Thirty years in the making.

In 2013 I did not work for anyone.

I had been in this industry for seventeen years by then. I joined the commercial department of a garment group in 1996 and worked my way through merchandising, shipping and banking until I was general manager of the group. Then I stopped, on purpose, for a year.

People thought that was strange, but I needed that year to think it through properly. I had a family to protect, and I was not going to gamble with them because I was impatient. So I spent the year trading trims without a factory of my own, taking courses, meeting people, and working out honestly what I still did not know.

At the end of it the arithmetic was simple. I had learned so much and done so much for other people's companies. Why not do it for my own.

TotalTex started in 2014 in Gazipur. Twelve thousand square feet, three sets of machines, about twenty people. We made poly bags and nothing else. Our first buyer was IRIS Group, and the first order they gave us was a poly order. They are still our buyer today. So is Mohammadi Group. I mention this because in our trade, a buyer who stays is the only certificate that cannot be printed.

That first year I was on the floor constantly. A new company is a newborn. It cannot hold a standard on its own, so I held it, order by order, until the team could hold it without me. Teaching people took far longer than buying machines. It is also the part that lasted.

The rest is on record. Twenty-one thousand square feet in 2016. A move to Zirabo in 2017 at twenty-five thousand. Forty thousand in 2018. Sixty-six thousand three hundred today, with more than two hundred and fifty people and eleven product lines under one roof.

Then 2020 came, and that is the year I will point to. We paused production only for the days the government closed us. Every salary was paid. Every instalment was paid. We did not lose a single buyer. Buyers whose suppliers could not keep going came to us instead. Nothing about that was luck. It was what our reputation turned out to be worth once it was tested.

If this factory disappeared tomorrow, I would not sit and count the machines I had lost. I would count what was built with the people who deal with us. Buyers we have never had a bad word with. Suppliers we have never paid late. Workers who have never had to wonder whether the money was coming. If nobody is unhappy with me, and I am content with myself, the years were worth it.

So when a buyer asks what we stand for, I do not have a long answer.

Quality. On-time delivery. Commitment. Communication. Accountability.

I try my level best to ensure all of it, and I expect the same from everyone who works here.

We built this in Bangladesh, with Bangladeshi hands, and this country carried us the entire way. Whoever runs this company after me inherits that debt along with the machines. I would like them to keep paying it back.