X-Rite’s Color measurement for dye houses improves color quality on a variety of textile materials and helps reduce impact to the global environment.
Challenges
The dye-house industry is crucially significant, employing millions globally and playing
a pivotal role in the textile sector. However, the environmental impact of dye-house operations is concerning.
According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), dye-houses contribute significantly to industrial water pollution and use a wide array of chemicals, including many hazardous substances. Moreover, the energy-intensive nature of dyeing processes contributes substantially to air pollution and climate change. Addressing these challenges is essential for the industry to meet environmental expectations while maintaining competitiveness and profitability.
How Digital Color Management Can Enhance Efficiency and Sustainability
The color specification process can cause significant rework and delays to get a product to market – some brands reporting it can take up to 12 weeks just to get a color approved.
These multiple rounds of lab dips and reviews create what we call the “roundabout of color” to ultimately slow time to market. Between each stage in the product development process, there is back and forth communication, lab dips, reviews, and revisions to gain alignment and approval on color.
This often requires extensive effort, including flying resources to suppliers or mills to do on-site color approvals and shipping lab dips for approval back and forth between brands and their suppliers.
All of this costs brands and suppliers time and money, while significantly impacting our planet by creating a tremendous amount of material and chemical waste, and carbon footprint of material transportation during the lab dip process.
To continue to compete in the textile industry, dye-houses, yarns & fabrics producers must accelerate speed to market, using digital color approval. Applying digital color management throughout the design, formulation, and quality control processes provides a seamless way to produce accurate color and reduce the carbon footprint of the textile industry.
Results
By introducing spectral data and color digitization in the design-to-manufacturing workflow, colorists can get to approved color faster and more efficiently.
- Reduce lab dip, shipping and review time from 40 to 50 days to just
- Formulate, produce, finish, evaluate quality, and ship in just 6 days instead 30 to 40.
Leveraging Digital Tools Across the Supply Chain
By moving from subjective color evaluation to objective spectrophotometric evaluation and introducing more color digitization in the design-to-manufacturing workflow, brands can get to approved color in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.
X-Rite Inc offers complete solutions for color matching and quality control on textile materials. Using spectral color measurement in junction with standard visual assessment tools, in combination with formulation and quality control software, dye houses can simplify the color development process, optimize the dyeing process, reuse leftover materials, and reduce approval cycles.
The graphic below shows how much time can be saved during the Inspiration and Creation and Production phases by eliminating the roundabout of color.
How a Global Supply Chain Can Introduce Digital Tools into Color Programs
Brands and manufacturers can cut time in half and dramatically reduce their impact on the environment by introducing digital tools into areas that impact color across the global production supply chain of dyers, finishers, and assembly partners. Pantone and X-Rite’s solution combines universal color standards, digital workflow tools and color measurement instrumentation to help fashion executives optimize the textile value chain for brands and suppliers.
Featured Products
To continue to compete in the textile industry, dye-houses must accelerate speed to market, bridge the art and science of design, and master digital color. Applying digital color management throughout the design, formulation, and quality control processes provides a seamless way to produce accurate color and reduce the carbon footprint of the textile industry.
