Riopele: Female Leadership

What do Riopele's R&D, Human Resources, and Sustainability departments have in common? All of them are led by women, without exception. The female leadership is just one of the curiosities of a company that has recorded a 23% growth in the total number of staff members over the last decade, meaning the hiring of 193 employees to a staff consisting of 1039 professionals.

Currently, the average age of employees is 41 years old. Forty-five percent (45%) of women hold leadership positions in a company where most employees are men (62%).

Riopele is looking for increasingly skilled staff in the market. The number of employees with a bachelor's degree is 94 (18% increase in the last decade), and 24 of them hold a Master's degree. The technical departments of R&D, Sustainability, IT Systems, Sales, Financial, Human Resources, Quality, Health and Safety, for example, are responsible (181 in total) for around 19% of the company's employees.

The importance of the "Horizontes Programme"

Established in 1927, Riopele is one of the most resilient Portuguese textile companies and a leading company in the international scenario regarding the creation and production of fabrics for fashion and clothing collections. It vertically integrates R&D, Spinning, Dyeing, Twisting, Weaving and Finishing, and Quality Control by offering a vertical textile production service capable of meeting the current fast pace of the fashion industry. To ensure the continuous training of employees, the company created the Horizontes Programme in 2012.

"We want to value the role of each person, regardless of their function, for the final result of the company. This naturally goes through the contribution of each worker in the development of fabrics of excellence", Bernardino Carneiro stressed.

According to Riopele's Board Director, through the "Horizontes Programme", "we provide all employees with the opportunity to participate in external training sessions, conferences and other initiatives, as well as internal training sessions". We highlight themed workshops such as the "Product, Process and Control", which creates the conditions "to foster individual interests and skills of each worker and empower them with a global knowledge of the business, by boosting teamwork and company's results", and has already involved more than 1,000 company employees.