Talking Textiles

Over the last few decades, the textiles and apparel industry, which once employed many people in North America and Europe, including work-from-home cottage industry type workers, has migrated to a highly dispersed global supply chain now estimated to employ 430 million people working in textile and fashion production worldwide.

The switch was largely driven by low labor rates in Asia as American and European labor rates continued to increase. Over this time, the industry has doubled in scale. Since 2002 the fashion industry alone has experienced double-digit growth moving from $1 trillion to $1.8 at retail value, according to Greenpeace in 2017.

The downside of this growth has been the industry’s negative impact on sustainability, the encouragement for brands to develop quasi-disposable fast fashion – and now, the impact of the global pandemic on what turns out to be a somewhat fragile supply chain. Debbie McKeegan, CEO of Texintel, discusses this in detail with Senior Editor Cary Sherburne.

Printing News:  Debbie, let’s start by having you tell our readers about Texintel.

Debbie McKeegan:  Texintel is a collaborative online platform and provides a free resource for the entire textile industry. Its aim is to connect the dots and fulfill the huge need to educate the market about the benefits of digital technologies, from design through production, distribution and fulfillment. Digital printing of textiles is growing, perhaps not as fast as we would like, but it will grow faster if people have access to key knowledge and information directly from professional practitioners and industry experts all over the world. Texintel provides the critical link between creatives, suppliers, technology providers and everyone else in the supply chain, all the way through manufacturing and on through to retail. The platform offers the textile community industry Insights, and importantly, direct access to both the innovations and the people that develop the software and machinery that is essential for sustainable change within the textile marketplace.

PN:  One thing we have seen with the pandemic is how fragile the global supply chain actually is. Can you share your thoughts on some of the things you’ve seen in terms of stresses on the supply chain?

DMcK:  The global supply chain is fractured, and it’s had issues and problems for a very long time. If you think about the fashion industry in the UK and Europe, the margins have become thinner and thinner, and that’s caused brands and retailers to reach out farther and farther into the East. The supply chain generates mountains of stock, inventory that’s constantly moving around on the oceans. When the pandemic hit, this caused a wave of disruption worldwide resulting in huge volumes of order cancellations in places like China and Bangladesh, and that has shown a disregard for contracts and for ethical manufacturing, further highlighting the industry’s lack of corporate social responsibility. Coming out of COVID, I think all of that needs to change. There is a great need and always will be for offshore manufacturing of core lines and core products. But I also think we also need to look at the opportunity for reshoring and bringing products closer to home so we can control the volume, control the supply, and make sure we deliver the correct product for the correct moment with very short lead times and not have to have huge piles of stock. We must rationalize the supply chain and move to a system that’s energy efficient and creates no waste; and then we will automatically reduce landfill. The industry has a culture of discounting; by manufacturing sustainably and just in time, this switch will also increase profits.

PN:  That sounds pretty straightforward.

DMcK:  Actually, it’s not as easy as it sounds. I was chatting with someone a few weeks ago about Marks & Spencer, a huge and historic brand here in the UK, and he noted they used to produce 94% of their goods here in the UK. I’d be surprised if they produced 4% of them here now. When all of the production moved out to Asia, we lost the infrastructure. Sewn manufacturing is a huge issue – we’ve probably lost two generations of valuable skills in that area alone. We are also short of textile practitioners and factory management and all of the incredible complexities that go into sewn manufacturing. It can’t be done overnight. With the use of microfactories, bot technologies, etc., we can solve some of the problems. But we are going to have to work hard to solve the issues of actually making the products. We are probably 15 years away from being able to do so robotically. We need to come together as a community to start training a generation of textile expertise across the manufacturing cycle if we are going to be able to start reshoring at least some of the textiles and apparel manufacturing.

PN:  One of the areas you talk a lot about is sustainability. The textiles industry is the world’s second largest polluter behind the petroleum industry. And making it more sustainable is closely linked with improving the supply chain. Digital technologies have an important role to play here. From a printing perspective, we are only at about 6.9% of all printed fabrics being printed digitally. Why is it taking so long to gain critical mass in this transformation?

DMcK:  I think the transformation has taken longer than we would like because the industry is so huge. I don’t think people realize how vast and how diverse the industry is. And also, it requires capital expenditures to acquire the requisite digital technologies. You see rotary machines in factories all over the world that are 40 years old; they live forever. But of course, with a sustainability agenda moving forward, it’s time for a huge change. The traditional processes are energy greedy and polluting. Ten percent of the world carbon emissions are attributed to the textile industry alone, and 20% of the world’s wastewater is attributed to the textiles industry, with 8% of that being attributed to print. In addition, traditional textile plants have a huge footprint compared with digital plants. Digitally printing textiles is a much greener, cleaner and more efficient process.

PN:  On the digital side, there’s been a lot of development in the inks being used. Which digital inks do you think are the most sustainable?

DMcK:  About 50% of the rotary printing is done using pigment inks. If we can switch that volume to digital, we save an incredible amount of energy and water. Digital printing with pigment inks uses practically zero water. And it uses a lot less energy than conventional textile printing. All of the inks have benefits when you are producing digitally because you are not producing waste; you are producing exactly what you need. But of all of them, pigment is the one that has the biggest impact to make. And with the many improvements we have seen to the inks and printheads, we can now run pigment inks at speeds similar to analog, up to 90 meters per minute.

PN:  Are there shortcomings to digital fabric printing?

DMcK:  Speed used to be the biggest shortcoming, but now we can print at any speed we like. There are entry level machines all the way up to high productivity single-pass printers that run at 90 meters per minute. One area is still the price per square meter, largely due to the cost of inks. But if you look at the costs across the entire production cycle, which people have a hard time doing for some reason, you have to consider that there is less waste, less water usage, less energy usage, and the total cost of ownership then starts to come in line with the costs of traditional print. Plus, you have the ability to bring out a larger variety of collections during the year manufactured to meet consumer demands, as well as the ability to produce custom products, for which there is growing demand.

PN:  Any closing words?

DMcK:  The transformation to digital is critical to our future, and it’s not moving as fast as we would like. But I think the COVID-19 pandemic has given us a huge opportunity to make sustainable change. The whole world has been frozen in time and has the time to think about addressing some of these issues. We have the opportunity and the technology to rationalize the whole supply chain and make its footprint smaller. I think the crisis will accelerate the achievement of increased sustainability. This is especially true at the retail end of the supply chain, where they need to be much cleverer. They need to iterate their lines more quickly and not hold massive stocks in warehouses, large percentages of which end up in the landfill. Digital is a great way to do that. You can use intelligent data to replenish what is really selling and to refresh collections to meet consumer demands for design diversity. People are really going to have to look back and change their supply chains and workflow procedures for the future. It’s taking forever, but let’s hope it speeds up.