El Paso’s largest garment factory, which employs mostly people with physical and mental disabilities, has hired Luis Alvarez as its new CEO. Wochit
Luis Alvarez brings 35 years of manufacturing expertise to ReadyOne, which mostly employs workers with disabilities
Luis Alvarez was enjoying semi-retirement in San Antonio after a 35-year career in the manufacturing industry, including managing factories in Mexico for several years, when he took a big detour to El Paso.
He’s the new chief executive officer of ReadyOne Industries, which operates El Paso’s largest garment factory and other smaller enterprises.
It’s one of El Paso’s largest private employers with about 1,100 employees, and is the city’s largest employer of people with mental and physical disabilities. It mostly makes uniforms and other garments for U.S. military branches.
Alvarez’s first day on the job at the not-for-profit company was Nov. 27.
Since March, the 56-year-old Alvarez was in semi-retirement mode, but kept his hand in business by sitting on boards of companies in China, San Francisco. and Denver, and doing business consulting for those companies. That took him on recent trips to China, Asia and Europe, he said. He was living a life he’d dreamt about, he said.
"I was having fun, it was exciting,and everything," Alvarez said recently during an interview in his new office at ReadyOne’s East El Paso headquarters . "I guess in a way, though, I missed the day-to-day responsibility of running a large company."
He left his job in March as president of Lancer Corp., a large, Japanese-owned manufacturer of soda fountain machines with annual sales of about $200 million and about 1,500 employees worldwide, including at factories in San Antonio, Australia, India, Belgium, and Mexico. Its main customers were Coca-Cola and Pepsi, he said.
He worked as an executive at San Antonio-based Lancer for 11 years, including seven years as president, and helped improve its manufacturing processes and grow the company, he said.
ReadyOne Industrie’ headquarters and main garment factory is located at 1414 Ability Drive in East El Paso.
In August, a head hunter called him about the ReadyOne CEO job.
He liked what he saw at ReadyOne and liked the idea of working for a company with the mission to employ people with disabilities.
“It’s a feel-good thing,” he said. It also brought him back to the large-company environment he missed.
Gary Hedrick, former El Paso Electric CEO who is chairman of the ReadyOne board of directors, said a national search firm found 20 candidates for the ReadyOne CEO job, and the board narrowed that to five finalists.
The board unanimously picked Alvarez because of his “rich background” in various manufacturing companies and because of his “cultural fit,” Hedrick said
“He is bilingual, and we thought he’d understand this community better than some of the other candidates,” Hedrick said.
Alvarez grew up in San Diego, where he did a lot of surfing. He now likes to swim, bike, and run.
He spent some of his early school years in Tijuana, Mexico, and he lived in the Mexican towns of Puebla and Leon with his Mexican-born wife and their two children, now in college, for five years when he managed automotive-bumper factories in Mexico for the French company Plastic Omnium.
His family has lived in San Antonio the last 11 years.
He replaces Tony Martinez, an El Paso lawyer who served as CEO for just over three years. He left in February for personal reasons, and was temporarily replaced by Tom Ahmann, a garment industry veteran who came out of retirement to serve several stints as ReadyOne CEO over the last 10 years.
Alvarez’s salary wasn’t disclosed. But Hedrick said he will be paid more than Martinez, who, according to Internal Revenue Service documents filed by ReadyOne, had total compensation of about $266,300 in 2015, the latest available information.
Ahmann, who was on ReadyOne’s CEO selection committee, said it will be easy for Alvarez to pick up the skills for government contracting and running a company aimed at hiring mostly people with physical and mental disabilities. Alvarez’s manufacturing and marketing expertise is what’s valuable, he said.
Alvarez comes to the company just as it picked up $90 million in new government contracts to make military uniforms. That’s expected to more than double ReadyOne’s sales next year from this year’s estimated $67 million, Ahmann said.
The company in October announced it was hiring 500 people due to the new contracts, and so far has hired only about 100 people because it’s difficult to find workers in El Paso’s current low-unemployment environment, Ahmann said.
Besides the company’s not-for-profit division, which employs the bulk of its workforce, it also has a for-profit division, named Roicom, which does work for a jean maker and the U.S. Postal Service. Roicom workers do not have to disabilities.
Juanita Ramirez works on a military jacket at ReadyOne Industries’ garment factory in East El Paso. She has worked at the company for 13 years.
Both divisions operate garment factories — the not-for-profit at 1414 Ability Drive, and the smaller, for-profit factory at 12100 Esther Lama Drive in East El Paso. Both factories will be involved with the new military garment contracts, Ahmann has said.
ReadyOne also operates a box-making operation at 11460 Pellicano Drive with about 100 employees, and a small call center with about 15 employees, which include both disabled and regular workers.
"We sell boxes for Juárez maquilas now, and there’s possible growth opportunities" by getting more companies in the maquiladora, or manufacturing sector, in Juárez and other parts of Mexico, to buy ReadyOne-made boxes for their products, Alvarez said.
"Part of my function is to grow the business," and create more employment, Alvarez said. "We have plenty of space and capacity to do more."
He’s a certified lean-manufacturing teacher, and plans to implement a "cost of waste initiative" at ReadyOne in the future, he said.
"Part of being lean is to look for cost reductions without affecting employment," Alvarez said. "People think leans means cost cutting, but lean’s first priority is customer satisfaction. Once you have satisfied customers, you can grow."
Vic Kolenc may be reached at 546-6421; vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; @vickolenc on Twitter.
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