Bluezone: Collaborations Help the Denim Industry Overcome Obstacles
Angela Velasquez
5 min read
Speakers at Bluezone highlighted how the denim industry needs to work together to be an active participant in the sustainable legislation, certification and innovations that are writing its future.
Companies can struggle to navigate all three alone or collaborate. Many of the panel discussions at Bluezone circled back to the positive impact collaborations can have.
“We like to work with companies from the denim industry, but also with other industries as well as designers and artists. It’s a way to [force us to think] outside the box, to gain new knowledge and some insights that maybe we don’t normally get,” said Andrea Venier, Officina39 managing director, during a panel about collaborative projects. “We are happy to share our knowledge—it’s a win-win approach at the end.”
One example of that win-win approach is Easyndigo, Officina39 indigo garment dye solution that works in tandem with Tonello’s DyeMate technology, an industrialized replacement for traditional manual indigo garment dyeing. Both Italian companies were pursuing indigo garment dye technologies, but together they landed on a more efficient and effective process.
Venier added it was easy for the two companies to join forces. “We share the same passion for our industry. We share the same vision and same ethics,” he said.
Effective partnerships identify pain points, understand the needs of the consumer, and find the solution together, said Ebru Ozaydin, The Lycra Company’s strategic marketing director for denim and ready-to-wear.
There’s also a practical side to collaborations. Ozaydin pointed out the financial benefits of partnerships, as they’re opportunities to split the cost of scaled-up product development and testing. “We will share the responsibility, and we will share the cost,” she said.
Bluezone
The denim industry is strong in creative collaborations and projects that scale a new technology that can benefit both parties, but less so on sharing data.
In Haelixa’s experience, Holly Berger, the traceable DNA marker firm’s marketing director, said manufacturers are keen to use traceability despite being the challenge to collect large amounts of information. However, there’s a disconnect with brands and how to implement traceability.
“Some of that has to do with brands that are not trying to trace of their supply chain, or don’t have a map yet,” she said during a panel about traceability. “That’s where some digital tools really help to connect those dots. But another one is collaboration. There is no one-stop-shop with full supply chain transparency. So, it does take collaborating, whether that’s with vertically integrated manufacturers, a digital platform, with physical traceability or secondary auditing companies. The more we share education and information, the more we adapt it.”
Meanwhile, brands are facing another hurdle: how to teach consumers to use the information gathered on QR codes.
“The reality is that most consumers aren’t scanning QR codes. They’re not really looking any deeper than what is maybe on the hang tag in the store,” Berger said. “So for us, we do make an attempt to communicate and to create that supply chain transparency so they can see the steps. This is the producer, this is what happened, these are the people involved… and we will continue to use QR codes.”
Collaboration is key to data collection, said Bart Westerman, Tex.Tracer founder and COO. “In the EU, there are around 140,000 to 150,000 brands and all of these brands need to collect on average 6 million data points,” he said. Fashion traceability platforms like Tex.Tracer are solutions for handling the data, but the main challenge is collecting the 6 million data points for each brand. There are communication barriers from brands to suppliers. Some suppliers still use physical forms. There’s also a lot of duplication, where multiple brands are asking a single supplier for the same information, that could be streamlined in an open-source platform, he said.
There’s also an information gap between the fashion industry and the people who making sustainable legislation like the corporate sustainability due diligence. During a panel about cotton, Muchaneta ten Napel, the founder and CEO of Shape Innovate, urged supply chain professionals and business owners to make their voices heard.
“Those who are making legislation, a lot of them are not aware of how this monster that we call the fashion industry operates. So, they’re making rules according to what they read or see and not according to how we as a business run,” she said. “I’m always encouraging voices to come to Brussels and to really advocate for yourself and advocate for your industry to make sure that these laws actually make a lot of sense, as opposed to give us guidance that harms our business.”
Westerman sees firsthand how governments are underestimating the complexity of supply chains.
“[The EU] is making these standards, but it takes a long time, and until we get there, it’s just going to be more headache for everyone to deliver all that compliance data,” he said.
Though Westerman described the legislation as “very generic,” companies are not making it easy for themselves by choosing to operate in silos. “We all ask similar questions, but not the same. We ask it in a different format. We don’t share data. There are suppliers that work across ten data platforms.”
While Tex.Tracer aims to simplify traceability and make their platform user friendly, Westerman said the process will require a change of mindset when it comes to collaborating and sharing information. “We all need to be asking the same questions,” he said.
