Business View - December 2014 83
several years later when the company entered into a
distributorship agreement with Milliken & Co., then
rented additional space and invested in appropriate
machinery. The operation began humbly, with the
brothers’ wives sewing fabric during the day, before
the brothers came in at night to cut and fold the pre-
pared materials.
The purchase of automated processing equipment al-
lowed the business – now known as the Venus Group
– to become one of the few in the U.S. with domestic
capabilities, as opposed to those who have that work
done in Mexico or El Salvador before bringing finished
products back.
Fabric shipped from Milliken’s plant in South Caroli-
na each Friday arrives at the Venus Group’s 170,000
square-foot facility in Foothill Ranch, Calif. – about
50 miles south of Los Angeles – via truckload every
Monday. Some is stocked as inventory in the company
warehouse, while the rest is processed as needed and
sent to customers within a handful of days.
“We were always taught that automation is the key,
and that has really paid off because our cost is proba-
bly better than even Mexico right now,” Patel said. “We
always felt that in order to give service to customers,
you had to make the product in the U.S. In our industry,
people want service. If an order goes out today, they
want it today. They don’t want it after a few days. So
that is really helping us.”
The workforce of 110 employees has been relatively
stable for several years, he said, and though the com-
pany’s geographic spread is global, the majority of the
products that are manufactured and processed in the
U.S. are distributed across North America and into
Central and South America.
MANUFACTURING
