Today we visited Glen Raven for our trip. Glen Raven is a massive international corporation that was started by the Gant family. Glen Raven itself is a textile company which tends to manufacture different fabrics for use on a variety of products around the world. The mission statement says, “Enhancing life for Global consumers with the world’s most innovatice fabric-based, market driven solutions.” As a company Glen Raven is held to the highest standards and works with some of the biggest companies in the world. They have been approved by the United States government for the way they produce their products cheaply and without cutting corner, this is important to their customers because it speaks volumes about the quality of the products produced by Glen Raven. Glen Raven is an extremely successful and innovative business that satisfies its customers on all fronts. What I found to be very interesting was the structure of the business. It was described as being an umbrella with 3 different functions operating under it, the customer fabrics, Trivantage and technical fabrics. Glen Raven has developed different brands for all of the different industries it operates in and depending on what function of the umbrella is being carried out a different brand is used. When a customer buys a certain light for instance they may consider having bought it from sunbrella, the design department. Sumbrella is practically seen as it’s own company by many of its customers. Similarly when a cole mine goes to the technical fabrics department they might consider themselves to have bought from Strata Geosystems, but that does not mean it was not part of the Glen Raven company. The last division is the Trivantage. This organization sells many goods that Glen Raven does not produce on its own, and many that it does, to different customers. It is essentially a sales division. The way the company is designed is very similarly to Glen Raven being the major corporations and having many different subsidiaries to work through and with.
Another interesting part of the company was their strategy for selling products based off of their brand reputation. Instead of producing items in mass quantities the cheapest out of anybody they try to create products in which their trusted brand is what really counts. As great of a strategy as this is though it makes them need to adapt quite often. As times change so does culture and certain items become easier to replace. For example in the 90’s Glen Raven was a major manufacturer of football jerseys, but as time went on many different places would make these jerseys and so Glen Raven left that market. Glen Raven is one of the most trusted organizations in fabrics and it shows because they are able to rely on their brand name reputation to get business from around the globe.
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