Desigual Loses Employees in Germanwings Tragedy

Barcelona-based fashion company Desigual is in mourning this week after losing two employees when Germanwings flight 9525 crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday. Robert Oliver Calvo was one of three Americans killed in the crash. He was on the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf along with coworker Laura Altamira. “Everybody [at Desigual], everybody, everybody, everybody is destroyed. It’s so horrible; we are all crying,” a company spokesperson told WWD. “Robert and Laura headed our retail expansion department in the German market. They were on their way to look for new locations. Robert was 37 with two children, and Laura, 32, just got married last year.” In light of the loss, Desigual canceled every activity in its stores — worldwide — this week and will hold a moment of silence on Wednesday.

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Value, Price Focus at Prime Source

HONG KONG — As producers and apparel brands continue to struggle with rising production costs in China, manufacturers have been emphasizing service and technology as well as quality over price competitiveness. Adding value was a major theme at the latest Prime Source Forum here. Unlike in past years, when the focus was on finding the next cheapest manufacturing destination, there was more of a consensus this year among participants that rising production costs were an inescapable fact and signaled a changing paradigm for the industry. “We’re typically the first ones into a country and then the first ones out of a country,” said Steven DiBlasi, vice president of global sourcing at Lanier Clothes. “We go in when there’s unemployment, low wages — wages go up, we move. We can’t continue to do that going forward. We’re going to run out of countries that we can afford from a compliance standpoint.” To be sure, there was still discussion of newer, cheaper markets. Adan Mohamed, cabinet secretary at the Ministry of Industrialization and Enterprise Development for the Republic of Kenya, was at the conference making a case for his country as a low-cost sourcing alternative. But more of the discussion centered around what manufacturers and

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