Established in 1994 with a small factory, Panayir Textile has grown in a very short time and has become one of the leaders in the home textile woven fabric production sector. Panayir Textile, which is the production choice of many brands with its weaving technologies and product range, has always preserved its innovative production style with the importance it attaches to R&D studies. Conducting an exclusive interview with Muharrem Panayır, general manager of the firm, we asked the secrets of their success story.
Could you briefly introduce yourself and your company?
I was born in Istanbul but I am from Denizli. I finished primary school, secondary school and high school in Denizli, where I started to live from the 2nd grade of primary school. I studied textile engineering at Uludağ University Faculty of Engineering in Bursa. My interest and curiosity in textiles started when I went to my father’s workplace and worked in the summer months during the middle school / high school years. This interest had a great share in my choice of vocational education. As soon as I graduated from university, I started working in our family company. Our company, which was established in 1994, entered the sector by producing fabrics for home textiles. Our company, which produced its fabrics on contract machinesin its first years, stepped into industrialism by purchasing its own machines in the following years. Our company, which has constantly renewed and increased its machines over the years, has reached a capacity of producing 10 million meters of fabric annually on the latest technology air-jet and rapier weaving machines. Our company, which produces all natural and natural / synthetic blended home / hotel textile fabrics, also prepares fabrics for different needs for companies producing outdoor furniture and textiles.
What is in your product portfolio and what are the prominent factors in these products? What kind of studies do you have on product development and R&D?
Our company can prepare home/hotel textile products sewn and packaged for its own brands as well as fabrics suitable for the needs of its customers. Apart from these, we have restarted the collection of home textile products under our “Luoca Patisca” brand, which we started 12 years ago and then stopped production for a while. In this process when we started to prepare products under our own brand, R&D studies have naturally accelerated. In this process, which continues by developing different yarn and weaving types, licensed chemical processes and sewing and appliqué techniques that provide extra added value will be developed and will be frequently used in our products in the coming period. Our designers, who follow fashion colors and trends, spend a lot of time on R&D and we will see the results of these in the products under our brand in the coming period.
What makes you superior to your competitors?
The most important elements that make our company different are our exciting design team who love their work and aim to put their dreams into action; our young managers who invest in machines that can produce not basic but differentiated products; our business team that is firmly committed to the mission of “reliability”, our vision focused on our sustainable future and digitalized world.
Are there any investments planned in the short, medium and long term?
Our company will not make an investment to increase its weaving production capacity for 2024, and in the following year, it will renew the machines that need to be renewed and complete the additional machinery investments that will increase its current capacity by 15%. Our company will quickly make the renewable electricity energy investment, which it started in 2023 but could not realize due to the inadequacy of the technical infrastructure of the distribution company, in its prioritized shortterm targets and will be in a position to produce all of the electrical energy we use. Apart from this, our company aims to grow in the field of e-commerce and will make serious efforts to take its rightful place in both national and global markets, and will quickly complete the employment and technology infrastructure that we lack in this field. One of the most important plans of our company, which makes value-added exports its main goal, will be to increase its R&D budgets to achieve this goal faster.
Can you give details about your exports? What would you like to say about your current and target markets, foreign promotion, fair participation etc. strategies?
The shrinking world trade volume due to increasing global inflation and tightening monetary policies has caused serious declines in our company’s exports. Our market and customer losses have increased due to the fact that the labor and energy costs imposed on the industrialists of our country over our competitors in the Far East cannot be subsidized. We will be much more aggressive in reaching our target audience by exhibiting our products at international fairs, especially Heimtextil, and supporting them with social media advertisements, with the awareness that the most important point where we can compensate for our losses is to have innovative collections. Participation in smaller-scale local fairs that we have not experienced before will also be among our short-term strategies, and we will cooperate much more actively with companies that provide B2B/B2C logistics services that make the world smaller. African countries and Brazil, which we think will increase their national income on top of their potential population and which we anticipate will have a high interest in our product portfolio, will be among our target market strategies.
Are there any specific issues or topics you would like to emphasize in particular?
There are some issues that I would like to address to the whole world through Turkey’s most established magazine. These are the issues that I would like to address by thinking about our yesterday, today and tomorrow.
- Let’s know our history well and prepare our young people to adopt this historical mission
- Let’s not educate our youth for the sake of educating them. Let’s allow those who have dreams to pursue them and make a special effort to restore the dignity of all professions, without exception, so that they have a profession
- Let us pass on nature to the next generation in the same way we passed it on to the previous generation. Let’s never forget that sustainability depends on a living ecosystem with an inherited nature and an unchanging climate.
- Let’s use our resources rationally. Instead of fossil energy sources that harm nature, let us turn to sustainable energy sources that protect nature. Let’s make saving a basic philosophy at the top of our lives, both in private and business life.
- Let us try to be and raise people with good morals. Let us love the creation. Let good morals, honesty, respect and justice form the basis of our relations with each other. Let us never let go of the threads of justice, good morals, respect, love and hard work.
- Let us not forget the importance of the family. Let us know that there is no power that can destroy a nation of close-knit families.