Accelerate ROI, digital transformation, and sustainability with a digital textile color program.
Hiccups in getting to market can be devasting for any type of business. For fashion, soft goods, apparel, and footwear brands, a major concern is missing out on the opportunity to increase sales and establish or reinforce brand credibility. Brands simply can’t afford any unnecessary slowdowns during the execution of a design due to delays in preliminary steps such as the color approval process.
“In an industry where style trends change faster than the seasons, a quick TTM [time to market] is essential for catching the wave of customer expectations and meeting ever-shifting market demands,” Printful reports.
Of course, this necessity overlaps with market forces that impel brands to produce “trendy clothes faster and cheaper than their competitors” in order to see considerable profits and gain ground, says Fast Company. The same pressures apply to footwear and soft apparel brands.
Another driving force? While a high percentage of customers claim to want more sustainable fashion, there’s a discrepancy evinced by purchasing decisions. Fashion Dive cites a study that “found that 33% of people believe sustainable alternatives are too expensive.” So, there is a real opportunity in the marketplace for producing more sustainable fashion at a lower price that meets consumer expectations.
Smart color solutions can be a multi-pronged business solution for fashion brands.
What if there was a solution that not only helped textile manufacturers get to market faster to boost return on investment, but also delivered in other areas such as:
- Increasing the efficiency of your textile supply chain,
- Deepening and improving relationships with textile manufacturers,
- Accelerating digital transformation for fashion brands and their suppliers,
- Protecting and strengthening your brand, and
- Making your brand from concept to retail more sustainable?
By applying smart digital color management early in the textile supply chain, soft goods, apparel, footwear, and fashion brands can not only avoid rippling negative effects; they can also see positive gains in more areas than expected.
First off, going about the textile color identification process the old school way means time…and potentially more time…and perhaps more time after that as brands identify matching physical swatches and ship them off to textile suppliers located around the globe. Then there’s the problem of suppliers doing multiple dips and sending numerous textile swatches back in the mail…only to discover the color is not right.
The time delay just to communicate the perfect colors for products leads to added shipping costs, and more pressing, a costly delay in bringing new concepts to market.
It also represents a hit to sustainability goals for fashion brands as more and more textile swatches are shipped back and forth between brands and suppliers, contributing to the fashions industry’s staggering “10% of global greenhouse gas emissions due to its long supply chains and energy intensive production,” according to UN Climate Change.
With the textile sector being “the third largest source of water degradation and land use in 2020,” per the European Parliament, brands are pressed to achieve greater sustainability in any part of their supply chain.
Limiting the back and forth between brands and suppliers—along with the corresponding textile waste—can also prevent an ensuing downstream waste of textiles relating to retail partner and customer dissatisfaction.
That is, added to this textile waste in the development phase is the potential for further and more brand damaging fabric waste towards the end of the process should retailers, let alone customers, find colors of individual or supposedly matching apparel items to be off.
One must think of color aesthetics as well as perfect matching when reviewing Narvar’s findings that “46% of returns were because clothes don’t look good, fit or were the wrong size.”
But color discrepancy goes much deeper than just a retail track jacket and its corresponding pair of pants failing to match exactly. Fashion, footwear, soft goods, and apparel brands are well aware of the Centre to Selvedge Shade Variation (CSV) that can exist across pieces of fabric due to the use of semi-continuous and continuous dying machines. An added layer of complexity and room for error can be introduced when different fabric pieces for a given garment, sneaker, or pillow are made by different textile suppliers. This pitfall can be particularly perilous for brands transitioning from lab to bulk production, which frequently involves widening textile manufacturer relationships.
Besides using physical swatches early in the supply chain, errors in the color approval process can lead to spiraling sustainability hits downstream with either dissatisfied retailers or customers. For customers alone, it could equate to “double the supply chain emissions and much greater wastage as over 25% of returned items end up being thrown out,” according to CNBC.
Then there’s growing pressure from governing bodies like the European Union who met in late March to discuss a proposal to “restrict exports of textile waste,” according to The Financial Times.
Change the color identification process into a business solution
In addition to hits to sustainability gains, production costs, and time to market, shortcomings in a brand’s color development and quality control program can be reflective of harmful gaps between brands and their textile manufacturers.
This comes at a time when improved relationships are increasingly viewed as beneficial to everyone. This realization has only deepened since McKinsey and Company found that “in 2017, 81 percent of brands included ‘supplier collaboration and development’ among their top three priorities.”
The answer? More and more brands are turning to a cloud-based color communication and approval process such as X-Rite Pantone’s Textile Color Hub. This secure and centralized platform includes a digital color library so brands and suppliers can be in exact agreement.
How exact? The process includes a color specification document that includes spectral data—aka, a given color’s fingerprint. And despite the distance between brands and suppliers, secure, cloud-based communication ensures trust in every step of the process. From quality control software for evaluating lab dips to calibration software to optimize and validate supplier spectrophotometers, brands can partner with suppliers they both trust and help to ensure better, more accurate output and high-quality color calibration. Since we can always see things in a different light, light source specifications are provided as well to keep brands and suppliers on the same page to avoid the pesky metamerism effect.
Get to know the advantages of pairing color management software with calibrated spectrophotometers and the right lighting. See how you can accelerate your lab dip phase by up to five times faster to increase time to market, deepen and improve supplier relationships, improve ROI and brand equity, and even improve your carbon footprint.
Start your Textile Color Hub FREE trial today.
To learn more, get in touch with our Color Experts.
