Exporters group eyes other regions for SPIN program

An exporters’ group credited a government-initiated program for helping them survive through the major economic crisis in 2008. The group also planned to expand the scope of the program to other regions this year.

SPIN, which stands for Subcontracting Partners for Innovation, was initiated by the Department of Trade and Industry region 7 headed by Director Asteria Caberte.

The program is a novel way to create jobs in the countryside through subcontracting.

DTI-7 will coordinate with big export companies to train countryside residents to become basket weavers. After the training, the weavers will be subcontracted by export companies to help them cope with the demands of their deliveries. These companies will tie-up with local government units to help them implement this program.

Jennifer Cruz, past president  of the Gift Toys and Houseware Foundation and Steve Sepulveda Advocacy Committee chairman of Philexport, said the SPIN program helped them save on overhead expenses and still deliver the volume of goods ordered by their customers.

“Through SPIN we were able to help provide for livelihood among our brothers and sisters in the countryside and they have also helped us with our deliveries,” they said.

Sepulveda also cited the problem of losing manpower to other booming industries like tourism, real estate and outsourcing as Cebu was becoming a more urbanized community.

“One very good example is our weavers from Sam Remigio. When all the beach resorts came in the area, we lost all our weavers to these establishments. With SPIN we were able to offset that capacity we lost through our weavers in other areas,” Sepulvida said.

Cruz, who owns Thirty-three Point Three which exports woven houseware like baskets, dining condiments among others, said that the 100 percent of the products were manufactured by the company but now weavers under SPIN contribute 10 percent of the firm’s production.

“We lost a lot of our manpower during the crisis and now that we have increasing orders mostly from specialty stores in the states we were still able to deliver because of SPIN,” he said.

Cruz said his company had a 5,000 workforce and 500 of these were under the SPIN program.

At present, Thirty-Three Point Three supplies houseware products to over 7,000 stores in the United States.

Cruz and Sepulveda said the success of the SPIN program with weavers prompted Director Caberte to expand the program to shellcraft industry.

The SPIN program had also reached Zamboanga where trainers were conducting shellcraft  trainings and tie-ups with local government units there.

“In Bacolod we’ll also have Shellcraft training in partnership with a group of manufacturers, producers and exporters,” Cruz  said.

He also said that Masbate in Region 5, and Abra in Region 1 werethe latest areas where the SPIN program would be implemented.

“We just trained 50 weavers in Masbate two months ago and now we are already ordering from them,” Cruz said.