Textile printer manufacturer Kornit has staged a fashion week event, presenting 12 collections by various designers, all featuring digitally printed fabrics and garments produced in a week or less, to audiences that included brands and fulfilment houses in order to explain the potential of digital print technology to deliver ‘sustainable fashion’ and to influence wider change in how the fashion industry operates.
The London event also featured keynote sessions and a panel discussion in which supply chain, inventory management and consumer engagement topics were addressed.
As well as aiming to combat the problems of wasteful and polluting production through more sustainable manufacturing practices and returns/recycling initiatives, presentations by Bill McRaith, formerly chief supply chain officer at PVH (owner of the Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein brands), Simon Platts, commercial ESG and sustainability director at Asos, and Kornit CEO Ronen Samuel touched on trends ranging from growing ‘instant gratification’ expectations to the potential explosion of creativity that access to rapid and cleaner printed textile production could usher in. Mr Samuel also noted that soft furnishing and other decor items were part of these trends.
In a proposed new production model, the established method of essentially guessing demand and seeking to drive down input costs while ignoring subsequent losses to due to wastage and end-of-range mark-downs is replaced by a dynamic exchange of data between brands, retailers and manufacturing/fulfilment sites, allocating production between onshore, near-shore and remote facilities according to run length, lead time and shipping costs.
Mr Samuel provided dramatic figures for waste material and water usage generated by the fashion industry and said that trends such as e-commerce and desire for self-expression, particularly as influenced by social media, as well as a willingness to pay more for environmentally better products were all indicating that a fundamental change is required.
