deliver against an always-accelerating demand for price, speed, innovation, and sustainability as well as being partners for deeper business transformation.”
This balancing act between economic metrics and environmental ones is also something that Ranatunga, and the wider MAS team, have committed to striking – not just as a way to fulfil their customers’ expectations, but as a critical, long-term strategic pillar within their own operations, under the banner of “Plan For Change”. Today, embodying sustainability by improving lives, products, and the planet, have become cornerstones of MAS’s philosophy, and each of the company’s commitments is measured, managed, and counterbalanced against the drive to optimise, automate, and deliver the right outcomes for their customers.
“As vital as it is from both a regulatory perspective and as a benchmark of consumer sentiment, sustainability cannot be an isolated activity and we cannot talk about it independently,” Ranatunga tells us. “For our customers, environmental progress at the product level now has to be connected back to revenue goals, and this means that every element of any product’s journey must be monitored, recorded, and reported on by their partners, so that it can be evaluated alongside those other essential metrics for market success.”
“To put that into practice,” he says, “we apply the same principles to our own business. We have ambitious targets to drive sustainable change and have set ourselves twelve measurable, long-term commitments. It’s essential that the sustainability initiatives we embark on meet international standards. But each of these must also align with our customers’ visions and connect to our own strategic roadmap. They are not islands.”
For MAS, then, the definition of success is not just being recognised as a more sustainable partner, or as a partner better able to produce to quality, cost, and performance targets. Neither is it about just being a partner able to decrease cycle time, or support supply chain diversification and digital product creation strategies. It means being recognised as a partner capable of operating across all these domains – and more – at the same time. A truly multi-functional cog in the machinery of fashion, at a time when that machinery is under historic strain.
And for any company in this position of responsibility, there are a series of different levers that can be pulled – either in isolation or, as the market now demands, all at once – to help create the infrastructure and the industrial support network that fashion will need in the near-term future, and to continue refining the systems that the industry already relies on today.
The first of these is diversification and de-risking. With different compounding factors – from climate change to conflict – altering sourcing strategies more quickly than ever, fashion brands have found themselves needing to quickly adapt to circumstances that can change on a shorter horizon than ever before, to diversify their inputs, and to reduce reliance on single sourcing regions.
But at the same time, standing up new partnerships in different locations is, in itself, a risky strategy for brands already working with a delicate balance of cost, time to market, and quality, and whose customers are sensitive to compromise. This leads to a pressure point: brands must find ways to reduce their exposure to risk but without losing access to capacity and specialist capabilities.
Here, MAS has invested ahead of the wider industry’s transformation trajectory; the company is already active in 13 different countries across its design, development, and manufacturing services, and its systems and technologies are set up in a way that supports agile orchestration and allocation.
The second avenue is product and service evolution: a spectrum of different capabilities and strategic initiatives that allows upstream providers to meet the demand for new collections, new product categories, and logical extensions of their existing specialisations. There are already numerous high-profile examples of collaborations between major brands and celebrities, and market opportunities for entirely new product categories, that have required brands to quickly identify and scale up relationships with partners who were capable of creating specialised products at the right speed, scale, and level of craftsmanship.
Here, again, MAS has invested in moving to where the industry was headed, building out the skillsets and the systems to be able to create what the company refers to as “breakthrough products,” and shoring up a localised, verticalised supply chain that reduces dependency on third parties further upstream, giving MAS full control over its ability to respond to these kinds of novel demands.
The third (and perhaps the most critical) route is digital transformation and investment in technology and automation at a deep, industrial level – not just within narrow domains, but across the full scope of design, development, production, and distribution. And it’s here that MAS has made its biggest and most successful bets, as Ranatunga explains.
“We see adopting technology, in a general sense, as fundamental to our ability to help change the course of the apparel market overall, across domains, but the way we approach the roll-out of innovation is also very closely aligned to the areas where we believe new systems and new ways of working can add the most value today,” he says. “For MAS, that means upgrading supply chain control towers and incorporating vision-based solutions to achieve optimum visibility into supply chain processes. It means forging partnerships in new markets to be able to offer best-in-class logistics support. It means investing in technology from key partners like Lectra in the cutting room, to create efficiencies, reduce costs, cut shopfloor inventory and work-in-progress, minimise lead times, and cut down on manual touchpoints.”
While that on-the-ground, granular approach to process innovation is calibrated for delivering value in core production tasks, MAS has also invested in digitising key areas where design, development, and customer collaboration cross over earlier in the product journey. This is most visible in the company’s pursuit of a “digital twin,” where the physical product lifecycle is simulated virtually as far as possible – from material digitisation and prototyping, to the company’s 3D Studio.
To unify these different technology strands, MAS (with the support of key partners like Lectra, who are also observing a fundamental shift in the role technology plays in holistic business outcomes) has also approached its own digital transformation with the goal of uniting different, disconnected disciplines into a single workflow.
“Innovation is not just a matter of process transformation – it’s also about ensuring that information can flow smoothly between different areas to create additional value,”Ranatunga says. “From planning to production, that flow, and the integrated systems that support it, is the key to reducing waste, continuously improving processes, and ensuring that whatever tasks we can repeat, in the physical world or virtually, we can automate.”
And while companies like MAS are ahead of the curve, in this connecting of end-to-end processes, their customers are following closely – more brands than ever are now evolving their own approaches to technology implementation in a way that allows them to take advantage of the opportunities that exist upstream.
“Our key customers have all matured their digital capabilities in significant ways,” Ranatunga adds. “That’s reflected in how effectively we are able to collaborate with their teams in individual areas, but it’s probably most obvious in the widespread recognition of the importance of end-to-end visibility – not just for sustainability purposes, but as an essential component of optimising the entire value chain. The same data and the same systems can provide insights into the material flow, detect and flag the downstream impact of delays, establish the foundation for AI systems for planning and process orchestration, and even deliver on new hybrid business models where connected manufacturing for customised products moves closer to the consumer, changing the equation. All these decisions and all these potential opportunities hinge on the same data and the same visibility.”
To continue in this pursuit of innovation, both responding to the current needs of the market and building the foundations that customers will rely on in the near future, MAS needs to rely on industry-leading technology – both in the core equipment used for cutting and sewing, and in the connected infrastructure and platforms needed to orchestrate and optimise products, and to collaborate with world-leading brands.
Asked what MAS looked for in a technology partner that could meet this brief, Ranatunga answered:
“We serve as the interface between consumers and brands, and as the market dynamics between those two audiences continue to change, we need to be able to rely on technology providers whose solutions are also agile and evolving. We look for continuous innovation and technology upgrades, but it’s also critical that we can work with both software and equipment providers to collaboratively develop solutions that respond to real market needs. And at the same time, any technology must have a pathway to real industrial scale at a sustainable price point; technology can be terrific, but it has to deliver the kind of cost efficiencies needed to meet market demand.”
This exacting mandate has been at the centre of the company’s relationship with Lectra – whose equipment and software solutions are at the heart of MAS’s operations on the shopfloor and in a range of other workflows, and who have been supporting both the cutting room and the boardroom sides of fashion for more than 50 years, culminating in the recent release of the end-to-end digital platform Valia Fashion.
“Our relationship with Lectra is strong, because they remain a front-runner in both software and hardware,” says Ranatunga. “At MAS we believe that working with best-in-class brands demands best-in-class technology, and we have seen Lectra continue to push those frontiers. Today, I believe around 90% of our equipment is from Lectra, because they have been relentless in both augmenting the direct capabilities of their cutting and spreading solutions, and in continuously developing the software ecosystem that allows us to truly industrialise innovation. And because of their on-the-ground presence in South Asia, we believe Lectra uniquely understands both the brand and production environments.”
On top of Lectra’s five decades in the extended supply chain, MAS itself has now been in business for close to four, and this combination of industry expertise and continuous innovation is something that is likely to secure MAS’s position at the vanguard of supply chain transformation in the near future – however unpredictable the demand.
“The key attribute that will define our ability to continue leading the market will be agility,”Ranatunga concludes. “We must be flexible enough to respond more quickly to changing demand. We will need to find ways to use our global footprint even more effectively. We will continue to work to drive down lead times and offer augmented solutions to our customers. We already see a trend towards smaller order quantities, driven by shorter trend cycles and unpredictability in the consumer market, and it will be essential for us to be able to work with our customers in-season, engineer to cost, and continue improving the metrics that matter at the same time as meeting increasingly exacting price point.”
With the motto “change is courage,” it’s clear that MAS views innovation and evolution as continuous challenges that only the boldest companies will be able to meet. But it’s also evident just how strongly-aligned the deepest-embedded fashion companies believe the trajectories of industry evolution and technology are.
“Fashion is judged, after everything else is said and done, based on whether the product stands out. That can be defined by quality, innovation, value, craftsmanship, or a range of other outcomes, but the brand has to be able to then deliver on those expectations consistently. Our commitment is to being the best partner for all those different criteria, and we recognise that the best way of achieving this, and positioning ourselves ahead of where the market is going, is by investing in technology with like-minded partners.”
To find out more about MAS, visit the company’s website – or read the articles the company’s leaders have previously written for The Interline on digital product and soft body avatars, and right-first-time physical sampling. Explore Lectra’s interconnected portfolio of solutions to find the key products and platforms being used by full-service upstream partners, brands, and retailers across the fashion journey. And download the “Meeting The Moment” strategic whitepaper, where MAS’s COO, Shakthi Ranatunga, Lectra’s Deputy CEO, Maximilien Abadie, and other key thinkers from across fashion provide their perspectives on the current moment of transformative change.