The closures are symptoms, not the disease
When Kate Sylvester closed after 31 years, alongside Mina, Hej hej, and Nisa, the coverage focused on the brands. Designers struggling. Fast fashion winning. Consumers not spending enough locally. That framing misses the point.
The real story is underneath the labels. Employment in NZ’s clothing, knitted products, footwear and repair sector has collapsed from roughly 110,000 workers at its 1970s peak to just 9,566 in 2023. By 2000, the number was already down to 19,879, meaning the sector lost half its remaining workforce in the 23 years since. Entire specialisations, including domestic textile production and suit manufacturing, have effectively vanished.
This is not a fashion story. It is an industrial capability story, and the capability is nearly gone.
Policy made this happen
Jacinta FitzGerald, chief executive of Mindful Fashion NZ, attributes the decline to the removal of quotas and reduction of tariffs in the 1980s and 1990s. That liberalisation was the right call for consumers at the time. Cheaper imports, more choice. But nobody planned for what would happen when the domestic production base didn’t just shrink but disintegrated.
The fashion sector sits inside a broader structural shift where NZ’s real economy grew 150% between 1990 and 2025 while real manufacturing output grew only 28%. Non-food manufacturing, the category that includes apparel, grew just 5% over those 35 years. Manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from 15.4% to 7.9%. Apparel is the canary. It has been struggling for decades and Wellington has barely noticed.
Every closure removes a node that cannot be rebuilt
A garment requires patternmakers, cutters, fabric wholesalers, button and zip suppliers, fusing specialists, CMT manufacturers, dyers and pressers. FitzGerald warns of a “critical risk” of losing the skills needed for local production: “Manufacturing locally requires the full ecosystem of skills, and when parts of that system disappear it becomes harder for brands to produce here even if they wanted to.”
Designer Juliette Hogan describes the industry as “incredibly challenged” and “hanging on by a thread”, warning that if one or two larger onshore brands stopped producing locally, the remaining manufacturers might not have enough volume to survive. Kate Megaw of Penny Sage says the industry feels “quite fragile right now”.
Retiring workers are not being replaced and training programmes are limited or non-existent. You cannot reshore manufacturing into an ecosystem that no longer exists.
World-class wool, zero value capture
Here is the number that should make any business owner wince. NZ produces enough fibre annually to fill 6,600 shipping containers, yet exports most of it as unprocessed product. Over 80% of NZ wool apparel is imported. Quality NZ raw wool, stronger and whiter than most overseas equivalents, gets blended into lower-grade yarns offshore. The country imports approximately 116,000 tonnes of yarn, textiles and apparel while producing 93,000 tonnes locally, with only 11,000 tonnes exported.
The sector generates $7.8 billion for the NZ economy and 1.9% of GDP, but the value-added margin is captured almost entirely offshore. FitzGerald puts it plainly: “This gap between what we produce, what we transform, and what we sell into global markets as value-added goods is a central opportunity.”
Technology is not a saviour without scale
Tim Deane, managing director of Norsewear, argues that new knitting technology is changing the economics by reducing labour’s share of production cost. He says NZ is “in the box seat” given shifting consumer demand for authentic, high-quality, locally made products.
Deane’s direct-sourcing model, paying $18.50 clean for 23-micron spec wool with no auction and no middlemen, is smart. But it works for a niche operator with a specific product. The broader ecosystem problem remains. Without patternmakers, without dyers, without CMT factories operating at sufficient volume, technology alone cannot rebuild what five decades of neglect dismantled.
Deane draws comparisons with Scandinavian clothing companies working with governments to promote outdoor clothing as a national brand. The comparison is instructive because those sectors succeeded precisely because governments treated manufacturing capability as a strategic asset rather than a market casualty.
The supply-chain argument business owners should care about
The case for domestic manufacturing capability is not sentimental. When COVID disrupted global shipping, brands with any local production capacity had a buffer. As geopolitical risk to trans-Pacific shipping routes grows, that buffer becomes more valuable. But each factory closure, each retiring patternmaker not replaced, each dyer that shuts, reduces the buffer permanently.
In November 2023, 14 workers at the Made It Here factory in Hawke’s Bay learned their employer was closing via a PowerPoint presentation. In 2023, Dane Ambler, then executive director of Buy New Zealand Made, described the textile industry as “quite bleak”, with local manufacturers “slowly disappearing.”
NZ Fashion Week has been cancelled four times in five years. The brands are leaving. The factories are closing. The workers are retiring without replacements. At some point, “Made in New Zealand” stops being a marketing claim and becomes a historical one. That point is closer than anyone in Wellington seems willing to admit.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Rising costs: NZ fashion brands struggle to survive in fast-fashion era (2026-06-03)
- NZ Herald Viva: Is ‘Made In New Zealand’ Clothing Dying? The Reality Of Manufacturing Locally Now (2026-06-03)
- The Spinoff: Is New Zealand-made clothing hanging on by a thread? (2026-06-03)
- Newswire: NZ manufacturing flatlined 35 years, services tripled (2026-04)
- Farmers Weekly: Report teases out hidden value in fibre (2026-06-03)
- Farmers Weekly: New technology revives high-end wool manufacturing in New Zealand (2026-05-02)
- RNZ: Made It Here factory workers say they were blindsided by closure (2023-11-21)