035. Manufactured x GIZ FABRIC: Anne Patricia Sutanto on Pan Brothers Tbk & Apparel Production in Indonesia

This is part one of our conversation with Anne Patricia Sutanto, Vice President of PT Pan Brothers Tbk. Pan Brothers is a manufacturing company based in Indonesia, and their story is pretty remarkable. When Anne started working for the company back in 1997 they had 2000 workers. Fast forward to the present and Pan Brothers employs over 35,000 workers. The primarily do cut and sew, though they also have fabric mills and beyond… even direct-to-consumer retail. But we’ll let Anne tell you more about that.

We start this episode by getting into Anne’s journey to Pan Brothers. How did she end leading an apparel manufacturing company? She also goes into a bit more detail about Pan Brothers: what kind of products do they make? Which production processes are they doing? How do they approach the direct to consumer part of their business? We close the episode with Anne’s thoughts on Indonesia: what does she perceive to be its strengths relative to other garment production countries?

We finish with a pretty big question: Pan Brothers has climbed the value chain, so to speak, and has been very proactive in terms of moving into more technical products that leverage Indonesia’s skilled workforce. But is this what’s positioned Pan Brothers to pick and choose its customers?

Want to dig deeper ?

The FABRIC project is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and supports the Asian textile industry in its transformation towards fair production for people and the environment.

We also want to highlight that GIZ Fabric has a great online seminar series called “Getting Through the Crisis Together: Asian Dialogues on Sustainability in the Textile and Garment Industry.” Anne was a speaker on the ninth seminar within this series. All the seminars are free and available online, and we highly recommend checking them out.

Find out more about Pan Brothers Tbk.

Anne Patricia Sutanto on how to communicate with thousands of workers.

Anne Patricia Sutanto on securing Covid vaccines for her team.