国际棉花价格的不断上涨

-Here’s a fabric to give you an idea…

-Danny Letzt and his team at Les Tout Petits have been manufacturing up-to-the-minute children’s fashions at their New Jersey facility for over 25 years. They always thought they could count on relatively stable prices for cotton. But this past year, everything has changed.

-Some of it is, to be honest with you, some of it is crazy, because how would you like to go to a gas station, as you are pulling in, it says $3 a gallon and as they are filling it up, it went up 15 cents more.

-So that’s how quickly prices are moving.

-That’s, in some cases, yes.

-Have you ever seen anything like this while you’ve been in business?

-Never. It’s 100% cotton garment…

-So far, in 2011, cotton futures have rallied more than 30%. Over the past year, futures have spiked more than 130%, driven by higher demand around the world and disappointing harvests.

-Give me an example of what something, something, one of these fabrics would have cost, even say a year ago, we do, do you know how much it’s, what’s the change been like?

-It probably has gone up triple. Not double, but triple, something over 64 cents a pound is like $1.60 and $1. 80.

-How do you cope with that increase in just one year? A tripling of the…

-It’s gonna probably get worse.

-For Letzt, much of the blame can be traced to China, which he says has virtually cornered the market for fabric manufacturing.

-Then no more manufacturers, fabric manufacturers in New York, New Jersey basically because all of them went out of business because China made the prices so sweet. Now that everyone is out, they are starting to raise and raise if you want...

-And you have no alternative; you have nowhere else to go.

-Basically, yes.

-Oh, my gosh.

-This is like a really hot stuff.

-Letzt has been able to shift production to more readily available synthetic fabrics and away from cotton to contain costs. He’s also been able to hold the line on price hikes by managing inventory.

-We are smart enough to order fabric in advance; (it) could be two months before cutting it. At least we own it, ‘because we don’t want to disappoint our stores, ‘because they need the merchandise.

-But decades of expertise in controlling cost will only go so far. Letzt says price of clothing for US consumers is heading up if cotton and other fabric prices remain at current levels.

Maggie Lake, cnn, Richfield, New Jersey.