Narayanganj, the "Dundee of Bangladesh": Why Our Factory Is Here

Our factory address says Narayanganj, and most people outside Bangladesh have never heard of it. It's worth explaining why a city an hour from Dhaka has been a textile town for close to two centuries — not because the history makes our clothes any different, but because it's a real answer to "why here," and most factories never bother giving one.

The nickname, and where it actually comes from

Narayanganj is sometimes called the "Dundee of Bangladesh" — a direct echo of Dundee, Scotland, which was the world's first industrialised jute-processing city, sometimes called "Juteopolis" in its own right. The comparison isn't a modern marketing line; it's a real nickname earned by more than a century of jute trade concentrated in one place on the Shitalakhya river.

The trade itself is older than the nickname. Jute export out of Narayanganj began in 1830, when the Rally Brothers started shipping raw jute west, with backing from a company based in Assam. By 1908, the city hosted 18 European and 2 Indian jute trading companies operating out of Calcutta — a genuine international trading hub, not a local market.

Adamjee: once the largest jute mill in the world

The clearest landmark in that history is Adamjee Jute Mills, built in 1950–51 on 295 acres beside the Shitalakhya river in Siddhirganj, within Narayanganj district. At its peak it was the largest jute mill in the world — bigger than anything in Calcutta or in Dundee itself, the city it was implicitly being compared to. It ran for half a century before closing in 2002, after years of losses, as synthetic packaging replaced jute sacking worldwide and the global jute trade contracted.

There's a second historical turn worth knowing, and it's less romantic: after 1947, when the new border split jute-growing land from most of the existing jute mills, the industry here shifted from raw jute trading to jute milling — new mills, including Adamjee, were built specifically because the processing capacity that used to sit across the new border no longer could.

The jute mills are gone. What's left is a place that has known how to run a textile export business, at real scale, for close to two hundred years.

Same city, different fibre — and we're not pretending otherwise

It would be easy to write this piece as though our factory grew out of that history in some direct line. It didn't, and we're not going to imply it did. Collective Studio was founded in 2019. We are a cut-and-sew knitwear operation — jersey, fleece, rib — not a jute mill, and nobody currently working our floor has any connection to Adamjee or the trading houses of 1908. That continuity would be a nicer story, and it isn't a true one.

What's true, more modestly, is this: Narayanganj has been a place where textile fibre gets bought, processed, and exported at real scale for the better part of two centuries. The fibre changed — jute, then cotton and synthetic knits, as Bangladesh's ready-made garment industry grew nationally from the 1980s onward (we cover that fuller story in our guide to the Bangladesh garment industry) — but the place kept the trade. That's a genuine, checkable reason a knitwear factory sits here rather than somewhere with no textile history at all, and it's the honest version of the "heritage" story, not the embellished one.

Where we fit

Collective Studio is a family-run knitwear manufacturer in Narayanganj — our own cut-and-sew floor, GOTS-certified under certificate RSC 9687, BKMEA and Narayanganj Chamber of Commerce member, founded 2019. We didn't inherit a jute mill and we don't claim to have. We did choose to build a factory in a city with a real, sourced textile history, and we'd rather tell you the accurate version of that than a nicer-sounding one. See our own story, the factory profile, or start your collection.