TEAM CLOTHING: Comfortably Stitched into South Africa’s Supply Chain
Gordon Johnstone, Managing Director at Team Clothing, tells Enterprise Africa that the company remains strong, reliable, and quality-driven as the industry faces significant challenges. An experienced and skilled team of people continues to delight customers while retaining full control over stock and assets. This is true manufacturing success story built over two decades in KwaZulu-Natal.
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From a small Durban operation once struggling to find its feet, Team Clothing has grown into one of South Africa’s most trusted uniform manufacturers, managing everything from initial design through to warehousing and same-day distribution for major retail and hospitality brands. Managing Director Gordon Johnstone says that staying local, staying debt-free, and never losing sight of quality has carried the business through some of the toughest years the KwaZulu-Natal clothing sector has faced.
Gordon’s own path to Team Clothing was not a straight line. After studying in Pietermaritzburg and a spell in the UK, he returned to South Africa to join a manufacturing business in the energy sector, before moving into corporate finance and completing an MBA at Wits Business School. Only once he had that grounding did he join Team Clothing, then a fraction of its current size.
“It was very small and very different to what it is now. We struggled for a couple of years, and it was extraordinarily challenging,” he recalls.
A breakthrough came when the company won the contract to supply Nando’s in South Africa. “That helped us to grow significantly. We saw 12 years of fantastic growth and that has got us to where we are today,” Gordon says.
That single contract shows how Team Clothing’s model works: the company builds its relationship with a brand’s head office, which hands down the design mandate before every franchisee becomes an account holder in its own right.
“In the Nando’s example, they have around 400 sites and we then go and develop relationships with all 400 of those sites,” Gordon explains. Today the group, which includes two manufacturing entities of different sizes, employs around 170 people, coordinating design, manufacture, warehousing and distribution under one roof, fed by long-standing fabric partners such as Lining & Textile Distributors on a rolling annual order cycle.
STAYING STEADY
The trading environment for KwaZulu-Natal’s clothing manufacturers has rarely been forgiving. Retailers under margin pressure continue to push down prices, cheap imports have widened the gap facing local producers, and compliance crackdowns across the province’s cut, make and trim sector have added further strain. Team Clothing has not been immune to the slowdown.
“We have found trading conditions to be tough,” Gordon admits. “We have been relatively stable with our revenue, but it is not always a straight growth path. We have changed our focus from pre-Covid when we were achieving between 18 and 25% year-on-year growth.”
What has held steady, he says, is the underlying strength of the balance sheet. “We are fortunate that we have a very good business where we have positive cash flow and we own all of our stock and our materials. We also have a clear creditors book and from a trading point of view we are strong.”
Much of that resilience was tested rather than assumed. Between the pandemic, flooding, and civil unrest, Team Clothing weathered a run of disruptions. “We have had a period of consolidation which is not the worst thing as we have been able to focus on our procedures and our quality,” Gordon reflects. That focus coincides with a wider push from government and industry bodies to lift standards across the sector, with officials recently urging manufacturers to compete on productivity and innovation rather than on protection from imports, and to root out the non-compliant practices drawing scrutiny to parts of the Newcastle and eThekwini clothing hubs.
Industry reporting from across the province has described retailers pulling orders and compliance teams descending on factories that fall short, with some producers relocating operations to chase lower costs. Gordon sees that migration as exactly the wrong response.
“The trading environment has been tough, and we haven’t seen the growth that we wanted or expected to see, but we are fully committed to what we do, and we are fully committed to staying local, only importing when necessary. Many in our industry go to eSwatini or Lesotho or elsewhere for their production – that is not something we want to do,” he says.
Behind that decision sits a strict approach to funding growth. “We are completely self-funded and everything we do is paid for by the shareholders. If you go on a broad growth spurt, every cent you make goes straight back into the business, and that is difficult,” Gordon notes, adding that he remains optimistic about where the cycle is heading. “My view is that the trading conditions will turn, we are already seeing a couple of green shoots, and when they do, we will be poised to take advantage of that.”
REACHING OUTWARD
That optimism is matched by expansion already under way. Team Clothing supplies uniform stock into the DRC, Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Angola and Tanzania, with limited volumes reaching Europe and the UK. “We are working with a distributor in the UK which works for many brands. We want to increase our footprint by supplying more of those brands. We head to the UK twice a year as we are on the same time zone, speak the same language, and we are cost competitive,” says Gordon.
Closer to home, a recent trip has sharpened his focus on one market in particular. “We are also keen on increasing our footprint in Zambia. I have just returned from a trip to Zambia which we see as one of the few African countries that is growing quickly,” he adds.
Underpinning both sides of the business is a manufacturing footprint built for flexibility. Team Clothing runs two factories, a 3000m2 site in Durban and an 800m2 facility in Hammarsdale, home to around 100 employees working a monthly forward planning system aligned with Bargaining Council guidelines. The Durban site houses a sample department with 20 machinists handling smaller runs, while larger or specialist volumes sometimes go to external contractors.
“We supply all the patterns, markers, fabrics, trim and thread, and we outsource the actual manufacturing process,” Gordon explains, adding that any partner factory is checked thoroughly for process, quality, and Bargaining Council registration. Fabric suppliers face the same scrutiny. “We insist on lab reports and testing, and sometimes we test the materials ourselves, because we cannot afford to make a garment that our customers wear but is not up to standard,” he says.
PEOPLE FIRST
For Gordon, what has changed most since he joined the business in 2005 has nothing to do with machinery or contracts. “If we look at how we operate today compared to when I joined, it is a completely different animal. That is not because of me, but it is because of an amazing team and a fantastic group of people,” he says.
Five members of that original senior team remain with the company today, a continuity Gordon credits partly to a management style built on trust rather than control. “I don’t believe in micromanaging people. We are in a unique industry and many positions in the business are not those you can learn from a university or fashion school; a lot of it is learning on the job and finding the best way to achieve goals,” he explains.
His view on debt is similarly grounded in independence. “I am somewhat conservative and I don’t like debt – it is a tool to be used as and when needed, but I think that not having any debt has allowed us tremendous flexibility as opposed to being beholden to someone,” Gordon says.
That same philosophy extends onto the factory floor, where Gordon insists there is no hierarchy between office and production staff. “There are no differences for people who sit in the office or people who operate the factory. We do try and reward long-standing employees, and we try to promote an open and healthy work environment where people can walk in and discuss anything,” he says. That culture of steady improvement is now being paired with new tools, including artificial intelligence. “Every day we wake up and try and do better than the day before. We don’t always get it right, but our goal is to follow a system of continual improvement. With AI coming in, we are already looking at tools that can help us become a better supplier to our customers,” Gordon adds.
For Gordon, the real asset behind two decades of growth is straightforward. “The single biggest asset of our business is the people that are here. Without those people, nothing happens. We are transparent, open, and honest. We are very firm about doing things correctly and ethically, and we stick to our values,” he says.
That commitment extends to the product, backed by a guarantee rarely offered elsewhere in the sector. “We offer a three-month warranty on all of our garments and we are proud of that.”
Scale was never really the point, he adds. “We don’t want to be the biggest business out there. We want to delight the customers that we have and have some fun along the way.”