Creating a new brand just by continuing your activity

Made-in-Romania ski apparels on the global market

Radio România Internațional, 04.02.2025, 14:00

Very few people know there are professional ski apparels created and manufactured in Romania. Furthermore, the origin of such a brand can be found in Toplita, Harghita County. It all started off from a small personal workshop.

Dan Cotfas is the manager of the company that created the brand. He span the yearn of it all. Everything started from the workshop of his parents, former workers in the field of tailoring.

“We started the activity in 1992, when my parents, who also worked in the field, retired, yet they felt they still needed to stay active and wanted to do something more. I am a mechanical engineer, a different field of work, and I thought I could offer them a chance to continue, finding them an activity so they could stay in shape, also enabling them to have the satisfaction of still being useful.

So I opened a Limited Liability Company in 1992, me and my parents and my brother, in our grandparents’ countryside house that was available. My parents had two sewing machines because they worked in the field. My father had a “Craftsman’s Record Book “, he had a workshop during Ceausescu’s regime where he manufactured men’s clothing, a bespoke tailoring workshop. We also bought several outdated machines and we started our activity with production for the domestic market, men’s trousers and some women’s dresses. We were astonished to see those products sold very well, being extremely sought-after on the Romanian market at that time. “
And, since at that time our guest today still worked in a different field and the products’ supply and dispatch were more and more difficult, an expansion of the activity was needed.

“We hired four more people so we had, like, six or seven people all told, until 1995. In 1995 we had the opportunity to have a lohn production for a company in Italy. We searched for other premises, we developed the business and, in the beginning, we had our first 15-strong work team and we worked products for a well-known brand in Italy. Shortly afterwards we enhanced our production capacity and began manufacturing technical articles.

So all along, it was a challenge for us to manufacture things we had not been used to manufacturing, also doing things we were not used to doing and things which for Romania, at that time, were unbeknownst. So we started manufacturing ski costumes with thermo-glued seams. We soon began to make mountain jackets, three-layer fabrics, also thermo-glued and we were among Romania’s first workshops to have manufactured goose-down jackets, completely manufactured in Romania. “

There were a couple of years more for them to work according to the lohn system. Meanwhile they accumulated enough experience and their products were quite sought-after, so they opted for the enhancement of their production capacity, also personalizing it. Dan Cotfas once again.

“We thought that, given they experience we’ve gathered, we should create our own brand as well. And we began with our own brand. We began with a shop of our own in Toplita, then we set up a shop in Targu Mures. We also developed the sector of selling of our own brand in Romania, there even was a time when we had 29, 30 partners we worked with and for whom we had our production, and our products sold in Romania, countrywide. “

All things considered, eventually they were a small step away from getting international recognition.

“In 2011-2012, we started our work for commissions we received from the ski monitors in Italy. After that, we were able to get commissions, to present collections in Austria as well as in Germany, in Finland, Great Britain, so much so that we also made ourselves visible on the ski slopes in Italy, Austria, Finland and Germany.

The volume of our commissions started increasing by the year, given the products were very good, all accessories and fabrics were premium, so they were professional fabrics, fabrics manufactured in Japan, with technical characteristics of the highest level. As we speak, we have more than 90 clubs we work with. Annually, we work commissions we receive from these clubs: winter sports gear, outfit for mountain rescuers, apparel for mountain climbers and, latterly, we have also developed the fashion side sector, mainly the goose down outfit.”

These are very useful pieces of info, for all of us, at wintertime, whether or not we are into practicing professional winter sports!