Roja serves its customers with two companies, Roja embroidery and Roja lace. Their product range focuses on lingerie, ready-to-wear, kids and home textiles. We, at Textowear Magazine, had a pleasant conversation on a range of topics from the foundation of the company to future investment plans with Beki Güreli, Chairman of the Board of Roja Embroidery & Lace.
Roja Embroidery & Lace is a successful and well established company. Can we have some information about the history of your company?
Today Roja is a 67 years old company. We initially began with manufacturing jersey and then moved to lace and embroidery production. Between 1986 and 1996, we were licensee partners of Bischoff St.Gallen, one of the most important players in the field. Ten years later, we persuaded Bischoff to invest in Turkey for a joint venture, Bischoff Roja.
For 20 years, our embroideries were produced under the Bischoff Roja name, while lace production continued with our own brand Roja.
In 2017, we bought back our shares from Bischoff and now maintain our activities under two companies: Roja Embroidery and Roja Lace.
Does Roja design in the direction of customer demands or fashion trends?
Certainly, the second one. Of course, we do our best to meet our customers’ needs but in most cases we follow the trends. Each season we receive trend briefs from our trend consultants. We then try to reflect these trends into our collections. We prepare two collections in a year and offer these both in Turkey and overseas. While most of our customers choose from our own collections, at times they also demand changes to make our products more suitable for their own production. We try to accommodate these changes as much as we can.
What are some of your best-selling products?
Although fashion is an ever-changing concept, the shape of the products are generally the same. Mostly, products are the same but the designs are produced in different patterns and colors in accordance with trends. After a while, after designing a new collection, you start thinking ‘what else can I create, what can it be? ’, but creation is an incredible and endless process.
Each season we can design new products as creative as the last season. We have very experienced designers in our team, we also work with various designers abroad. We don’t think that we are creating a specific product. Creation is very important for us. We are the first company in Turkey to receive creation incentives from the government.
Can you give us information about your production and export capacity? Which brands do you work with especially at foreign markets?
I don’t like speaking with numbers on exports. For us, quality is more important than quantity. Within the scope of export awards given by İTHİB, we received the award of ‘the company producing the most value-added product within the sector’ and we are very proud of this.
We work with high value brands and with high-street brands like Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Carrefour, Zara and Mango.
What kind of strategy does Roja Embroidery follow on quality and sustainability issues that is produced with Oeko-Tex certification?
If you carry out export activities, you already have a certain quality standard. For Oeko- Tex certification, your products need to be dyed with non-hazardous dyes
for human health and as a company you need to preserce color fastness in products. Firms demand these qualifications in advance. As a company, we would never sacrifice our understanding of quality. Although we are known as an expensive firm in this sector, customers choose us because they know we have high standards for our products.
Can you name something that you would never sacrifice for quality and design despite customer demands?
Mostly, we try not to make any sacrifices from quality and design. In some cases, our customers force us to make some sacrifices, especially in the local market.
In export markets, the customers themselves don’t accept any sacrifices. However, in the local market we are often forced by the customers and try to persuade them not to give in from quality and design.
What is your market and growth targets for 2017?
We are trying to be as positive as we can. Today, some customers don’t want to visit Turkey, so we travel all around the world and visit customers at their offices. Our team is very diligent and persuasive and they try to eliminate all negative perceptions and convince customers that we are extremely good in what we do. Although it is too early to make any sales assumptions, our goal is to increase our exports and create new markets. We trust our product and think that our products are at high standard in terms of quality and design. Today Roja is a known brand in Europe. We have started to create brand value in Far East. We have been working extensively to develop the US market and we believe that we will have fruitful results there.
Roja is known for its unique strategies, can you talk about these a little bit?
Our communications and IT network are very strong because we believe in the importance of adapting to today’s conditions. We have an online archive of thirty thousand designs that our customers have access to. I believe this will be a key differentiator in the near-future.
Another key factor is that our company is female dominated - most of our executives, from planning to the manager of our factory, are women. We believe that a combination of male and female vision is key to success.
