A while ago I asked you to send me e-mails with the problems you have when you want to apply eco-effective designing in your company. There are a lot of different aspects that keep you busy. To name a few: material choices, customer behaviour, communication, time-management, prices and supply chains. With this input I am going to write a series of articles.
One of the big frustrations is to find the right materials. Today I am going to describe to you why this is difficult and I will give you tips to overcome the issues.
One of the big frustrations is to find the right materials. Today I am going to describe to you why this is difficult and I will give you tips to overcome the issues.
There are three main reasons why it is difficult to find materials.
Your designer doesn't know when a material is environment friendly What is environment friendliness? How do you choose a material? It is a new skill that not every designer possesses. I wrote an article on recognising a environment friendly material. Read more about it by clicking this link. | There is less choice and the prices are higher. There is indeed less choice, because the textile industry already exists for a long time but only recently we started realizing we have to produce human/environment friendly. It is not true that the prices are always higher. Most factories that invest in the development of environment friendly materials already made high quality products and R&D is an important part of their business already. They see this as a new direction. Their prices are the same. Factories that compete with their price will find it harder to develop environment friendly products because it will force them to spend a lot of time on R&D, which they are not used to. They will probably calculate this R&D into the price you pay for the fabrics. Indeed these fabrics will cost more then the non-environment friendly options of the same factory. | Your purchasing department doesn't know where to look It is difficult for you to find the right resources that can deliver the material you are looking for. Where do your purchasers have to look in Europe? Fabrics
Leather Nonwovens Yarns/Fibres Multiple options Haberdashery Or you can contact agents from different factories. If you think I missed an option, please let me know! |
What can you do to overcome these difficulties?
- Educate your designer on environment friendliness of materials or hire an eco-effective researcher during the design and development phase,
- Give your purchasing department a new task when they go to fairs: ask for environment friendly options. (Some fairs have special communication to find environment friendly options, like Texworld)
- Ask for environment friendly fabrics yourself, the more it is asked for, the more urgent it becomes for the factory.
- Develop new materials in co-creation with the factory, to create more options for your company.
- Develop new business models in which the price of the materials can be shared with multiple users e.g. Lease, rent or material recovery with a deposit. This way a higher cost price does not have to be a problem.