From Import to Istanbul
A belt maker was importing its elastic webbing from the EU. It worked, but it was slow, priced in euros and planned around someone else’s production calendar. In 2023, they tried ours.
The starting point
Belt elastic is unforgiving. It is the visible face of the product, so shade consistency, surface quality and recovery behavior all show up directly on the shelf. Switching a proven imported supply for a local one is a risk no belt maker takes lightly.
What we did
We started where every serious substitution starts: matching the specification, not just the price. Width, elasticity, recovery and finish were sampled against the imported reference until the customer’s own production line could not tell the difference. Then we added what an importer cannot: short lead times from an Istanbul facility and the ability to develop custom colors and patterns for their belt collections, the same capability behind our own Habby Fahion belt production.
What we did together
We treated it as a project partnership, not a shipment. Habby supplied the product range, the catalogs, the samples and the product photography, so a company that had never sold a pet product could walk into retail conversations looking like it had. They supplied what we could not: local market knowledge and existing commercial relationships.
Where it stands
The relationship began in 2023 at roughly 2,000 meters a month. Today it runs at around 10,000 meters a month.
What this says about working with us
If your product depends on imported elastic, the question is not whether a local source is cheaper. It is whether it can match the specification and then beat the lead time. That is a test we invite.
Depending on imported elastic?
Send the specification of your current supply; we sample against it and quote the lead time.