Sustainability

Episode 19: Katie Elks and JD Davis | Brooklinen

Katie Elks and JD Davis on how Brooklinen has become so admired.

Brooklinen is the most popular sheet brand on the internet and has received over 80,000 five star consumer reviews for its products. Katie Elks, Director of Design & Product Development, and JD Davis Production, Procurement & Quality Manager of the multi-award-winning luxury bedding & bath brand, share with us why the brand has become so popular, which definitely has a lot to do with the materials that are sourced. We discuss the company’s dedication to quality, responsible manufacturing and transparency – and what consumer trends have shifted during the pandemic.

Katie Elks, Director of Design & Product Development
JD Davis, Production, Procurement & Quality Manager

Katie Elks’ and JD Davis’ Interview Transcript

Nancy: Hello, I’m Nancy Fendler, and you’re listening to Material Wise, your podcast on material matters. It’s my chance to talk to designers, product developers and other guests about what influences them to create, how and why they select the materials they choose, and the relationships they built with their customers and industry. My guests today are with a multi-award winning luxury bedding and bath brand, Brooklinen. Joining me on the conversation are Katie Elks, Brooklinen and director of design and product development and JD Davis, Brooklinen product, procurement and quality manager. Brooklinen was co-founded by husband and wife team Vicki and Rich Fulop, who after sleeping on incredibly soft, cool, crisp, and expensive hotel sheets while on vacation, formed the idea of bringing high-end linens at reasonable prices that would appeal to a younger market. Their ideas certainly took off as nearly a decade later, Brooklinen is the most popular Sheet brand on the internet and has received over 80,000 five star consumer reviews for its products. Katie and JD share with us why the brand has become so popular, which definitely has a lot to do with the materials that are sourced. We discussed Brooklinen’s dedication to quality, responsible manufacturing, and transparency, in addition to the consumer trends that have shifted during the pandemic. Finally, Katie and JD share some of their favorite Brooklinen products and other brands they’re following. I hope you enjoy. So Katie and JD, thanks so much for joining me on Material Wise.
Katie: Thanks for having us.
JD: Thank you.
Nancy: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been such a fan of Brooklinen and its products and the story. So it’s really fun to be able to chat with you guys. So Katie, I’d just like to know a little bit about you before we get into Brooklinen. So how did you get involved with Brooklinen?
Katie: Sure. So before Brooklinen I always worked in apparel and design and product development, so that’s what I do here. I do the design, color and pattern for all our products.
Nancy: Okay. How about you JD?
JD: Yeah, so I actually came to the Brooklinen team because of a past working relationship with Katie, which is very exciting to be working together again. My background is in supply chain and here I manage all things production, quality, and our suppliers. So essentially everything that goes into mass producing the products that are designed and developed by Katie’s team.
Nancy: So the founders, I’ve read a little bit about, it’s an, a husband and wife team. It’s kind of a romantic story, but I’m just curious why the name Brooklinen?
Katie: So a friend of the founders actually came up with the name by combining our main product category and our home (NYC) borough. So Brooklyn and bed linens became Brooklinen.
Nancy: And I’m wondering if you can tell me why the founders felt as though there was a need for a curated collection of bedding or sleep products, I should say.
Katie: It started with bedding. Rich and Vicki were on vacation at a high-end hotel. And they really loved the sheets that were there. They went to the hotel store to buy them and they were a little over their budget. So after their vacation, they were looking online for a better option and couldn’t really find something and found that other people were also looking for the same thing. So that’s how it all started.
Nancy:  So who do you think the customer is? Who is the Brooklinen customer?
Katie: Well, the co-founders were definitely designing product for themselves at first. So they were kind of the first audience and then their friends and family kind of talking to them about what they wanted. And now really our audience is anyone who wants to be comfortable.
Nancy: JD, do you have anything to add?
JD: I’d say overall, our customer is really a broad group of people, of a lot of different backgrounds. And I think that’s something that also draws a lot of us to want to work at Brooklinen is that it appeals to a really large range of people. And like Katie said, Brooklinen appeals to people who want to be comfortable and show me someone who doesn’t want to be comfortable.
Nancy: That’s for sure, particularly this last year. And it also just seems to be very assessable too, because you can buy it online. I know you have some pop-up shops, but to me it has a real friendly demeanor. In some of my research, I noticed that Brooklinen has three core values. The first of them is quality. Maybe JD, I could ask you for, since you are in more of the sourcing and materials, is how the materials come into play with quality?
JD: I can answer on the quality end of this, as far as upholding the quality standards that we have for our customers. There’s a lot of checkpoints and us working really closely with our vendors to make sure that the quality standards are something that we ourselves would want to sleep on and look forward to sleeping on. As far as the sourcing of the fabric itself and the exact fabrics that are chosen, I would actually send that over to Katie to kind of speak to that from the sourcing side of the product.
Nancy: Okay, Great. Thanks. So Katie, what’s important to you when you select a fabric?
Katie: So durability is definitely one of the things we think about, but also everything has to be super soft. We want people to pull it out of their box and be really excited to use it. So it’s kind of finding that perfect spot between something that’s long-lasting and really soft. And then whenever we’re adding something new to the collection, we really want to make sure it’s additive. And it’s not just like a different version of something we have. So our classic percale, our Lux sateen, and our washed linen are all very different in terms of hand feel. And what kind of customer would gravitate to each of those.
Nancy: When it comes to sourcing, where do you turn to find your materials?
Katie: So all our vendors are really experts in the kinds of products they make. So it’s talking to them about what new innovations are happening or something that we’ve seen, whether it be in a store or online, or just any kind of new idea, they’re our biggest partners in development to help us execute on something. And then we also do attend trade shows, not in the past year, but hopefully we can go back to that because obviously a big part of it to go and see so many vendors at once and be able to touch and feel is really important.
Nancy: Oh, I know. That touch and feel. There’s probably been a lot of shipping of fabrics back and forth for you to experience and feel. Do you think consumers have become savvier about the materials that they are purchasing?
Katie: I absolutely think that they have, even before the pandemic, from the product side, but also on the marketing side, we really make sure that our customers understand that quality is key and that we’re looking out for them as far as putting out product that is the best quality that we can deliver and quality we want to sleep on ourselves. Even now that we are in the pandemic, we’re all spending time at home that we never ever have before. And I’d say this before, and I’m saying this now is like, everyone is paying way more attention to what’s in our homes. What’s around us all the time, especially our soft textiles. I think probably everyone around is looking at what we have, wanting to upgrade or think about it a different way, laundering things more often. It’s really been an interesting experience, at least personally, for me to see how that’s changed with myself. And I think that customers now are paying even more attention to what they have around them. Specifically, natural fibers are really, really popular with us and something that consumers just really respond to even more so now.
Nancy: So the second value was responsible manufacturing. So just to talk a little bit about, on that point, what is your sustainability platform? And also just what sustainability means to you?
JD: Yeah. I’d say responsible manufacturing, sustainable manufacturing. This is definitely, I think specifically for me, something that is front and center. It’s sustainability of the products, how we produce products, but also how we produce products, wanting at the end of the day to be making products that last is super important for us and that our customers can get all of the use out of the products that we can really honor the raw materials and the processes that go into making it. But as we start to look deeper in our supply chain, now that we are on the tail end of a global supply chain disruption, we can really reinvigorate the sustainability focuses across everything, whether it’s materials, factory processes, freight shipping packaging, the last mile, shipping to the customer. As we scale, we’re finding more and more exciting ways to have a positive impact on the environment and something that we can holistically look at and make sure that these are the right things to do for our customer at the end of the day as well.
Nancy: There’s so many things that go into sustainability. And I was just talking to my 16 year old last night and talking about materials and how much savvier they’ve become with the items that they’re purchasing and how they’re packaged and whether it’s apparel, or a CD, or whatever. So I think you’re right. I think it’s a very exciting time. So much innovation has come out of the sustainability movement and particularly in materials. Katie, where do you find your design inspiration, including color scheme?
Katie: Yeah. We always seem to start with color when we’re concepting a new collection. It’s definitely one of my favorite aspects of textiles, is how they take color. We follow kind of what’s going on in fashion or different home trends. Our original collection, or a lot of our core products have more of like a men’s wear inspiration. So we definitely always try to keep in mind, our full range of customers. A lot of bedding companies really steer more towards like floral and shiny. I think we do a really nice job of full breadth of colors and patterns for anyone to choose from. We also work with print designers that are outside of Brooklinen and they all have their own different approach to color and pattern. So they bring a lot of inspiration and ideas for new collections.
Nancy: You mentioned drawing from men’s wear, and I can see that, but just begs me to ask if you see more men buying bedding than women or an increased number of men buying bedding?
Katie: Yeah. I would say our customer split is about 50% men, 50% women when traditionally it’s for bedding and home goods. It’s more female identifying group that make the most of the customer base. So it’s interesting to see that our product really, or our assortment really does have something for everyone.
Nancy: Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m glad. Glad to hear it. So are there important design principles that you and your team follow? I mean, you mentioned quality, durability, just curious if you see any other trends coming that hit you, that, oh, I’ve got to have this, or I got to do this?
Katie: Yeah. We always want to have some patterns that feel of the moment or are exciting, but it also comes down to, we want people to have this product for years to come. So kind of finding that line of, okay, what’s exciting, but isn’t going to feel dated or out done in a year. So you can continue to use the product.
Nancy: Do you have any thoughts where betting trends might be headed?
Katie: Yeah. From our vendors we’ve seen a lot of health and wellness trends and different finishes and applications and all kinds of things they’re putting into yarns. CBD infused yarns is a big one that we’ve seen. Haven’t tested that ourselves yet, but also we still haven’t addressed a lot of soft goods for the home. So for us, it’s still about exploring more decorative soft items, or rugs, or anything along those lines that could compliment what would be the adding to that market.
Nancy: You mentioned health and wellness, and I think that was sort of the third value. And I mean, health and wellness has certainly been a trend across everything this past year. I mean, previously pre pandemic, but more than anything this year. The term self-care. I keep hearing that word a lot too. It seems like there might be some cross market trends between, like, I think you’ve mentioned, sort of performance features that you might find, such as anti-microbial or a cool touch or whatever. And then bringing those performance features into home bedding or home textiles, I should say. Do you see this happening?
Katie: Yeah. I think definitely the like active wear community and people that develop those products, a lot of those technologies I think would have great adaptations into home. There’s a lot of things that help for active wear. So you don’t have to wash it as often. I’m a little hesitant to tell people to not wash their sheets as often, but if it helps keep things fresher between washing, I think it could be a great add.
Nancy: We’re hopefully coming out of the pandemic. It certainly feels it where I live in Maine. And hopefully where you are in New York. Have you seen a big shift in your business as a result of the pandemic? JD, you mentioned people really caring about comfort and their purchases. So I’m just curious if you’ve seen any interesting purchasing trends.
JD: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said before, we’re all spending more time in our homes where like looking at, oh, maybe my sheets seen better days, that sort of thing. We’re actually seeing a lot of first-time customers, coming to us for sheets. That’s what we’re known for. Brooklinen, come to us for sheets, but they’re actually returning to expand into the rest of their home. I’d say specifically, I’m really excited about our bath categories that we have, the towels that we offer. For me, that was my second Brooklinen product that I bought and really found these took my bathroom to the whole next level. And we’re seeing our customers, go through this experience specifically during the pandemic as well. People just coming back to us sooner and for more items, whether that be throws, towels, our silk products. Because as you mentioned, we do have a very broad assortment and can really get people excited about breathing more life into their space.
Nancy: So I just want to ask you some fun questions that might be a little bit more personal. And so let’s start with you, Katie. What’s your favorite material or what are your favorite materials?
Katie: I love cotton. So are classic cotton percale is my favorite fabric. It’s our original product too.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: I really love our towels. Honestly, I really love our towels, our super plush towels are most classic, super popular. I really love them in the marled colorway that we have. So that’s a black and white cross. Kind of gives it a little bit of depth, but I just, I use them every day and I absolutely love those.
Nancy: Good tip. I have to take a look at those. Nothing like a good towel that’s for sure. We’ll just go back and forth. So Katie, what’s your favorite Brooklinen item and why?
Katie: My favorite item is the silk pillowcase. So even before joining Brooklinen I had silk pillowcases from other brands and I like ours so much more. It’s just a heavier weight. It washes a lot better. And when we were traveling more, I would always bring it with me because it packs down so small. And then it’s kind of this nice little piece of home wherever you’re going.
Nancy: Yeah. And is it true that it makes your hair less frizzy? Not that you have frizzy hair. By seeing you on Zoom, that is.
Katie: I can have yeah, second and third day hair very easily. It’s soft on my skin as well. So if I put on a lot of moisturizer at night, especially in the winter right now, it stays on my face rather than soaking into a cotton pillowcase.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: Yeah, I really love basics. And the comforter collection that we have specifically, our down comforters. I absolutely love. I have both our lightweight and our all season for different times of year and for any guests that might stay. And just really love the quality for the price that we can offer our customers. And now working on the product is really exciting as well, because this is one, similar to Katie, that I owned before joining the team.
Nancy: Oh wow. That’s cool. So Katie, besides your own brand and your own products, what brands do you love? Who do you think, does a really good job with their brand?
Katie: Yeah, two brands that I really like that I’m kind of looking at, I think industries or a type of customer that haven’t been as widely addressed as most companies have, but FIGS for their scrubs. I think every doctor, and nurse, and medical professional appreciates their update to that very old category. And then Universal Standard, I think is a great one for having a broad size range and really making it accessible to anyone that wants to have their product.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: Very fitting for the pandemic, I really liked the exercise wear brand Girlfriend Collective. They’ve recently launched into more apparel products, but I really liked their sustainability stance in industry with a lot of synthetics. And in synthetics, it can tend to be a big drain on the environment as far as resources go. So I really enjoy what they put out. And I wouldn’t be alone in saying that the technical fabric developments at UNIQLO are really appealing as well. So I would have to say UNIQLO.
Nancy: Both good ones too. So Katie, if you were not a designer, product developer, what profession would you have chosen?
Katie: I think I would be in the teaching field either for something in the arts or for science.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: Well, I don’t think I could get too far from calendars, and planning, and all the conducting that comes along with production management. So I’d say probably project management, which is pretty close. So it might be a little bit of a cop out, but production is where I’ll stay because that international element is pretty critical for me.
Nancy: So here’s a big question and I only know one person who does this, but Katie, do you iron your sheets?
Katie: No, I do try to get them on the bed while they’re still warm from the dryer to help reduce the wrinkling, but definitely do not iron any of my sheets.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: Absolutely not. I do not iron my sheets. With cats on the bed and crazy schedule, I opt for a lived in look.
Nancy: I don’t feel so bad now. Okay. It’s been a really long, hard year and I’m sure we’ve all had some silver linings as well as some difficulty, but once the pandemic is over, what are you looking most forward to? How about you, Katie?
Katie: I think I’m looking forward to traveling. Obviously like most people, I had some travel plans in 2020 that got canceled. So I’m hoping to travel around and visit family and connect with people.
Nancy: How about you JD?
JD: Mine is also travel. One of my favorite things about what I do is visiting our suppliers and really being able to see everything about making our product in the facilities in which, is spending most of its time before it comes to us. And so I’d have to say visiting our suppliers is the absolutely the thing I’m looking most forward to. It really brings a lot of joy to the day to day, but also really great teaching moments for myself and within my team.
Nancy: Me too. I’m just looking forward to being in the same room, the same conference with a bunch of people and learning. And it’s amazing what Zoom and the technology can do to bring us together. But there’s nothing quite like really being there in person with someone. Katie and JD, thanks so much for joining me on Material Wise. It was great to see you, with you.
Katie: Thank you.
JD: Thank you.

Links to organizations mentioned in podcast:

Episode 18: Dr. Andrew Dent | Material Connexion

Dr. Andrew Dent on creating his dream position at Material Connexion.

Dr. Andrew Dent is the executive vice president research at Material ConneXion, a world -class library known for its innovative problem solving and thought-leadership by influential brands across every industry. We discuss a range of topics from how Dr. Dent became interested in material science, his fondness for the human interaction side of materials, and how this combination led him to his post at Material ConneXion where he has been for the last 20 years. We also talk about what sustainability means to him, his passion for waste and the future of material development – it’s looking bright!

Dr. Andrew Dent on Material ConneXion, materials, material library, material science, sustainability, & waste.

Dr. Dent’s Interview Transcript

Nancy: Hello, I’m Nancy Fendler, and you’re listening to Material Wise, your podcast on material matters. It’s my chance to talk to designers, product developers and other guests about what influences them to create. Why and how they select the materials they choose, and the relationships they’ve built with their customers and industry. I hope you’re all well and having a positive start to the new year. Material Wise has been quiet over the course of the pandemic, however we’re excited to be back this season with a wonderful lineup of interesting guests, beginning with my guest today, Dr. Andrew Dent. Dr. Andrew Dent is the executive vice president, research, at Material ConneXion. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Material ConneXion, it’s a world class library and consultancy known for its innovative problem solving and thought leadership by influential brands across every industry. Dr. Dent’s research directs the implementation of consulting projects and the selection of innovative, sustainable and advanced materials to Material ConneXion’s library, which currently has over 7500 materials. If you’ve never been to a Material ConneXion library, it’s a real treat and I highly recommend it. Dr. Dent has helped numerous Fortune 500 companies from Whirlpool, to Adidas, to BMW and more, develop or improve their products through the use of innovative materials. He speaks frequently on innovative material strategies, and is the co-author of the Material Innovation book series. We had a great conversation, discussing a range of topics from how he became interested in materials and material science, and how this eventually led him to Material ConneXion, where he’s been for the last 20 years. We also talk about what sustainability means to him, and we learn quite a bit about his passion for waste. He believes the future of material innovation is bright, and I’m excited to share our discussion on this episode of Material Wise. I hope you enjoy. Nancy: Hello Dr. Dent, it’s wonderful to have you on Material Wise.
Dr. Dent: Nice to be here, thank you.
Nancy: You’ve been involved in this business for a long time. How did you get involved, or how did you get interested in material science?
Dr. Dent: Actually, I have been asked that one before and honestly, I cannot remember. It was probably 30 years ago. Trying to remember exactly why I was interested in material science, I think it was because I just had a love of the physical world. Rather than just thinking about your surroundings in terms of color or form, I really thought about what they’re made of. I was always fascinated about what things are actually made of. And that, I think, material science is probably the best way of investigating that, so that’s how I ended up there. But I must admit, it’s a little murky after 30 years.
Nancy: Can you just share a little bit about how you got started? And, a little bit about your background in material science?
Dr. Dent: Sure, yeah. I trained as a material scientist, there is a degree in that. I took an undergraduate and PhD in material science. It’s definitely the unloved step-child of the engineering degrees. If you think about chemical engineering, civil, mechanical, those types, they have an awful lot of following, there’s an awful lot of people doing them. Material science, a lot of people don’t even know it exists. It’s definitely a smaller discipline, it is an engineering discipline, and it resulted in me doing a PhD and then working for a number of different organizations. Doing a little bit of teaching, out at universities, just under the area of material science. I did love that, it allowed me to get my hands on an awful lot of innovative and interesting new materials. So that, for me, was great. The challenge I had was that I realized I wasn’t necessarily very good at the science part, I wasn’t very good at the teaching and the research, and I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to do something a little bit more of a challenge. I started casting around for things I could do with this material science degree.
Nancy: It sounds like you probably like more of the human side of it as well, collaborating. What drew you to Material ConneXion?
Dr. Dent: I think it was this result of not being quite satisfied. Loving the materials, but not necessarily liking the way in which I was doing work. I think you’re right, it was the human interaction I was missing. I was actually at a friend’s house and on his coffee table, there was a flyer for Material ConneXion. I looked at it, I thought okay, I want to work there. It satisfied that need not just to know about the physical world and know about materials, but also to interact with a different type of person. The then owner of Material ConneXion, George Beylerian, I called him up. I said, “I want to work with you, I think I can do some real good work for you.” He said, “No, we’re not interested. We don’t have any open positions.” Okay, fair enough. So then I called him up again, probably about two or three weeks later. I said, “No really, just allow me to come and see you. I’ll convince you that you need to have someone like me on your staff.” He eventually relented, I ended up sitting down with him at the Steelcase Restaurant, just near Columbus Circle, this is around year 2000. We just started chatting, and I think I finally managed to convince him. He said, “Okay, come and work with us.” It took a little bit of effort, because I think they weren’t really expecting someone like me. The majority of the people who had been working there previously tended to be in the design field, they weren’t necessarily looking for a PhD material scientist. But, I think my hope is that I actually provided some value and actually expanded their understanding of what materials could be.
Nancy: What actually is your role at Material ConneXion? What do you do?
Dr. Dent: Well, I’ve had a number of different roles. At the moment, I’m executive vice president in charge of material research. Because I’ve been there so long, two decades, my role has shifted. I have a very talented colleague, Gayatri Keskar, who oversees the consulting department, the area of Material ConneXion where we actually deal with directly consulting work with our clients. I tend to work on our mentoring and overarching role, where I review all the materials that come into our Material ConneXion library, I assess all of the work that’s going out for our consulting projects, I interact with our licensees. It’s more a mentoring and overseeing role. I do a lot of consulting, too, and obviously do a lot of presentations. We’re about to do a presentation in Turkey, for a design conference. So I do those sorts of things as well, but the majority now is just making sure that the direction of our materials innovation and our work is going down the right path.
Nancy: Yeah, it’s a big job. Particularly, I would think, during the pandemic where people may not have been able to come into the library. You have libraries not only in New York, it’s international?
Dr. Dent: We have a number of libraries around the world, in Europe, in Asia. Yes.
Nancy: How have you executed business during the pandemic?
Dr. Dent: I was surprised and pleased. The work we have been doing hasn’t really suffered at all, in the delivery of work to our clients. We had a very good year in 2020, which I feel bad saying that sometimes because a lot of people didn’t have a good year. But, we’ve actually managed to adapt relatively well. Yes of course, I would love to have more clients come into the physical library. And, we are still open for appointments, so we will actually have people in. But of course, it’s socially distanced, we can only limit the number of people, so we still can do that on a limited basis. But, what we’ve managed to do is, through just very efficient shipping and delivery of samples, we’re able work, a lot of it’s on Zoom calls. We delivery an awful lot of virtual presentations. We’re doing fewer workshops, because the workshops, they benefit from that one-to-one, hands on interaction with the materials with a whole group of people, so fewer workshops. But, we’ve transitioned a little bit and we’re doing more direct consulting where clients come to us for a particular need and we can deliver that through Zoom presentations, we can send samples. We’ve had examples where we’ve had a company, or a client, that has two or three locations, so you send samples to those three different locations so everyone’s looking at the same material at the same time. You’re not in-person, but it’s as close to. I think we’ve managed to adapt, and as a result we’re doing well. I’m excited about the future.
Nancy: Yeah, that’s great. I know we’ve all had to adapt in different ways. But, having been to the library a few times, and had clients who’ve submitted products. I don’t know if you still have the box? But, you shipped things out, you’ve done this before. Or, I should say Material ConneXion has done this before, that method. I’ve found, in speaking with designers and material developers that they’ve found quite a bit of creativity during the pandemic, during this time. Have you seen some new exciting materials pop up in this year?
Dr. Dent: I’m a great believer that adversity can generate just incredible bursts of creativity. I think given an unlimited budget can be often the death knell for real creativity. If you think about music in the ’70s and ’80s in the UK, you turned on an awful lot of great music as a result of the economic climate not being that good. I think adversity has its advantages. I think yes, the pandemic has forced people to perhaps adapt and think differently. We’ve had, actually, a surprising number of people who’ve come to us, who over the last perhaps three to five years, had in their head an idea about what they wanted to create, whether it’s a product or a material. I thought okay, when I’m sitting at home with not an awful lot of stuff to do, it’s something that bubbled up again. And they thought, “How do I then bring this material or this product out into the world?” We’ve had an awful lot of clients who are just individuals who have a patent on a particular material or technology and said, “Okay, I want to see if I can now develop this.” So, it’s actually been quite an exciting year in terms of just individuals just trying to new materials and new challenges to the market. I think, with clients as well, again, the adversity is what’s helped us somewhat in that, as some companies have reduced the workforce, typically the first area to go tends to be R&D, research and development, because it’s not a must have it’s a nice to have. For some companies, they have it because it allows them to generate new product, but a lot of companies, they see that as an expendable part. So once they do bring that down in size, we can then fill that gap. Again, we’ve adapted to make sure that we can fill in the role of research and development for some of the smaller corporations.
Nancy: Wow, that’s great. I understand that sustainability is a big part of probably your personal and your professional philosophy. Sustainability means so much to different people. I’m just curious what sustainability means to you.
Dr. Dent: Okay. If we look back 10 years, from let’s say 2010 towards 2015, you had a change in the way that people approached product development and new product creation. They were always aware of sustainability, but it was one of those things they kept on saying, “Well, we can’t really afford it. We’ll do it next year. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not really part of what we want to do.” And then, over those few years, it transitioned through to, “Okay, sustainability needs to be part of the pillars of what we use in order to create product.” So price, performance, aesthetics, and the fourth one became sustainability, so it became we need to include this. What you have is you’d have a sustainability group, or a department that would think about the way material, a product could be sustainable. But, in the last probably three to five years, very much so perhaps in the last two to three years, we’ve now seen sustainability become front-and-center. Now, it becomes a leader in that group. For the most part, you’ve got incremental improvements in you’re trying to reduce the cost of your product, you’re trying to improve the aesthetics, and then performance, those tend to be incremental. Now, they’re actually considering sustainability as a way of completely changing the product itself. Changing the material entirely, changing the design entirely, in order to adapt to sustainability. I think sustainability has gone from non-existent, to okay, we are aware of it,  to it’s important to have that as part of our portfolio, to it’s the main thing we’re now thinking about when we’re designing a new product. I think that’s interesting to note, over the last 10 years. For us, although we are very much within the design field, in fashion, and architecture, and automotive, and all those different design industries, we’re very much interested and driven by data, numbers. Now, it isn’t always the most interesting thing for designers to know about numbers, but what we tend to do with sustainability is we tend to separate it out into quantifiable attributes. Because sustainability is a very large term, we can talk about eco or green, but they’re just words. What we do, though, is we separate them out. Rather than is a material sustainable, we think about okay, does it have recycled content? How much? Is it post-industrial, IE straight out of the waste generated in the factory, or is it post-consumer, the stuff you put out on the curb when you recycle? Does it contain bio content, stuff that’s renewable? How much water does it use, is it reducing the amount of water it needs? What’s the carbon footprint? If we can separate it out into these specific attributes, so rather than saying is something green or not, is something sustainable, you can say okay, this material or this product has just reduced its water usage in production by 50%. That’s a number, to me, that makes an awful lot of sense and it allows you to quantify your improvements to sustainability. So rather than thinking about it as a general term, decide which aspects are important to you. We do this a lot with clients. What’s your North Star? What is the main aspect of sustainability you want to attack, because you can’t deal with it all. I take Levis as an example. Now Levis, their biggest challenge was water. You make a pair of Levis jeans, and the amount of water, the thousands of gallons that are used, in order to grow the cotton, produce the product, then dye the product. And then, often after that, stone wash or other treatment somehow affect it. So, throughout the entire cycle, using a large amount of water. Water was their North Star, reducing the amount of water they used. Maybe they weren’t getting into the most sustainable aspect of other areas, but for them water was the main thing they needed to tackle because that was the thing they could most affect. If you’re ever producing a garment or product, or something you’re designing, what’s the most important sustainability aspect? Because if you try and attack all at the same time, you’re never going to do it, you’re just never going to succeed. Think about your North Star, think about what that is, and then attack that. But also, think about how you can do that quantifiably. Rather than just saying, “We’ve now got a green product,” what is the specific attribute, what’s the specific thing you can state to your customers that you’ve reduced or improved.
Nancy: That’s so well put, because my clients are a material brands and they sometimes feel as though they have to do everything, bio, pre-consumer, post-consumer, just as you were talking about. Sometimes it’s driven by brands, sometimes it’s driven by consumer. I think what everyone’s trying to do is to do their best. I also understand that you have some interesting ideas on how waste can be used to make sustainable products.
Dr. Dent: I do love waste. It is possibly one of my favorite topics, just because I wish we’d remove the word waste. I’ve talked about this in the past. Nature has zero waste, because everything that is deposited by some animal or plant is then taken up by another animal or plant, so it goes in a complete cycle. No matter how many billion or trillion ants there are, and the amount of animal mess they have, they still have zero effect on the overall environment because basically, anything they do is then recycled back into the system. For me, waste, we need to follow that and try to think about any of the waste produced in the mining, in the production, in the use and also the end of life of anything that we use. Waste is the wrong word, it’s just another resource. I think we’ve got a lot better at accepting recycled content. It was an interesting thing when we started to see recycled content plastics in our food storage containers or in our drinking containers. Previously consumers would have said, “Well, I’m not putting recycled material in that, that’s dirty.” I think we now have an understanding. We’ve seen products from cow waste, we’ve seen products from old mattresses, we’ve seen even chewing gum is being used, and that’s a greater understanding that we can clean and repurpose these materials, and it’s a resource, because we know that the planet as a finite amount of resources. Until we can start mining Mars, which I think is still a long way away, we need to accept that we’ve only got one planet so let’s use those resources. For me, I think of landfills and I think of just a goldmine of potential materials you could use. I think we’re getting better at using waste, we’re making sure that it’s cleaner, we’re making sure that it’s more readily available. I think if you’re producing anything, find out where in your current production processes you can utilize your waste, and a lot of them are making it efficient. But also, how do you collaborate with other companies whose existing waste could be a valuable resource for you? I think if we’re going to survive and do well, we need to understand that it’s not going to be alone. Any company that’s trying to do everything alone, I think, is going to be challenged. You’re going to need to reach out. I was fascinated by … Colgate came out with the first recyclable toothpaste tube, and they’ve been working for 10 years on this recyclable plastic material for toothpaste. It was a specific type of combination of different plastics. But, it is easily recyclable. They said, “Okay, we think this innovation’s so interesting, we’re going to offer it to other toothpaste manufacturers because we understand that, if we develop something so valuable, potentially things that wasn’t recyclable before but now is recyclable, we can’t keep it to ourselves. We’ve got to offer it to others.” That level of collaboration, I think, is going to be essentially going forward because we can’t be in this alone. If we’re assuming that we have to basically just do it by ourselves, we’re losing out on potential resources from others, and also selling some of our waste materials to other companies as well.
Nancy: Yeah, that’s so fascinating. You mentioned something that, when I heard on the radio this morning about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine actually collaborating with its competitor, Merck, to get more out. That is just another competitor’s having to collaborate for the greater good.
Dr. Dent: I think we need to treat sustainability like we treated the pandemic. It was amazing. The ability to move huge resources, and to ensure that you had a number of different organizations working on a vaccine, that ability, you need to have that same sort of emphasis and drive for sustainability. The challenge we have with sustainability is that it’s not immediate. Sustainability works when we concern ourselves with our own health and our family’s health. It’s amazing how a young mother or a young father will spend an awful lot more money and will care an awful lot more about the materials used in anything that’s going onto or into their child, but that’s immediate and it’s also close to home. Sustainability has the challenge that it tends to be a little bit further away. We’re starting to see it more, the Texas cold snap was a good example. But, it’s never as immediate as, say, something like the pandemic. Pandemic we know we’re saving lives. Sustainability, we’re also saving lives it’s just not the ones that we’re directly related to right now. That’s the challenge it has, is that we don’t feel that sense of urgency that we have for the pandemic. I wish we could change that mindset and really understand the urgency at which we need to start making these changes, in order to make sure that our future generations can survive well on this planet.
Nancy: Well, little by little. You spreading the word certainly helps. Just to talk a little bit more about you and your interests: where do you draw your inspiration from, Dr. Dent?
Dr. Dent: It’s interesting. I’ve mentioned about not wanting to be in science anymore, and what I realized … It took me a little time to realize, but I get inspired by designers and creativity in a way that, if I work with a bunch of engineers, I’m on a relatively even keel in terms of energy. Sometimes, it goes down. If I work with designers, their creative energy and their child-like appreciation of the world, I draw from that energy. I love interacting with creators, because I think I can provide knowledge, I can provide understandable delivery of information that they’ll find useful, and that interaction for me is really what gets me up in the morning. It’s the human interaction, being able to help designers and creators move forward in their desire and their ability to produce things. That, for me, is a very, very human aspect to what drives me.
Nancy: Yeah, and you probably make it very easy for them to understand, too, I sense that you could solve a problem.
Dr. Dent: Yes. The whole point of Material ConneXion was to take a bunch of really technical science and make it palatable, make it understandable, because designers don’t work in numbers, they don’t work in tables and graphs. They work in more emotional responses, and what you can see, and feel, and touch, and how you respond to a material or product. What we need to do is to transfer the data points that we get from the engineers and the scientists, and then relate those to a way in which a material can be appreciated. That has been our job. Because you can get a whole bunch of data and information on the web, there’s no limit to basic data points and information from the web. But as a designer, where do you go? If you search for the word textile in Google, I’m sure you’ll end up with billions of results. Which one do you use? If you search polyester, then now you’ve got perhaps 300 million results. If you’re going to [inaudible 00:23:41] and they only want recycled content, but then which one do you choose? What’s the reason for choosing that? And how does it feel? How do you respond to that? I think that’s where we have value. So I think that’s what Material ConneXion’s always been able to do, is to take the science, make it palatable. Although we do have material scientists on our staff, we’re very careful to make sure that we don’t do science speak because it can be its own jargon, and very hard to understand. And also, I don’t want anyone talking down to people who don’t necessarily have an intimate knowledge of material, so we deal with all types. We deal with material specialists on design teams, we also deal with people who have very limited knowledge. We should be able to connect with and explain to all, so I think that’s the value we have.
Nancy: I think the people who are designers and creatives have, as you mentioned, they love to touch and feel. It has to perform, it has to do the job, but it also has to have an emotional connection somehow with them.
Dr. Dent: A good example was the E-textiles, the E-textiles market, where you started to have electronic textiles within fashion. It was interesting to see the first few conferences that we would go to, where what you had is a bunch of engineers on one side, and they created these wonderful touch sensitive, or conductive, or battery-powered flexible circuits. And then, what would happen is they would present these, and you have a bunch of creatives, and fashion houses, or brands would come up and say, “Okay, that’s great. How do I sew it into a garment?” Or, “How does it feel when I wear it?” Or, “Can I wash it?” The engineers hadn’t even thought about this. There was this disconnect between the engineers who had this great new technology, and it was exciting, but then they hadn’t thought about what’s the human response to that. As a human, I want it to feel nice, I want it to look good, I want it to do the function that you’ve made for it, but I also want it to do other things as well. I need to make sure I can wash it. And also, for the brands themselves, how do you sew it into a garment? Because let’s not forget, fashion is an industry that still works on a process that is a couple of thousand years old, which is to weave a yarn and then sew it. It’s not high tech, for the most part. It’s always interesting, that potential disconnect. We were talking to the engineers and putting the questions to them before they started presenting, or before they started talking to brands. Okay, the brands going to ask you how do I sew it in. If I do charge it, I don’t to have to put a battery in it overnight, I want to find a simpler way because we’re used to having our clothes reflect our own personal taste and style. But also, be relatively easy, I don’t want to have to think about charging my shirt overnight. I want to put it on when I feel good and wear it, and that’d be great. I think it’s that disconnect that we try and make sure that there’s a much more clear connection between.
Nancy: Ah, that’s a great example. What are some of your favorite materials? It’s a big question, I know. It’s like who is your favorite child.
Dr. Dent: Yes, with access to the 10,000 different materials we have in our library, I have … I think, if we talk about classes of materials, I’m excited by materials that offer a renewable option to what we have already, that can be industrialized, and that do not impact significantly existing ecosystems. I know that’s a complicated thing. When we think about cotton as a material, love it, it’s incredible. I’m wearing it right now, I’ve got cotton almost everything. It’s a great material. But the challenge is, it’s a monoculture, it’s also very water intensive. It would be good to have alternatives that we can offer so it’s not just 100% cotton. Cotton’s going to be there, it’s a staple fiber. And also, it’s got an industrialized resource as well. One of the challenges we have with any new material … If you’re trying to go up against cotton, you’re trying to compete with cotton, you could have incredible material that has the same sort of absorbency, same sort of performance, but if you can’t produce it at the volumes that cotton can be produced, then no brand is going to bring out a decent size collection in it because they can’t guarantee that there’s a reliable crop for next year. I’m always interested in materials that can go up against the mainstays, the plastics, the cottons, the materials we’ve been using for the past 50 years, but do it in a way that does not affect an ecosystem. Let’s take hemp. Hemp fibers are now coming up, and they have a good potential. They don’t require an awful lot of irrigation. They have the ability, because there’s also other resources for them, there’s a potential for them to be used in an industrialized way. And, they can get an awful lot of the properties that cotton has. Now, is it going to take over cotton? Not at all. But, it has the ability to then compete in the same way that cotton does. Same thing with some synthetics. When we think about plastics, if you’re going to have a bioplastic, or if a plastic comes from renewable resources, whether it’s corn or sugar, or whatever else it is, you’d better make sure that you can get the sorts of volumes that companies need in order to produce from plastic. If you’ve got this wonderful new plastic that comes from, let’s say, a small plant that’s available in Ethiopia, or let’s say it’s in some small area of Belgium, that’s a challenge because plastics companies need larger volumes. We use it in hundreds of thousands of tons. I’m always excited by materials where the suppliers already thought about that. If we think of, in terms of the bioplastics, I love the idea of seaweed. Seaweed and algae is great because you can industrialize that production. I love the idea of using bioplastics from, let’s say, castor oil. Castor oil is already produce in an industrialized way, they produce it all over the world, so there’s an awful lot of resource for that. They know how to produce it in large volumes, it’s reliable. Castor beans is a great resource as well. We’re always looking for those types of resources. If you are going to use renewable materials, best to find something that does offer viability. We have companies that come in with all sorts of amazing new materials, but unless you really can produce it in high volume, then it’s going to be a challenge. If it requires that you use plants or renewables that are off of food, that’s also a challenge. When the first commercially successful bioplastics from corn, the challenge was you’re using corn. Corn could be used as a food so the challenge is, well do we really want to be producing a whole bunch of plastic out of food? Well, we have people who are resource scarce when it comes to food, so we’ve got to be careful with that sort of thing. You don’t necessarily want to make something really popular, in the same way that let’s say McDonald’s started selling apples and it became a real burden on the ability to produce apples out there in the world because they wanted so much. Same with plastics. Because we use so many plastics, if you suddenly have all plastics trying to be made out of corn, you’re going to deplete corn resources and therefore not have enough for humans to eat. I’m always interested in new materials that have thought through that. That have the potential to be industrialized, large volume, can compete on the same playing field as existing materials because we do need that diversity or resource. We can’t just use plastics from petroleum, we can’t just use cotton, we need alternatives because if we then suddenly have a problem with a blight in cotton or that sort of thing, then you cause huge spikes in the market and challenges. I think it’s diversity and understanding that if you want to produce something, make sure you can do it in high volume.
Nancy: But, it’s also such an opportunity, sustainability has brought so much more innovation into material. I’m wondering, I know some college students have been listening to this podcast, and loving materials, I think that it would be a wonderful field to get into. What do you see? Do you see there is a great future in material science?
Dr. Dent: Yeah sure, because let’s be honest, unless we all decided to … it’s possible, because of the pandemic. If we all decide to live just in a little pod in our living room and your entire world’s digitally online, unless that happens, we need materials. We need innovation in materials because that’s what our physical world is made out of. My hope is that we will start to see a combination and collaboration between human made and then biologically made materials. But still, if you look around, if you basically look up from your computer and look around your room, every single one of those is a material. We’re never going to not need material, so there’s always an opportunity there. Material science deals very much in engineering materials, so it deals with engineering plastics, it deals with metals and ceramics. Material ConneXion had to broaden that, because of course also within materials you have textiles. In material science, we never really deal with textiles, only in the world of composites. There is a much broader range of potential within materials than just, say, basic material science. I’m always fascinated by textiles, just because it’s such a … You’ve got an entire discipline, an entire department, that’s based upon just one type of construction which is the woven or knit, just that flexible material. It’s such a fascinating and very involved material. We all wear it every day, it covers an awful lot of the surfaces we interact with. I think material science is good, and certainly that will move you towards perhaps more of the engineering field. A lot of our people who work for us who are material scientists, we have to get them to relearn materials because their basic knowledge in engineering materials is good, but we also need to broaden it out into what about architectural materials, natural materials, woods and natural fibers, textiles, all these different fields which material science doesn’t necessarily cover. But yes, it’s broader than just material science but there’s never not going to be a need for innovation in this area.
Nancy: Great. Oh, I’m so inspired by you, this has been great. And also, your energy and enthusiasm. Thank you so much, I hope I get the chance to meet you in person when I get to New York, or when I can come to New York and visit the library again.
Dr. Dent: If you come over, just email, text me, I will give you a tour. We can connect.
Nancy: Thank you for listening to Material Wise. I’d like to thank the incredibly talented Woods Creative for their help in producing this podcast. Jake Nevrla mixes our episodes and composes our theme music. For more information and transcripts of each episode, please visit materialwise.co. And please subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again and until next time, take care.

Links to organizations mentioned in podcast:

Episode 17: Ruth Kelly | SAACHS

Ruth Kelly on finding her path to SSACHS and making change in the active apparel industry.

Ruth Kelly is the head of materials and materials editor of SSACHS, a design agency for performance and active lifestyle apparel, which also publishes a digital magazine under the same name. We had a fun conversation discussing her journey of leaving her corporate life to join SSACHS with her partners. As a creative fabric expert, thought leader, and educator, Ruth shares insights as to how she approaches material development, what makes a good material partner, how the pandemic has influenced design trends and sustainability, along with the necessary digital marketing tools that are needed to help connect suppliers, mills, and brands. You’ll also discover the meaning behind the name SSACHS!

Portrait of Ruth Kelly, of SAACHS
Ruth Kelly, Performance Materials Expert | Entrepreneur | Editor | Fabric Developer & Innovator

Ruth’s Interview Transcript

Nancy: Hello, I’m Nancy Fendler, and you’re listening to Material Wise, your podcast on material matters. It’s my chance to talk to designers, product developers and other guests about what inspires them to create. Why and how they select the materials they choose, and the relationships they’ve built with their customers and industry. My guest today is Ruth Kelly, head of materials and materials editor of SSACHS, a design agency for performance and active lifestyle apparel, which also, creatively enough, publishes a digital magazine under the same name. Passionate about performance materials, Ruth is a creative fabric expert, thought leader, and educator. She has successfully led raw materials teams in the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka – and across the supply chain from performance brands such as lululemon, where she worked for seven years as materials director, to manufacturers. Ruth combines her network of connections with practical in-depth knowledge of the fabric development, sourcing, validation, and production process to make ideas come alive. I spoke with Ruth from her home office in Vancouver, BC. We had a fun conversation discussing a range of topics from how she left her corporate job to join SSACHS with her partners to how she approaches materials development. We also chat about what makes a good material partner, how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced design trends, along with the necessary digital marketing tools that are needed to help connect suppliers, mills, and brands.

In case you’re wondering where the name SSACHS came from, it’s actually a derivative of the Trossachs area in Scotland, where the SSACHS founders have close ties. As the Trossachs is a wonderful outdoor area loved by cyclists, hikers, and runners alike, it’s a great name for a sportswear and active lifestyle design company. I hope you enjoy the episode. Nancy: Ruth, thanks so much for being on Material Wise. I’ve heard so much about you and glad to finally chat.
Ruth: Well, thank you so much for having me, Nancy. I’m really excited to have a chat and share some of my thoughts and stories.
Nancy: Yeah. Wonderful. I’ve done a bit of research on SSACHS. Am I pronouncing it correctly?
Ruth: Yes, you are. Yes.
Nancy: Okay, SSACHS. Can you tell me how you got involved? It’s such an interesting business with the design and the magazine.
Ruth: Yeah. Well, it’s been an extremely exciting journey. We’re just at the beginning of that journey still. How I got involved with my two business partners, Diane and Soudi, who are both in the UK, although we’re all British, it was actually the powers of LinkedIn and connection and networking that got us together, because a bit like yourself, Nancy, we’d all been existing in parallel worlds throughout our careers, having worked in sportswear, in big corporations, the big brands. Diane reached out to me on LinkedIn and was like, “Hey, Ruth, really interested in what you’re doing. I’ve got a magazine. Would you like to be interviewed?” Of course, as a new consultant in this world, it’s always nice to have someone who wants to interview you. It comes across a lot more authentic from a PR marketing point of view. So, I jumped on a call with Diane and, law of attraction, we just hit it off so well that it morphed into an amazing conversation. I wanted to say an interview, but it wasn’t an interview or a job application, it was just a really cool conversation. We realized we had so much in common that I actually came off that call being invited to join the team and head up the materials section of the magazine. So yeah, it was just having this lovely feeling of, oh, these are a great bunch of people they’ve got, they’re trying to do exactly what I’m trying to do, and isn’t it so much better to be part of a network and part of a team rather than trying to do everything by yourself?
Nancy: Absolutely. It just brings me back to, maybe we’ll come back to this, but one of the articles that you wrote for the magazine on collaboration and how important it is and how you can often do so much bigger things with it, and even though you have different strengths, but when you bring it together, it’s really powerful.
Ruth: Yeah. I always try and go back to the teachings of Richard Branson, because he always talks about that not one person can do everything and be super strong in everything. So that’s one thing I’ve learned is to be aware of what your strengths are, and also be aware of maybe where you’re not so good or you don’t enjoy things, and having that confidence to be able to let other people take the leads who are amazing at that, and then that’s where it’s so much better as a team.
Nancy: Absolutely. Was there a kind of a defining moment where the three of you… I mean, you had this call on LinkedIn, but I know you had worked with some very big brands in the past. Were you head of materials with some of these brands? Was there a time where you just said, “Okay, I’ve had it, and I want to do something on my own?”
Ruth: Yeah. Well, I wasn’t head of materials, but I was a director for lululemon. You know, like any big brand there is especially, I think, as well, when you work for a publicly traded company, there’s obviously another set of responsibilities and pressure to keep, quite rightly, well, you could argue about that, but that’s another podcast, but there is this pressure, anyway, to provide newness and more, more, more profits. Having been working like that for seven years, it’s exhausting. It’s super fun, but there is an element of what I call a hamster wheel. Oh, here we go again. Here’s another season. And those seasons seem to be getting shorter and shorter and you’ll feel like yourself and your team have pulled out a miracle or done something really amazing, but it’s never good enough. It’s always like, what’s next, what’s next. So maybe that’s the cynic in me, being in the industry a little bit more, but I think coming into the twilight of my career, shall we say, not at the beginning, you start to look at things differently. So, it’s, okay, what can I actually do for myself to really create the life I love? It was a big thing for me having to break those shackles of the monthly salary. So, being able to step out of that and, okay, how can I create financial stability for my family in a different way, in an entrepreneurial way? That is super scary, that is, and it’s taken me many years to get the courage to try and do that, but I found it’s extremely freeing when you do. You know, you kind of now think of, “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” Right? But it’s been in that mindset of, “Oh, I always need to work for someone else. I need to get that salary to come in,” especially when we’ve all got responsibilities, et cetera. So, yeah, I think that was part of the drive, and the drive to also try to make a change in the industry. You know, we can all sit and complain about, oh, I don’t like the fact that there’s all this pressure, or that things aren’t sustainable, or that I don’t feel I have a life, or I’m not producing great products. We can all get in complaints, but for me, it’s also, how do you be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? So also stepping outside of that enables you to have different conversations because you don’t have to put that on that layer of working for a company and have to apply their filter to everything.
Nancy: Absolutely. It’s very frightening, I know, but so rewarding. I have a feeling it will be interesting to see when we come out of the pandemic what will transpire with company work, what people do. I think a lot of innovation, or I hope lot of innovation, comes out of this situation, not just in product ways, but just personal ways as well. I listen to podcasts a lot, and yesterday on my walk I was listening to Brene Brown and Daring Greatly. I’m just like, “Oh yeah, that’s why I did this.” I know it’s scary, but.
Ruth: Awesome. I mean, I was fortunate enough to see her speak. She was one of the keynote speakers at the lululemon Leadership Conference and she is amazing. She’s so much fun, as well. I think she was a little bit scared that she was coming to lululemon and that people were going to be, you know. Then, this was quite a few years ago, so early on in her public speaking career, so I guess she’s had her some experiences where maybe she tried to be a little bit goofy and people didn’t kind of get it. But of course, the lululemon team was totally into it and she had the whole room up dancing. Yeah, she’s awesome.
Nancy: Oh, she’s funny. Maybe we can get a little bit more into materials now. So how do you think materials influence design?
Ruth: Great question, Nancy. Yeah, this is something where it’s, to me, it’s a symbiotic relationship. I talk a lot about, with designers, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, and it can be both, right? So often it’s that influence of you pick something, you pick this material up, you have this tactile, it’s visual, experience. As a designer, you can get excited, you can start to visualize how that can transpire, how that can be used in a design and how it can create something that is going to, especially in sportswear, provide a soul and a function, and, okay, it might sound a little bit pompous, but actually enrich someone’s life by making them feel good, by making them not have to worry that they’re going to get caught out in the rain when they’re on a run. So, yes, you can pick up fabrics and have that very visceral relationship with them and that can spark the design process. But then equally, there’s also the other way to look at things, the other side of the coin, where as a designer you might have an idea of something that you want to create and you can’t actually find the exact thing either visually or aesthetically that you want, or performance wise, that you need. That’s super fun as well, being able to work with a designer and help draw out their ideas, especially as they’re the experts, maybe, in apparel design, and you’re the expert in developing the fabrics and being able to do that. I’ve also worked on other aspects where when I was at lululemon I did, a few years ago, a reflective embroidery collection. I was really interested in how that whole design and development played off each other. So, the whole project came to light because we were trying to innovate in the area of reflectivity. So, when you’re out on a run, especially in the fall in the Northern hemisphere, you want to be able to feel safe, and with reflectivity, it’s very technical, there’s a lot of limitations as to what you can do. I had this idea, it was two o’clock in the morning, using my background from the intimate apparel world, I thought, ooh, what about taking this new reflective yarn that’s very difficult to knit or weave because it’s super stiff and applying that to an embroidery technique which is not normally used in sportswear. I kind of thought, hmm, I knew I couldn’t go to the design team and explain this because they kind of wouldn’t get it. They needed to see something. I could see it in my mind, but I knew they needed something to actually see. So, as a side of desk project, went along and persuaded a company that I noticed was an embroidery company. “Oh, hey, if I can get you some yarn, would you just be interested in just doing me a little sample?” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, sure. No problem.” So did that. Then when I showed it to our creative director, he was like, “Yeah, just go for it, Ruth, that’s awesome. Just go for it.” Then it was the question of working with the design team to be like, okay, this is the potential, how can we actually engineer what we need to make the best use of this technology? So sometimes you also get into that realm where they are both influencing each other, and so that you’re doing the development of the material at the same time as the development of the garment. So that was super interesting to be able to make these adjustments on the fly as we fit the garment. Oh, we need that embroidery to go a little bit more up there. Let’s alter, let’s tweak, that design. So that’s super cool as well.
Nancy: Yeah. It’s symbiotic how you work together, and you really need both so one can feed off the other. What do you think is important to you when you create a fabric? Obviously, the yarn, what the fabric has to do, but do you just have like these brainstorms that maybe come from design or just like, “Oh, I have got to have an invention here?”
Ruth: Yeah, it’s a bit of everything. You know, for me, it’s like lots of different plates that you’re spinning at the same time. So, you have to have a real appreciation and a desire to produce something that’s aesthetically beautiful or handsome, or whatever that can be. That’s really important because you could be an amazing technical person but create something that just doesn’t look or feel great and nobody’s going to want to wear it. It doesn’t matter how great it is technically, especially when you’re putting something next to skin. Then the other thing is, being a bit of a geek as well, a bit of a technical nerd, as you said, it’s about getting into that detail of the fibers, the yarn, the number of filaments that’s in there, the construction, the finishing, the amount of stretch, all these different parts of the recipe. It’s a bit like baking a cake that you’re playing around with, and it’s fascinating how they all inter-react to the good or detriment of the overall finish. A third element is also the commercial aspect that you need to ask, is this a commercial product? What does that mean? How can I get that into mass production? Then, of course, don’t forget sustainability as well. So that’s a very important new fourth place that we need to keep in there. Am I producing something that is going to be sustainable? I mean, that’s a whole other debate, but at least am I producing something that is going to be part of someone’s closet for a while. It’s going to be durable. It’s going to be something that they’re going to treasure. That’s really important to me as well.
Nancy: Speaking of sustainability, it means so many different things to so many different people. What does sustainability mean to you?
Ruth: Well, I think the first important thing to think about is from a design point of view. Because we can talk about circularity of design, we can talk about recycling, et cetera, et cetera, but as I said earlier, it has to be sustainable in terms of it has to be something that we all produced and that it’s going to be treasured and loved. Because if you think about circular design, or end of life, you’re talking about you’ve already built in this obsolescence into the garment. You’re already thinking about end of life. But what if something was so treasured, such good quality, that it isn’t wearing a way, but also it isn’t becoming obsolete because it’s no longer in fashion or it’s no longer considered aesthetic? I don’t know, maybe I’m an idealist, but I think the more that we can do to that, that is going to be huge, and we definitely need to look at our level of consumerism. So, I think, yes, everything else is part of the solution. Recycling, biodegradable, waterless dying, using renewable energies in factories, like all of these are super, super important, and we also need to look at the amount that we consume and the amount that we produce. So, for me, it’s about producing better and producing less. That doesn’t necessarily go with a consumerist or a capitalist culture, so again, we’ve got this…right?
Nancy: Yes. No, and I’m hearing that from other guests on the podcast. I think that’s a fabulous trend. We all have too much stuff and if we can buy better and wear longer, that would be better. But you’re right, consumerism. When you’re designing all these different seasons, you have to keep coming up with something else and something more and something more. So, it will be interesting to see what happens. How do you think the supply chain has been helping brands with their sustainable efforts?
Ruth: I think that’s a really good question. I think there’s good and bad. I wouldn’t even say bad, it’s just really hard. You know, it’s hard for us all to figure out and to really tell the authentic stories. People, quite rightly, are cynical about, “Oh, it’s just greenwash. Oh, here we go again. “If I look at the mill, say, and they do a better job than others at telling the stories. It can be confusing because sometimes their salespeople aren’t always maybe the best technical and don’t know the story themselves. One thing I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Nancy, that can be super confusing is even something as simple as the recycled yarn. The fiber supplier manufacturer might have yarn beyond the plant and might give it their own brand name, and then the mill wants to give it another brand name, and then everybody gets really confused, you know? I found out fabrics that I had been working with for years, have actually got a component of a Serona yarn, and I didn’t even know, right? So, I think we can do a lot better. I think, certainly from the mill level, people are really trying to do good and they are really trying to help the brand. You know, it’s been tough for them because when we started these conversations years ago, it was always about price and people wanted the sustainability aspect but didn’t want to pay anything extra. Now, that price difference is still there, but it’s becoming much, much smaller. It’s going to be interesting to see in terms of smaller dye batches and things like that, how we can carry on. Because there’s so much waste with minimums and lot of dead bolt stock, that type of stuff. There are some great group buying platforms that are out there now for smaller brands or people where you can actually buy our redundant stock, so that’s a good thing. But yeah, still lots to go. Of course, some great research that’s going on at the moment in different materials, looking at adjacent industries and looking at their waste and can that be used as a feed stock? So, I think, yeah, it’s a very complex journey, and we’re just at the beginning and there’s no silver bullet for any of us in this.
Nancy:  Yeah. Just trying to do the best that we can.
Ruth: Yeah, and just ask questions. I always say to people, be curious. Stay with the mill, but ask questions, be curious, be cynical, just keep asking and asking, and that’s how you learn.
Nancy: What do you think makes a good textile partner when you’re looking for materials or you’re developing materials?
Ruth: The number one thing is open and honest communication. I mean, I’m assuming here that you’ve got the technical know-how, right? That’s a big. So, I think it’s finding the right person who fits your business, okay? So, there are different suppliers that will work with different brands or different manufacturers, so it’s understanding their business model and seeing if it fits in with yours. If they are geared to produce big runs and that’s what you’re looking for, awesome. If you want somebody who’s smaller and flexible, great. You always have to do your research to understand what their business model is, but also what they’re specialist in. Because a lot of mills, and I’m just talking about fabric mills here, specifically, but it goes the same for any textile partner, be it when you’re going further upstream looking at fiber or day stock chemical partners, is understanding what they’re best in the world at, right? Because they might have a wide portfolio, but they’re really good at this, okay? Maybe that’s what you want to focus in on. But as I said earlier, it’s that open, honest communication that is huge. It just makes life so much easier. It’s also obviously up to yourself to be super clear on your expectations so that when it goes wrong, it’s often, as it always is in human life, about different levels of expectation and people not being clear on either side. Which when we’re dealing with different cultures, different time zones, that can be super difficult. Especially when you are at the beginning of a relationship with somebody it’s a bit like dating and it takes a while to get to know each other, but then hopefully after a while, you’re in a situation where you can be truly honest. Even when you’re having to deliver bad news, which happens all the time, the partner feels that they can do that and it’s also going to be okay. It might not be the news that you want to hear, but they feel that they can actually explain the situation and give possible solutions and that you can work together to solve that. Right? So, I think another thing that really good textile partners do is they do their research. They really understand their customer’s business and they’ve done their research. I’ve, throughout my career, sat through and, oh gosh, I don’t even want to think about how many times I’ve sat through it must be thousands of presentations and people sharing their range and you just know that they haven’t even looked at the store, they haven’t looked at the product. They’re just trying to hit all bases. I get that. I get that there’s also the stuff in the store that was maybe things that were developed two, three years ago. They don’t necessarily know what’s in the pipeline or where businesses is changing. But really good ones do help the brands, help the retailers, make that connection of, oh, this is how I can use this product in my collection. This is the potential.
Nancy: Right. Help come up with solutions to your problem.
Ruth: Yeah. Yeah.
Nancy: Exactly.
Ruth: So they might have this like amazing new fabric or new technology, and they’re saying to the brand, oh, we’ve been in the store, they might reference a particular garment that they’ve got, and they’re saying like, “This could be your next wild in the wind jacket.” Right? This could be, I don’t know what that is.
Nancy: It’s very good. I like it.
Ruth: I know! Wild in the wind. But yeah, they might have even made a comment or done some sketches. Again, it’s just planting that seed and helping them make that connection. Because I often say to people who are presenting to the big brands, you forget, these people that go in from meeting to meeting, they might’ve been in meetings for 90% of their day. They might not even have had a chance to go to the bathroom or eat anything. It’s hard to change gears sometimes and suddenly get into that space, you know? So, you’ve almost got to do their job for them and make it easier as to how they can see the runway. You’re laying the runway out for them.
Nancy: What textile brands and mills do you think are doing a good job with innovation right now? Am I putting you on the spot?
Ruth: Yeah. I don’t know. Obviously, we’re at a confidentiality point in time a bit, right? That’s always a difficult one. So, there’s lots I could say there, but, yeah, I’m a bit loathe. I can give a little taste of what we’re doing at SSACHS is I put a curated list of my favorite fabrics for spring and summer ’20, and we’re just in the process of getting those photographed. We took into account the ISPO color trends and things like that. So, yeah, it’s my favorite fabrics that I think I’m really excited for sportswear from in there.
Nancy: Well, we’ll have to just wait and look at the magazine or online. We’ll have all that information in the show notes, as well.
Ruth: Awesome.
Nancy: So how do you think the pandemic has influenced design trends in technology?
Ruth: Oh, massively. You know, obviously, stay at home has really influenced my field of expertise in technical sportswear. Look at fashion, right? People don’t need a nice new dress to go to a wedding, maybe, or they don’t need that prom dress, unfortunately, or whatever. So that’s a real obvious one. I think it’s accelerated and amplified what we were already seeing. We were already seeing this extension of comfort. So using all of that expertise that has been around in the world of intimate apparel, swimwear, sportswear, for many years, understanding what comfort, what movement of the body is, and the interaction between fabrics, the interaction between the body when it sweats, all of that, we’re just seeing that further being amplified in terms of if you’re nonactive. I was saying inactive. We’re always active. We’re always moving. But in terms of non-true high level sportswear, so that comfort, you know? But also, not losing anything in terms of aesthetics. So yes, back in the day, we always had our big baggy sweats or whatever that you would never be seen dead in, but there is so much more of this fusion of function and fashion and comfort now, and I just see more and more of that. It’s interesting, from what I observe the industry has become very polarized. People are either doing really well, especially if they’ve got this kind of model and if they are doing e-commerce, and then you’ve got others that are maybe struggling so much. It’s going to be really interesting. As you said earlier, the innovation has been in how people work and processes, how they are using digital tools to develop. It’s going to be an interesting journey to see how it goes on. Of course, I don’t think we’ll really know until the beginning of 2021, because a lot of the collections were all in the pipeline, so some were canceled, as we know, some were rearranged, so we won’t actually know the true fallout of what’s happening until the beginning of 2021, as well.
Nancy: Right. Right. What digital marketing techniques will remain, do you think, to help suppliers connect with mills, brands, post-pandemic?
Ruth: I think it’s been interesting. You look at the virtual trade shows, I think, that’s happened, it’s not been completely easy. There’s been limited success. I know I felt bombarded as an attendee, and a lot of the pure joy is about the networking, is about the touch and feel of the fabrics. Yes, there’s been some great talks and webinars, but again, we all start to feel bombarded from that. I’m not so sure how that’s going to carry on, I’ll be really honest. There is an amazing company down in LA called Preface who operate in the fashion space. They took a very novel approach and decided… Sorry, to back up, they’d just started to do some what they call boutique trade shows out of LA and New York. When the virus hit, they decided to have a different approach and to actually present the season, or present the show, in a box to their customers. So, they didn’t even try and do a virtual show. They didn’t even do a webinar series. They did a series of talks, of panels, of workshops if people wanted it, and they delivered in a box to their customers a pre-curated collection of fabrics, of colors, of some of the smells and things to influence over the season all with a sustainability aspect of it. I thought that was super smart and really worked for that segment. That was a different way to approach things.
Nancy: It’s almost a bespoke effort, like they were customizing.
Ruth: Absolutely, yeah.
Nancy: I wonder if that’s going to happen more.  It’ll be interesting to see. I’m hearing the same, that trade shows, I don’t think these virtual shows, as hard as organizers are trying to make them happen and I give them so much credit, they are just not quite the same. They’ve had to work so quickly to try to develop these platforms, so it must be very hard on them. Ruth: Yes. Nancy: You kind of touched on this a little bit, but where do you think performance apparel trends are heading? You know, you mentioned you think that fashion as we know it might be dead, but if you had your crystal ball, where do you think performance apparel trends are heading?
Ruth: Well, I think from everyone I speak to, whether it be men’s, women’s, whatever, comfort is still a thing. That’s not going away anytime, just more and more of it. I think there’s going to be, again, more on the sustainability side. There will be more things that are actually coming to commercialization. Again, all these amazing things that are happening – take natural dyes for example. Because they are available, right? You can do that, but how can you really ensure that you take the variability out of them? So, there are people working on that and there are people working on bio-plastics. I mean, we all know about mushroom leather and all those sorts of things. I see that there’s going to be more and more of that. I think it’s going to be interesting when we look at when people start to think about microplastics and what’s happening there. We have already seen fabrics being engineered that claim to have less microfiber shedding into the waterways. I think that’s a huge area that people will start to really see some solutions there. So, I think it’s going to be super interesting. Everybody, from what I’ve… not everybody, but a lot of people, what they are wanting to do is to have, their ideal textile would be something that has the true performance, a full performance of a polyester or a nylon. Well, actually the performance of a polyester, the handling of a nylon, and look of a natural. Right? And completely sustainable and biodegradable. So, if you could do that, you’re on the way.
Nancy: Okay, get at it, Ruth.
Ruth: Yeah, okay. Right?
Nancy: Well, I know you’re not only a material developer, you’re a writer, a yoga teacher, lecturer. I mean, I was going to ask you if you weren’t doing any of those things, what would you be doing?
Ruth: If I wasn’t in any of those things, what would I be doing? That is a great question. I think I would be either an archeologist, because I’m just a bit of a history geek. I love anything like that. Maybe, though, I don’t know if I could sit for hours and hours in the dirt. My other choice, to go from dirt to water, would be a Marine biologist.
Nancy: Interesting. Interesting.
Ruth: Yeah. Yeah. I used to teach scuba diving for many years, and I just love being in the ocean, so I think that would be the opposite.
Nancy: Oh, well, there’s still lots of years left, Ruth. So, what have you indulged in during COVID-19? Anything?
Ruth: Well, apart from the odd glass of wine and the odd chocolate, which I think we all have, what have I indulged in? I’ve indulged in my garden, my yard. That’s been awesome, just being able to spend time out there and getting a bit of fresh air. Working with the family, playing with the dog, and lots of reading. I’ve had lots of time to do lots and lots more reading, as well, which has been great.
Nancy: That’s great. Yeah. Well, it’s been difficult, but there are some silver linings for sure.
Ruth: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nancy: Well, Ruth, I can’t thank you enough. I really enjoyed our talk. We’ll put information on SSACHS on our show notes. I hope that we can meet in person sometime soon.
Ruth: I hope so, too. Thanks.
Nancy: Thanks, and have a really great vacation. Okay? Ruth: Thank you so much. You take care. Bye, now. Nancy: You, too. Bye.

Links to organizations mentioned in podcast:

  • For more information on SSACHS design agency and magazine, please visit https://www.ssachsagency.com/

Episode 16: Wayne Fan | Frontier.cool

Wayne Fan on bringing textiles to life in a digital world

Wayne shares how the Frontier Textile Collaboration Program and other digital tools help bring fabrics to life while also building community between suppliers and brands with respect to fabric samples, inventory, price quotes, and more. He also shares a few lessons he’s learned from the pandemic.

Portrait of Wayne Fan, the Chief Strategy Officer of Frontier.cool
Wayne Fan, CSO, Frontier.cool

Wayne’s Interview Transcript

Nancy: Hello, I’m Nancy Fendler, and you’re listening to Material Wise, your podcast on material matters. It’s my chance to talk to designers, product developers and other guests about what inspires them to create. Why and how they select the materials they choose, and the relationships they’ve built with their customers and industry. 

This is the first podcast we produced since the pandemic, and it seems like forever. I hope you’re all staying well, safe, and sane. Our guest for this episode is fitting, given how much the apparel industry and supply chain have had to turn to boosting their digital technology platforms and skills to conduct business.

Wayne Fan is the chief strategy officer of Frontier, a co-working software as a service designed to digitize fabrics, enhance supply chain management, and elevate 3D design capabilities. The company has seen a big jump in the adoption of its platform during the coronavirus, as more mills and brands have moved their businesses to the cloud to cut costs and work as efficiently as possible from home. Wayne shares how Frontier and other digital tools can help bring fabrics to life, while also building community between suppliers and brands with respect to fabric samples, inventory, price quotes, and more. He also shares a few lessons he’s learned from the pandemic. I hope you enjoy.

 

Nancy: Hi, Wayne, how are you doing?

Wayne: I’m great. Happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Nancy: Thank you for being here. Can you give us just a little bit of background about how you got involved with Frontier?

Wayne: Frontier grew out of a previous business my partner Victor and I founded 11 years ago. I was happy to be part of the team. We delved right into the textile business. It was an OEM business model, and we’ve evolved a lot since then.

Nancy: Did you guys go to school together or anything like that? How did you-

Wayne: We did. We did. We graduated from University of Rochester, and we majored in different fields and then decided to take on this journey.

Nancy: Tell us about Frontier and how you feel it fits the need in the market.

Wayne: Over the last several months, we experienced surging demand, and primarily coming from manufacturers wanting to gain exposure because the traditional route fabric trade shows were all canceled for the entire year. So they felt the need to establish with digital tools to be able to showcase their new collections with their existing customers. That’s one angle.

And another need is that over the past several months, also due to COVID-19, many of the brands that we’ve observed really doubled down taking everything into the cloud, taking a lot of their assets into the cloud, digitized not only their assets, but also their workflow and processes. And I feel like that’s more important for organizations, such as brands, because they need to manage their image in front of consumers. But then at the same time, they need to manage the supply chain, which involves a lot of manufacturers. To have everyone working on the same page, whether that be merchandising, or quality assurance, or compliance, or material development, it’s a pretty big problem to tackle. Then a lot of brands became a lot more aware of that, so we got a lot of interest from them, as well.

Nancy: Frontier launched about a year and a half ago. How has the acceptance been since you’ve launched?

Wayne: From idea to product, it took a long time. Now, I really understand how to build products and having it accepted by the market. We’re fortunate that we’ve established couple kinds of business models that work with software providers or other cloud-based companies in the textile space, as well as directly working with many ventures in the supply chain. I believe these kinds of product market fits will only grow even in the short/medium run. So we want to really have our product more solid, and then discover new needs and perhaps fulfill some of those needs. Then in the long run we really want to build to where the digital textile supply chain model that we’ve all been waiting for, that the entire industry has been talking about for, I would say, at least a decade or, if anything, more than that.

Nancy: Yeah, and nothing like the pause that we’ve had with COVID-19 to make the supply chain think about that, right? And how digital tools are so important right now, and getting everyone connected when we can’t be together in person.

Wayne: Yeah. Just to give another example, let’s disregard the virus situation. As new designers coming out of the school, they’re learning how to design with software, different 3D software. So basically, a new generation of designers, they’re already used to the digital space, so it only makes more sense that in organizations you have technologies or workflows that can support these kinds of skill sets because you see the entire industry really transitioning more rapidly to a digital process.

Nancy: Right. Yeah. It is. You’re educating the older group, but also the younger group that’s coming on are embracing this, and you’re helping to give them access to even better tools, which will help the whole supply chain evolve and not do things as status quo. I was talking to actually a designer today, and she was talking about some of the same old ways that designers work, where you build a design, you go to the supplier for fabric, and they send you swatches, and then you look through the books and you think of that. And with COVID, or even not with the pandemic, but things need to change to expedite the process and knowing you a little bit, and we’ll talk about this, but the expense of sending swatches back and forth is very costly and not so sustainable.

Wayne Fan: I like to use the auto and the aerospace industry as an example. They adopted CAD design, 3D process into their workflow decades ago. And the reason they were able to do that, I think they’re two-fold. One is that there are so few companies in those industries if you look at the auto brands out there. But then when you compare those with the (vast) textile industry, you start to recognize even the largest brand in the world, let’s not that name names for now, that may only take up less than 1% of the global textile economy. So, it’s a vast industry and changes just doesn’t happen as quickly as an industry just have so few players. That’s one.

Secondly, for hard materials, such as steel or wood, they are much easier to render the 3D engines. That’s why these industries took on so quickly for them. For fabric soft materials there’s a lot of physical properties that you need to capture in the software. That’s why it took much longer to develop different types of software tools that can reflect the different properties of a material properly. And then you need to be able to get to that point to really promote a product that’s… Essentially, so designers can actually see 3D rendering and actually make informed decisions. Otherwise, they always going to go back to making an actual sample because the computer-rendered the sample looks nothing like the actual good. So I feel like the technology is more mature in their past two years. That allowed us to push through more rapidly.

Nancy: Yeah. Well, that’s great. The touch and feel is really important when it comes to selecting fabrics. However, you can touch and feel a million fabrics, and you can’t order a million fabrics. So your platform allows designers or product developers to edit what they’re looking at online, and you’re giving all these great notes, hand-feel notes, and then they can order the swatches that they need, based on what you’re giving them. And you’ve done a lot to help refine all those material notes so that designers can help make those decisions, or product developers can make those decisions a little bit easier before they start ordering swatches.

Wayne: We know that in the market there is a need for digital fabric material. So we set out to build a product that has almost no entry barrier for any individual user or companies to digitize their material. We don’t require any hardware, and then we keep a lot of the work in the cloud. Therefore, the entire supply chain or one manufacturer, one manufacturing partner, can at least start migrating their physical good to a cloud space and make them digital fabric materials. That’s one thing we provide, the cloud space for that, the environment for that. Because we have such a low entry point, so we start accumulating a lot of materials very fast.

The next logical step is to have a great searchability, searchability that we tackle from two ends. One is really embrace hashtags and really let the crowd, let users define what they want to be seen as. We give our users the power to define their products. That’s from one side. And then in the process we also try to organize the language tree around textile terminologies because from the designer, they speak of an item very differently from what a manufacturer may speak of an item. So it’s an ongoing process to really accumulate that language tree. So when you type in denim, I will have some indigo twills that may come up because essentially these are the same things. So then that’s the searching capability.

Lastly, I would say it is collaboration, which we find massively important is that with digital materials, we want these files, so to speak, be transferable, we want these files be able to be shared, collections can be shared among different groups working on different projects. So I would say we really build our product around these three pillars. One is digitalization, and then secondly is great search capability. And then it’s the collaboration aspect.

Nancy: I would think that the platform would be perfect for trade show organizers during this pandemic where a lot of trade shows are turning to virtual. And I’ve taken a few, both at Kingpins and Outdoor Retailer and Performance Days where some of the images that are portrayed online are a little bit static. I just think that this would be a perfect outlet for Frontier, and I’d love your feedback.

Wayne: Virtual trade shows is something that we did not anticipate in the beginning. Based on the trade shows that we’ve attended in the past, a lot of the interactions basically brand… It’s a marketplace where brands, different stakeholders come in to discuss, whether that be materials or many other things, really. But then we find our platform is already, it’s basically ready, like I mentioned. There’s the interactive feature, and then there’s the showroom for different types of textiles and all the information well-organized on one page. So it becomes a suitable, I definitely wouldn’t say perfect, but it becomes a suitable place for buyers and sellers to interact in terms of, not just on price negotiation, it’s also material development, different questions about different types of fabric. 

So we are very happy to support that aspect of a trade show. And then we’re working with Taiwan Textile Federation to bring the TITAS. It’s a trade show set in October. There’s going to be a physical one. Although, there’s going to be almost… Not many brands will be attending due to the flight restriction situation. So we will definitely take that online and then support this government agency to replicate the physical trade show as much as possible. That’s what we’re working on now.

Nancy: Yeah. I know. That’s a hot topic among many right now, in terms of trade shows are such a big part of the supply chain, as we mentioned, and we’re all kind of sitting on the edge of our seats to see what’s going to happen with trade shows. But tools like yours could really help bring some assemblance to the touch and feel, even though you can’t really touch and feel. But like you were saying, you have the tools to try to bring all that hand-feel to life would be great.

So we’ve been in this pandemic for quite a few months. What have you learned? Have there been some learning lessons?

Wayne: I was surprised at how things can change so quickly and drastically in a couple weeks. I feel like no one really saw that coming. No one was really prepared. But then, of course, for those business models, that are already well-protected, well-hedged, such as businesses already in the cloud, perhaps Netflix or Amazon, businesses like them probably prospered. I don’t mean it in a bad way, but their business model is well-hedged from these kind of situations.

In Taiwan, I always say we’re pretty lucky. We’re not much affected for that long. A lot of businesses were impacted big time, but then for overall, I think we were doing okay. Business went on as usual for us. We already supported remote work, so we could get things done. And then we got a lot of interest over this time, and then so everyone’s very excited about it.

Nancy: Yeah. That’s great. You work with mills and brands all over the globe. How do you feel that they’re coping with COVID-19?

Wayne: I think almost everyone is just scrambling to find solutions, and then there’s no clean solution or product or software or platform that fills the entire need. So it’s kind of a learning curve, I think. And I think it will be helpful to give stakeholders, brands, or suppliers a step one, two, three guide, or a successful case study in terms of how business can transition themselves during this time. Or maybe not even during this time. They should really better equip themselves for what’s coming, such as physical retail locations may not be as powerful as back in the day. I’m not saying stores won’t exist, but they may become more of a brand awareness point of sale, rather than where sales activity actually happened. So yeah, back to your question, I think too many things on the table. No one really know what steps to take in an organization. So a successful case study would help a lot of people out.

Nancy: Yeah. Absolutely, Wayne. I think that if anything has taught us during this time is that we need to have a very powerful digital presence, or not we, but the whole entire supply chain brands because of social distancing, we don’t know how long it’s going to happen, and this pause could be a time for us to really rebuild our tools or embrace tools that are already developed and learn from them. You can say, “Okay, we’re going to take this time to really build up our digital presence and work on our supply chain flow, digital flow.” Or if you don’t, then who knows what will happen.

Wayne: There are so many tools out there on the market, and then I wouldn’t say any of them is particularly brand new. And these tools exist probably, some for maybe decades, some for a couple of years now. But then I would say if everyone in the industry is always too busy working, too busy to look at other tools that can achieve the same thing with even less time spent on it, you’ll never discover these new tools. So it’s really people opening their eyes, really. And these things kind of exist already. So again, for one person to do that, it’s pretty easy, but then for an organization to really dedicate themselves to really changing their processes or re-examine how to perform one task with a more efficient tool or method is something I think it’s important. Because the last thing that we want to see is that, okay, the COVID-19 is over, everyone back to the same way they were working previously. So nothing really changed, then that would be a slightly, unfortunately, I think.

Nancy: Me too. I agree. I agree. I hope that we all learn from this and grow from it. So anything else you want to share? You’ve got this new seminar or-

Wayne: It’s a local seminar that we are hosting. It’s a physical event that we’re hosting next week in Taiwan. It’s put together by the Taiwan Textile Federation, and then we are one of the primary sponsors. The message that we want to send together with some of our partners is to build the awareness, and then give people clear guidelines on what kind of actions they can take and what kind of tools can achieve what kind of results. And we will bring together some of our users, some of potential users, professionals at the brand level, professionals in AWs, Amazon, because they really provide the web infrastructure for a lot of our products. So we bring together these people and have a discussion on how we can help textile manufacturers transform digitally or adapt digital strategies into their workflow, or it could be as simple as how to use a digital product. And then we want to include everything in this event. So we want the takeaway to be very clear and precise. So back to what I was saying, so we give people steps on what you can do. And then at the end of those three steps, what you’re going to see, by providing a case study. So hopefully the message gets delivered better that way.

Nancy: Wayne, thanks so much for joining us on Material Wise and good luck with the conference. Good luck with Frontier. This is the perfect time to be in the space that you are, and I hope we can connect again soon.

Wayne: Thank you, Nancy. Thank you very much for this opportunity. And let’s talk soon.

Nancy: Thank you for listening to Material Wise. I’d like to thank the incredibly talented Woods Creative for their help in producing this podcast. Jake Nevrla mixes our episodes and composes our theme music. For more information and transcripts of each episode, please visit materialwise.co and please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, again, and until next time, take care.

Links to organizations mentioned in podcast:

  • Frontier: https://frontier.cool/
  • Taiwan Textile Federation: https://www.textiles.org.tw/TTF/english/home/ContentMore.aspx?kind=COREITEM&menu_id=244

Episode 15: Best of 2019

The Best of 2019 –
Highlights from our guests

Happy New Year! While in production with our new 2020 line-up of episodes, we wanted to share some highlights taken from my conversations with last year’s smart and talented guests whom I was honored to have spent time with. We discovered that sustainability is still a huge topic. While it means many things to different people, sustainability is no longer a trend, but a business approach that’s here to stay. We also learned how collaboration throughout the entire supply chain lifts individual businesses and the industry as a whole. We catch a glimpse into the future with digital manufacturing, robotic tailoring and smart textiles. The thread that ties my guests together, is that they all believe it is an exciting time to be involved with materials. I hope you enjoy!

Jay Adams, Co-Founder of Brass Clothing
Louisa Smith, international textile trend consultant
Portrait of Gihan Amarasiriwardena of Ministry of Supply
Gihan Amarasiriwardena, co-founder and president of Ministry of Supply
Emily Walzer, editor and co-publisher of Textile Insights
Elizabeth Whelan, Founder and Principal at Elizabeth Whelan Design
James Morin, COO, President of Sales at Flowfold

Episode 13: Gihan Amarasiriwardena | Ministry of Supply

Gihan Amarasiriwardena on inventing apparel that drives the industry forward

Gihan Amarasiriwardena is the co-founder/president of Boston-based Ministry of Supply, a sleek and modern brand of performance professional apparel that launched in 2012. Gihan shares how he and his colleague, co-founder/CEO, Aman Advani, both MIT students at the time, shared a desire to create professional apparel that had the same performance benefits as their favorite athletic pieces. We learn how the brand got its start, the significance of its name and the role materials, attention to design and fit play into each and every piece to make the apparel scientifically better. www.ministryofsupply.com

Portrait of Gihan Amarasiriwardena of Ministry of Supply
Gihan Amarasiriwardena, co-founder/president of Ministry of Supply

Transcript: Gihan Amarasiriwardena Interview

Nancy: My guest today is Gihan Amarasiriwardena, co-founder and president of Ministry of Supply, a sleek, modern brand of what Gihan calls – performance professional apparel.

Gihan and colleague, Aman Advani, who is CEO and co-founder of Ministry of Supply, created the brand out of their mutual desire to invent professional apparel that was scientifically better than anything on the market. They wanted the apparel to have the same performance benefits of their favorite athletic pieces – moisture/odor management, temperature regulation, stretch and durability – while looking suitable and stylish for the workplace.

All this began when Gihan and Aman, both students at MIT at the time, were hacking their own apparel prototypes independently of one another. Gihan was cutting up running shirts and making dress shirts out of them and Aman was taking the bottom out of his Dri-FIT socks and sewing them to his Gold Toe socks. A MIT professor recognized that they were both working on the same problem and introduced them to each other.

In 2012, Boston-based Ministry of Supply launched with a wildly successful Kick-Starter campaign introducing its Apollo shirt that features the same phase- changing or temperature-regulating materials used by NASA astronauts in their apparel. 

With sustainable performance and a contemporary aesthetic in mind, the brand has expanded into a full collection of professional apparel for men and women designed to comfortably fit and move with your body.

To attest to that, Gihan and his fiancé have set the Guinness World Record for fastest man and woman to run a half marathon in a suit (a Ministry of Supply Suit, of course).

Today, Ministry of Supply has six stores located in major cities across the U.S. in addition to is online site. The stores play a critical role in educating consumers about performance materials and apparel – encouraging them to try on a product and learn about it. The company also publishes a blog called ScientificallyBetter.com that helps explain materials so people can be better educated when buying apparel. 

In our conversation, Gihan shares more about his background, how Ministry of Supply got its name, the brand’s sustainability views and the community it has built. He also gives us a glimpse into the future of the brand’s design development – specifically the use of active textile tailoring where garments can be robotically tailored after the fact. 

I want to apologize in advance for the sound quality of this episode. We had some technical difficulties with the equipment when recording in the Ministry of Supply store and you will hear some interference. The full transcript of our conversation are in the episode notes on the Material Wise website along with links to several of the organizations and blog Gihan calls out.

Thank you so much for listening! I hope you enjoy!


Nancy:
Gihan, thank you so much for inviting me to your beautiful store on Newbury Street, and for being a guest on Material Wise.

Gihan: Thanks for having me.

Nancy: I’d like to start by asking you a little bit about your background and how you got started in design.

Gihan: Yeah, I grew up as a Boy Scout here in New England, and I was going camping pretty much every month. One of my favorite things was to go to EMS or REI and kind of peruse the performance gear racks. I fell in love with Polartec and with GORE-TEX and used this gear on my kind of monthly camp out. Over time I started thinking, it would be interesting to start making my own. With a couple of my friends in my troop, we started taking Tyvek actually, and laminating that to fleece and making our own windproof breathable fleeces.

Actually, our very first ones , we were actually taking trash bags and laminating them to fleece, and we quickly realized the value of waterproof breathable membranes instead. It was kind of that first introduction to performance materials.

I just kind of fell in love with the idea of using materials to unlock performance. When I went to college, I studied chemical and biological engineering at MIT and I thought I wanted to startup – kind of like an outdoor gear company or performance materials company, and with most things, there’s a kind of a point of inspiration and a pivot. Living in the city – moving from rural, Amherst, Mass, to Boston – I realized that there was this opportunity to bring that performance to what you could wear in the city, what you could wear to work, and I wanted to bring that performance to what I could wear every day.

Nancy: Wow, that’s great. Yes. I’m sure you did. Plastic isn’t that waterproof, or isn’t that breathable, excuse me. Was there a defining moment that made you feel as though there was a need for performance and casual apparel or actually call it work apparel?

Gihan: Work apparel, yeah, so we focused on creating a category we called performance professional. Having run cross country and track from middle school all the way through college, I witnessed the transition from cotton running shirts from Dri-FIT to Under Armour, and seeing how big a difference that made. It was night and day. In the same realm, that was kind of as we were going into our professional lives, realizing that technology hadn’t ported over. People were still having sweat stains, lack of stretch, and  they selected to dry clean and iron their clothes every day. These are things that had been solved before in other sectors, but it hadn’t been ported over (to professional work apparel).

My co-founder was actually challenged with the same problem. Aman was a consultant and he had been going to client sites every week and fly out every Monday morning.  For him, his challenge was socks. He would actually take Nike Dri-FIT socks, cut the bottoms off of them, sew them to Gold Toe dress socks. So ,we were finding, we were both kind of hacking apparel. I was cutting up running shirts, making dress shirts out of them, and we were both at MIT, and he was at the business school, I was in engineering school, and one of our professors said, “You two are both kind of peddling your prototypes, working on the same exact problem,” and he introduced us. So yeah, that’s kind of how it started.

Nancy: Oh my God, that’s so serendipitous.

Gihan: Yeah, yeah. We’re very lucky. That’s where that kind of experiences of materials development and then also kind of use case kind of came together and that was the impetus for brand.

Nancy: Oh, that’s amazing. Speaking of the brand, how did you come up with the name Ministry of Supply?

Gihan: Yeah, it’s a really good question. Our company name, Ministry of Supply, is actually inspired by, if you’ve watched James Bond movies, Bond always goes and sees Q before his mission starts and Q gives him his gear. It turns out that Q is based on a real person named Charles Fraser-Smith and his cover was the British Ministry of Supply, and he designed gadgetry and clothing for the British Special Ops. We kind of see ourselves as Q’s labs designing gear for people on a mission.

Nancy: I can just see it. I did not know that. That’s really interesting. You started with men’s and now you have women’s, as I’m seeing in the store, who is your customer do you find?

Gihan: Yeah. Our core customer is really we never really a single demographic, but rather it’s a lifestyle, often times, of a person in their career who’s at that point where they’re looking to connect the different parts of their day, whether it’s staying fit, it’s their personal pursuits, and also their family – and then that they’re really passionate about their work as well. Previously we would have different outfits for each of those different spheres. Kind of the goal of MOS, is that our clothing can become a tool to connect those different parts of the day.

I mean, there’s this constant story that we hear over and over again, and it sounds like it’s not, but it’s actually, it’s a true one that we hear all the time, which is, I get home from work at 6:30, and my kid goes to bed at 7:30, and there’s 60 minutes there. If I’m spending, 10 to 15 of those just changing into a T-shirt and jeans, that’s 25% of my time lost. It’s those moments that the product really stands out. We think that as you go from a red-eye straight to the work day and it feels like you’ve been wearing sweat pants on the flight, and then you feel fresh and you look sharp when you get to the office and stuff. Those are the types of things, those moments, where the product really makes a difference.

Nancy: I’m seeing it more and more where, we can talk about this a little bit later, but wearing more, packing less, having things that have multiple applications, and the whole athleisure side, but then there’s probably a word for professional apparel that can … I don’t know if it’s commuter apparel, whatever. Ministry of Supply got its  start online – and now you have how many stores?

Gihan: We have six stores across the US, plus our online store.

Nancy: Wow, congratulations.

Gihan: Thank you.

Nancy: How do they benefit or complement one another?

Gihan: Yeah, we started online, but one of the things that we realized was we’d always had these popups, and that there was this incredible interaction that happens when you only have the little store that customers can looking to see the product, they can feel it, they can try it on. For a lot of our customers it’s about dissuading any doubts they had about what does this feel like? These are materials that are not cotton, it’s not always just traditional wool suiting. These are materials that have great four-way stretch. A lot of times people are wondering, is this going to look as sharp as my suit that I have in my wardrobe? These are amazing moments to see firsthand.

We also think an important part of our role as a company is to educate people about performance materials and performance apparel. That’s what our stores are really meant to do. It’s really about being able to try a product on, but also learn about it. Our stores play a critical role in that. That being said, our stores all stand on their own two feet and that’s something that we think is important. That in a time where there’s a lot of questions around what’s the role of retail, we want to make sure our stores have a purpose, and in our six locations they are really driving the market there. That’s something that we thought is real important.

Nancy: That’s great. It’s like coming in for an experience that they might know about the product but then actually, with the brand, but to come in and to feel it and touch it because fashion can be more emotional or the shopping can, but there is a real technical story to it, which needs some explanation, but not get so bogged down with it. Speaking of materials, which we have a mutual love for, before we get into sort of the materials per se, I’d like to talk a little bit about the design. Are there any important design principles that you and your team follow for the collection?

Gihan: Yeah, I mean, when we think about our process and our development, one of the key things is we believe in what we call quantified empathy. It’s this process that we’ve developed, which is really about starting our design process rooted in customer challenges or opportunities. We have these eight tools, ranging from customer interviews to the fact that every single interaction with a customer through email or through Facebook and others, what we’re doing is we’re basically categorizing those comments and understanding, was this a fit issue with our product? Was this an issue with regard to durability? We can basically understand which of our products have opportunities for improvement. We think of ourselves a little bit more like a car company where we have a few key models that we iterate each year, and that we improve rather than trying to kind of redevelop everything from scratch each time.

The reason that’s important is that when you’re doing a completely new style, sometimes you’re not necessarily building off of the knowledge of the previous version. You can see here in our store, we have mostly blues and grays, kind of traditional selects, but with these tweaks that kind of reinvent them. What we want to do is kind of create the foundation of your wardrobe, the pieces that you can rely on that you can build your outfit on. That’s kind of the mantra of the design.

Jarlath Mellet, he’s our Design Director. He was formerly Design Director for Brooks Brothers, Theory, and so you can see it in the style of our products. They have really clean, modern, contemporary, but at the same time, our fit is really one that’s really meant to kind of move with your body. That’s a different element of our garments. We don’t look at fit just from a, what does that look like on a mannequin when you’re standing straight, but look at fit in terms of how does it feel and how does it look as you’re moving and we think that’s really important.

Nancy: Absolutely. I know – you can ride your bike in your suit on the way to work if you want and still look fresh when you go into the office. It also gives you opportunity to accessorize as a woman. You can wear these lovely, rich colors but accessorize with something that will make you personalize it.

Gihan: Yeah.

Nancy: How do materials come into play? I mean, obviously you’ve done a lot of studying and work on your materials.

Gihan: There’s kind of a couple of pillars of challenges that we’ve looked at. It’s moisture management, it’s mobility and stretch, it’s ease of care, so does it look good throughout the course of the day? Does it cause wrinkles? Then also, what does it look like when it comes to out of the wash, out of the dryer? We’re really trying to minimize care. We look at these lenses as ways of improving the materials. I’ll kind of use a couple examples. One of our more key products is our Apollo dress shirt. It’s the one that we started the brand with. It is a dress shirt that is a knit material and then it’s basically a polyester yarn with a paraffin wax core. That paraffin wax can actually, it’s a different type of paraffin that melt and freeze right around your skin temperature, and through a process called phase-change.

It’s called phase-change material. Basically, if you’re walking outside and you’re going to grab coffee, it’s hot out, it’ll actually melt and through a melting process absorb your excess body heat. Then when you come into kind of like an over A/C’d office, it actually freezes and releases that heat back to you. It’s kind of like a rechargeable battery for heat and it works automatically, and it’s built into the core of all of our Apollo shirts.

Nancy: That’s what you started with your Kickstarter, which should actually win a Guinness World Book of Records for successful Kickstarter launches. Oh, my goodness. It feels great, so you don’t even feel the technology really in the shirt.

Gihan: That’s something, you’ll see when you kind of walk into the store, we’ve got a NASA moon picture right here over our changing rooms. We also have a lot of NASA signage, and actually, in the front of our store, is  a NASA spacesuit, and that is a nod to the fact that the phase-change materials were actually designed for the use of glove liners. NASA uses it for astronauts because the extremes of space, it’s 240 degrees in the sunlight and it’s simultaneously -140 degrees in the shadows, and so they were using this material. We look for material inspiration from all sorts of ideas. In this case we’re looking at one of the labs we work with is the Human Systems Laboratory at MIT. We were kind of exposed to this material through our work with them. It’s now a core part of our product line, so that’s one of our materials.

Nancy: Great. Thus, the name of Apollo.

Gihan: That’s Apollo.

Nancy: Yeah, yeah. That’s amazing.

Gihan: Then another material is our Kinetics. I’m actually wearing our kinetic pants right here. It’s available in our pants and our blazers, as well as some dresses for women as well. But in this case, it’s actually a bi-component yarn. It’s part polyethylene, part PET, another type of polyester, but what’s really interesting is as you extrude it, it creates a spiral effect into the yarn fulfillment. That creates natural elasticity. We use that kind of natural, elastic yarn, it’s actually made out of 17% bio-based PET.

Nancy: That’s good.

Gihan: Yeah, and at the same time we’re also using warp knitting, which is it’s kind of like a knitting machine, but it’s also kind of like a weaving machine, same time weaving them in so you get this great structure you expect out of woven, but incredible four-way stretch.

Nancy: Yeah, it looks almost like a softshell type of stretch. It’s so cool.

Gihan: It’s something that we’ve kind of used as kind of a foundation of our product line. We’re starting to see, we have these platforms, these platform materials that once we understand how to use it, we use it many times. It allows the customer to understand I love this material. I’m also going to understand how it feels in a different application.

Nancy: Amazing. With regards to materials, where do you turn to for material trend sourcing? It seems like you create your own or borrow from NASA, but are there any specific trade shows or conferences or do you seek out certain mills that you can work with that provide you with new inspiration?

Gihan: Yeah, in terms of inspiration, we look at a variety of different places. We kind of look at as a funnel, as a hopper, where we try to take in inspiration from the lab – with what are the far-out developments. Right now we are working with the Advanced Functional Fabrics Association of America. AFFOA is a research arm of our facility, based out of MIT, that’s doing a lot of development around the next generation fibers and wearables. We have a research grant through AFFOA to work on shape-change materials with the self-assembly lab at MIT. That’s where we’re looking at kind of next generation fibers.

Then as we become a little bit closer, one of the big challenges with material development is scale – it’s one thing to have something in small scale, but how do you develop it in volume? We think it’s just so critical to have really great industry partners. We work with Singtex, Toray –  these are all kind of fiber mills and largely in Japan and Taiwan and we’re pushing the forefront of the materials development all the way from the yarn filament down to the knitting and weaving of it.

It’s a co-development. I think that’s the key part is it’s about finding what’s possible with manufacturer and what are the needs that we have from a consumer standpoint, and developing that with our factories.

In terms of conferences, despite the fact that we make a lot of professional wear, work clothing, our favorite conference is going to Outdoor Retailer. That’s kind of where that intersection happens where you’re taking inspiration from the outdoor athletic market but then bring it to kind of wear-to-work clothing/casual clothing.

Nancy: That’s great to hear. That’s my favorite trade show, too. It’s fabulous. Yeah, they’ve done a really good job with having suppliers in a really good area. There’s a new trade show that you may have heard of called the Functional Fabric Fair Performance Days that’s in New York, and now in Portland, Oregon. That’s later this month. I’m headed back there actually in a couple weeks. Do you think that consumers have caught on with savvier materials and are willing to be open to … I don’t want to say spending more money, but just adopting them for more professional apparel? Obviously, here we are in your store, that might be asking…

Gihan: No, I mean, I think one of the things that we can truly impart is that care labels can be misleading or fiber competence. We look at a material label, and it may say 100% cotton, maybe says 100% polyester, but there’s so many different variants of all of these different materials. It’s more than just what the polymer is, it’s how the fiber’s extruded, it’s how it’s knit, it’s how it’s processed. What we try to do, especially in our stores and online, is go that layer deeper. In this case, for example, our Apollo shirt, we were talking about the phase-change materials, they’re embedded in the yarn. It’s about talking about what does working fabric bring, explaining how the film and geometry, the fact that it’s bi-component, the fact that it’s extruded in this spiral shape, the fact that it’s using morph knit construction, these are all layers that kind of get lost when you just look at it from a composition standpoint.

We think it’s really important to explain that we do that through our store experience. Then we actually started a blog. It started as a kind of an internal conversation to kind of at first all to learn about materials. We started publishing it publicly actually this year. It’s called ScientificallyBetter.com, and we basically every week put up a post around different material technologies and explaining terms like what is a waterproof/breathable membrane? How does waterless dyeing work? The reason we think that’s important is because the more people understand the differences, they can maybe be more educated in the choices that they make.

Nancy: Exactly. Also, in the sustainability arena where that’s such a big part of the conversation right now -when you say waterless dye, that’s a big component in sustainability. Speaking of that, I’ve done some research ,and I know that you have a donation process, which is part of your sustainability platform. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and maybe some other sustainable practices?

Gihan: Yeah, so we’ve been a big part of having the minimalist wardrobe, really having to have those core elements that you can trust and can rely on. It’s about taking that decision fatigue away. At some point you’ll have, we call it “1 in; 1 outs.” It was kind of – my co-founder had 10 hangers and he just wanted to have 10 hangers in his closet and no more than that. If you got a new piece of clothing, you would take one out and you would donate it. What we’ve tried to do is we’ve just tried to facilitate that process. Really, there’s a lot of pieces where sometimes we move locations or we change jobs and it’s great clothing, it’s just a different work environment, different location. It’s a great piece of clothing but it can be reused.

What we’re trying to do is facilitate taking that clothing, actually creating outfits, and working with different organizations. Really here at Boston International Institute where we’re working with different groups where people are kind of going into the professional field and helping outfit them. That’s kind of one way we really focused on the use side of our garment program.

We’re also looking at recycling and so that’s something where a big focus of a lot of our materials recently has been about going to, in some cases, mono-materials. Like our Apollo dress shirt is 100% recyclable and that’s something that we’re excited about.

Nancy: Yeah, that’s fabulous. I was just at this functional fabric fair in July, and the whole term sustainability means so much to different people. There’s recyclable, post-consumer, pre-consumer, pre-industrial? I think that educating consumers with your blog is helpful. We’ll put that on the show notes – the website for that.

I was actually introduced to Ministry of Supply at the Museum of Modern Art store in New York City, when I was visiting my daughter and it was the Mercury Intelligent Jacket (that caught my eye). I’m like, oh my God, this is so cool. That’s a real smart parka or jacket. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Because that was your next Kickstarter campaign, right?

Gihan: Yeah, so the Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket is a winter parka. It looks like kind of like you get a really cool skiwear, outerwear, designed for the city. But on the inside we’ve got three carbon fiber heating elements that are completely flexible. They run off of a USB battery, kind of any battery that charges your cell phone off of. But one of the things that makes it really unique is we’ve been so aware of the fact that it’s not about staying warm or cold, it’s about staying at the right temperature at the right time. That’s what we learned through our years of development of shirts and sweaters. We wanted to take that a step further and in this garment we actually have two temperature sensors, one on the inside, one on the outside, to monitor your body temperature and external temperature.

But we also have an accelerometer in the jacket. The reason that’s important is the best predictor that you will be hot is how much you’ve been doing. If you’re standing at a cold bus stop, we’ll turn the heat up all the way. If you’re walking for a couple minutes, we know that you’re going to be hot in maybe 10 minutes from now, and so we’ll actually turn the heat down. Actually it’s interesting, when you’re standing still our core, kind of our waist up, produces about 50 watts of heat. If we’re walking, we’re creating about 100 watts of heat, same as a light bulb, and it’s twice as much heat just when we’re walking. So that ability for garments to have that fluctuation is something that we think is really important. That’s an Intelligent Heated Jacket.

We’ve even taken the layer further, which is it has Bluetooth communication built into it, so it’ll allows the jacket through our smartphone app … some people run hot, some people run cold, much like a smart thermostat, you can actually train the jacket and say, I’m too hot right now, or I’m too cold. It takes into account kind of how much you’ve been walking, what the temperature is in that location, or that kind of environment, and it changes the model so that it becomes more and more personalized for you. That’s where we think wearables should go. We think it’s more than just about health monitoring. We think that there’s a great component there, but we want to see it be involved in clothes that we’re in every day, and a big part of it is we buy garments, in many cases, for functionality, and a winter jacket, you’re buying it for waterproofness, you’re buying it for warmth, and so we think wearables should do a better job at keeping you dry or keeping you warm.

Nancy: That’s great. It sounds so intuitive, and I’ve been studying a little bit about smart technology and I have a client that makes sensors for athletic apparel, and the fact that it allows you not to wear other devices to regulate your biometric readings. How’s the jacket doing?

Gihan: It’s do really well. We sold over 4,000 units last year through our Kickstarter campaign. The reason we’ve launched a couple of products on Kickstarter, our Apollo shirt and then our Mercury jacket, and we also have the socks. It’s an amazing example of a community that really values technology and design. The community’s so involved in helping us develop the product, validate our problem statements, giving us feedback with the challenges, and one of the cool things is because it’s a wearable, actually, we can do over-the-air updates. Based on feedback that people were giving us, we’re actually, after they bought the jacket, we were able to push updates so that they have increased functionality. It’s doing really well – it’s carried in the Museum of Modern Art stores.

Nancy: There must be such satisfaction to see that.

Gihan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nancy: Oh my goodness. I’m not sure. I would assume that they’re pretty picky about what they choose to put in their store. I do have a question about it though. When you launder it, do you have to take out any of the devices or the hardware or anything?

Gihan: Yeah, that’s the challenge of wearables is laundering in particular. The only thing you have to do is you just pull out the battery, everything else is machine washable, the heating pads, the sensors, the microcontroller that’s in there. We’ve worked with manufacturers that specialize in this kind of thing. They really think everything out to the last detail, and helped us really create a garment that is tested through 65 washes.

Nancy: Wow, that’s amazing. You’ve taken technology very far, both with developing fabrics and the garments. You mentioned a little bit about working with MIT on fabrics in the future, can you give us an indication of what you might see in the next so many years?

Gihan: One of the things we’ve been really looking at is the ways in which you can use digital manufacturing to kind of improve the manufacturing supply chain, so material loss, but also functionality of materials. We’ve been doing a lot of what we call 3D Print-Knit. It’s similar to whole garment knitting. We’re working with Shima Seiki a lot. These are all materials that are made on a computerized knitting machine and allows us to control the composition, the structure, and allows us to create functionality based on how we knit the garment computationally.

When we’re looking at data we ask if have we improved it? We launched this project about nine months ago, it’s called active textile tailoring and we’re looking at how can we mix this material that can be post-tailored, that can be robotically tailored. We did a demo of this on a mannequin on this sweater. We could fit into the mannequin using the robot. It’s kind of these are the visions of the future that we have. Tailoring right now is actually quite difficult, particularly for knit garments, things like that. But if you can produce something in bulk, let’s say in one size, but then tailored to anyone’s body after the fact, that suddenly reduces obsolescence, it creates a better fit for the consumer, so it’s something we’re real excited about

Nancy: Potentially eliminating material waste. That’s amazing. I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions that are a bit more personal, not too, too personal, but just to get to know you a little bit better. What are your favorite materials?

Gihan: Some of my favorite materials, I’ve been in love waterproof/breathable membranes. I think they’re one of the coolest concepts out there, and just the evolution that’s happened, the evolution of PTFE, PU, I’ve always been interested in those. At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how we can use bio-based feedstocks to create functional yarns. Much like polyester has kind of come into its own recently, it’s evolved quite a lot from the Dacron in the 50s, right? Now, it’s becomes high performance fiber that looks and feels like cotton. In the same realm we’re interested in how we can use cellulosic materials to have similar functionality as these performance materials. I’m spending a lot of time with viscose and cellulose materials.

Nancy: Yeah, and they’re also sustainable, right?

Gihan: Exactly.

Nancy: And feel amazing. What’s your favorite Ministry of Supply piece?

Gihan: Probably my favorite piece that I probably wear at least (one a day) is one garment from our kinetic line. It’s got amazing structure and it looks really sharp. I bike to work every day and so I wear it every day with that. My fiancé and I, we both actually ran half marathons in suits made out of it, and so we’ve set the Guinness World Records for Fastest Half Marathon in a suit for men and women.

Nancy: Oh, cool.

Gihan: You can actually see the photo over there in the store, yeah.

Nancy: Oh, my goodness, yes. Wow, that’s great.

Gihan: That’s one of my favorite pieces, yeah.

Nancy: We’ll have to feature that on the show notes too. Beside your own brand, do you have another favorite?

Gihan: Yeah, I’m a big fan of Arc’teryx, I think just in terms of how they’ve really pushed forward manufacturing and materials and kind of thinking of the garments holistically that way, kind of pushing forward lamination bonding, but doing it a way that is really thoughtful and that’s not superfluous. That’s something that we think is really important.

We also take a lot of inspiration from Patagonia. I mean, I think, a lot of brands do, and I think the reason is that they are pushing the industry forward in terms of sustainability, but not the compromise of performance. That has been something that we’ve been really kind of focused on recently about, especially in an arena where there is a lot more turnover in clothing, so we’re hoping to kind of bring that mentality to this industry.

Nancy: Yeah, both amazing brands. They’ve done so much. Do you have any trends that you absolutely love right now and despise?

Gihan: The trends that … We try to look at what are the macro trends, what are the timeless truths that in the computer space there’s this idea of Moore’s Law, which is basically the computers will get twice as fast every 18 months. Those are the trends that we want to focus on. One of the ones that we’re seeing now is obviously kind of casualization of the office wardrobe, so what we’re trying to do is figure out how can we make things seem increasingly comfortable that fit to the aesthetic of the office, but at the same time allow people to look and feel polished and sharp? That’s where our brand has strength – the juxtaposition of the two.

Nancy: Yeah, that’s a good trend. I think that, and it just, again, it allows you to buy less, wear more.

Gihan: Exactly.

Nancy: That’s a big trend right now. I know you’re an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs often have things that keep them up at night. If you are not, then I want to know your secret, but are there any things that are keeping you up at night?

Gihan: The thing that we’re kind of super conscious of is how do we be responsible as a brand in terms of in fashion in particular, we’re often at the whim of style trends, their changes in production markets. Those are two things. On the demand side, it’s ‘what is of the moment’? And then on the supply side it’s there’s a changing supply base right now, and we want to make sure that we’re thoughtful in both of those, that ultimately, we’re making our garments in an efficient manner to lower our footprint. But at the same time that we’re also creating styles and products that people want. Because what we’re trying to minimize here is obsolescence. We’re trying to minimize how much waste is created from our system. That’s the thing that we’re trying to answer now.

We don’t really say we’re in the fast-fashion space. That being said, we know that it effects our product line and that’s something that we’re really focused on.

Nancy: Great, yeah. What are you most proud of?

Gihan: I mean, I would say it’s probably our team. I think it’s something where we have built ourselves as a brand that, it’s like our namesake, it’s kind of this invention laboratory, and a team that is able to kind of bring it to life and explain to the customers. I think that’s something that we take a lot of pride in of moving the entire industry forward in terms of inventing apparel. That’s kind of the mission of our brand. Our hope is that clothing, if we’re still wearing the same clothes that our grandparents wore, that it’s almost like what have we done right? Have we moved the industry forward? Have we made people more comfortable? Have we made their days easier? That’s what we’re really trying to do is make sure that clothing continues to evolve at the same rate that our laptops do, that our phones do, our cars do. That’s kind of our mission and I think we’ve created a team system that allows that to happen.

Nancy: Yeah. That’s great. I love that. Inventing apparel. That’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to add or mention that we didn’t discuss? Anything like what’s next? 

Gihan: Yeah, I’d say that intersection of sustainable performance is what we’re really excited about.

Nancy: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I hope to see you at Outdoor Retailer, maybe this winter, but until then, I will continue to explore your stores, and we’ll see you around.

Gihan: Thanks so much.

Nancy: Okay.

Gihan: I appreciate it.

Nancy: Bye-bye.

Links to organizations mentioned in podcast:

  • Human Systems Laboratory: https://hsl.mit.edu/
  • Advanced Functional Fabrics Association of America: http://go.affoa.org/
  • Scientifically Better blog: https://www.scientificallybetter.com

Episode 05: Rob Naughter | Patagonia

Rob Naughter with Patagonia On the Company’s Commitment to Sustainable/Traceable Textiles

With the desire of working on material development with finished goods brands, Rob Naughter came knocking on Patagonia’s door after spending six years as a development engineer with PrimaLoft, a premium insulation for outdoor and home furnishings products. While it took the reputable three interviews, Rob finally landed at Patagonia’s Ventura headquarters as Materials R&D Manager 11 years ago and has moved up the ranks to Patagonia’s Director of Material Innovation and Impact. Rob has pioneered several of the company’ most notable sustainable/traceable material developments such as its 100% Traceable Down Standard and the recent launch of its down-like PlumaFill, which took ten years to come to market. Given that Patagonia fails nearly all materials tested in its labs, we talk about Patagonia’s increased bandwidth on material development and what makes a good material partner. We also discuss the evolution of the Patagonia customer and the company’s love hate relationship with polyester.

Rob Naughter, Director of Material Innovation and Impact at Patagonia

Rob’s Interview Transcript

Nancy: Hello. I’m Nancy Fendler and you’re listening to Material Wise, your podcast on material matters. It’s my chance to talk to designers, product developers, and other guests in the outdoor, fashion, home furnishings, among other industries about what influences them to create, how and why they select the materials they choose, and the relationships they built with their customers and industry.

I’m excited to share this episode, featuring Rob Naughter, the director of material innovation and impact at Patagonia. I met Rob years ago when he was a development engineer with PrimaLoft, a former client of mine. Rob spoke to me from his office in Ventura, California to chat about his role at Patagonia, what makes a good material partner, and a few developments he’s most proud of.

Nancy: Rob, thanks so much for joining me on Material Wise.

Rob: Thank you. Thanks, Nancy.

Nancy: Can you tell us how you got into material research and development and how you landed at Patagonia?

Rob: Sure. I started just looking to get into the industry. I was a very passionate outdoor user and started working for a small non-wovens company doing lab testing and learning as much as I could about the non-wovens part of the industry and how it’s used in clothing. And I did that for a number of years at a company called PrimaLoft in Albany, New York.

Nancy: I remember that.

Rob: Yeah. Yeah so I did that for a number of years. I started in the lab just trying to learn as much as I could about the process about how things pass and fail, about what is a good non-woven textile, and what needs improvement on it. And, the more I learned, the more I wanted to definitely go deeper into this. But I got very interested in the textiles that get used in combination with these, which I had a very limited exposure to in that role there. I did spend about six years with that company growing from different roles from basically working in the lab and doing quality assurance to doing product development from the non-woven side and it was great. I got to interact more with the plans. What I found interesting is what and why they were leaning towards certain products versus other products, and it just gave a better glimpse of what was going on in the entire industry.

So after a couple of years with that, I started really wanting to work with finished products so I applied to a few companies – Patagonia actually. When I applied to Patagonia, I think when I got hired it was the third time I’d applied to the organization! And it’s not an uncommon story a lot of folks apply here several times, maybe the first time you apply it’s for a different role, you’re not completely clear on what that role is until you meet with human resources, you meet with one of the hiring managers and you learn a little bit more about what they do here. So, I was hired a little over a decade ago, and now as a material developer. Basically the position was created specifically around my expertise not only in insulation but also about insulation in synthetic wovens, which is the category that insulation was mostly used in. That was great because I’d had some experience with textiles and the testing that was done on that. I was able to work with the mills and broaden my understanding about those textiles in that role.

Nancy: That’s great. So the third time was a charm?

Rob: Yeah.

Nancy: And you moved all the way out to Ventura, California from Albany, New York.

Rob: From Albany, New York. Yep it was a big move so it was a big change in my life and I figured I’d give it a shot and see how everything worked out and you know if you don’t like it you can always try something else. But found that it was a really good fit and people here were really accommodating, really nice, really passionate, very driven company inspired by our fearless leader, Yvon Chouinard. He’s been doing this for a long time and making really high-quality product that lasts for a very long time in the industry. So it was great. I felt lucky to be a part of that team.

I spent six years working in material development before I started managing that category. Our company had seen probably almost double in growth and we needed a much larger group of people to manage the textile developments for the different categories and so I spent about four years managing that category of insulation and wovens as it grew. We have down products, we have synthetic products, we have products with down-proof wovens, we have windbreakers, we have a lot of different items that fall into that category. So, it wasn’t just a single piece material used to go into a garment, it could be a lot of different things that has to be put together to build a product’s performance.

Nancy: I understand. So, how do you think or why do you think that it has grown and evolved so much? That department?

Rob: I think Patagonia’s put a lot of bandwidth behind material expertise, a lot of Patagonia’s initiatives going back to recycled polyester and organic cotton, traceable down, all of these go back to the raw material source and better understanding what’s actually in the product, and so a lot of companies may just buy whoever has the closest relationship to their garment factory and they actually don’t know all of the materials that are in their brands. But for Patagonia, they’ve taken a big stance in not only knowing where it’s coming from, but understanding what goes into those textiles.

Nancy: Right. You know obviously, unless you’re living under a rock, people must know that corporate social environmental responsibility are ingrained in Patagonia’s DNA so I would assume that the materials that you choose and as well as their practices are also very important.

Rob: Yeah. I mean we also have a huge sustainability team and corporate responsibility team now that tries to instill our values into our supply chain just so that we can have a larger impact moreover than even what we buy. So if we buy ten t-shirts worth of stuff, that’s great, we can impact that change. But if we impact the supplier that’s providing those ten t-shirts then we can impact hundreds, thousands, millions of t-shirts and so that’s ultimately our goal. Like we want to have the best product and we want to have the most traceable supply chain, but we are also trying to bring the whole industry along with that change.

Nancy: This might be kind of a silly question based on what you said, but since you’ve been at Patagonia, do you feel that material sourcing has changed over the years?

Rob: The biggest change I think is that years and years ago they (material sourcing managers) took a lot of what the factories were saying at face value. So they didn’t know where their nylon was coming from or where their polyester was coming from, they just knew that it was recycled or not recycled. And that was pretty standard back in the seventies and eighties in the industry. As we’ve gone forward I’d say traceability has become a front factor of that and going as deep as you can into the product. Some levels we’re going all the way back to the chemical that’s making the compound or the chemicals that are used in the dye stuff that’s in the blue jacket that you bought. And that’s something that I think a lot of companies don’t do and haven’t been doing for very long. It’s something that Patagonia’s very passionate about and I think we kind of led the way with that when we took a big stance with organic cotton. I believe it was 1996, that they we decided we were not longer going sell any conventional cotton. There wasn’t necessarily a performance reason behind that. It was because our founders had seen some of the things that they didn’t like within that supply chain and decided that they don’t want to be associated with that anymore.

So they actually dropped hundreds if not thousands of units to accommodate this new structure and they felt so passionately about it and moving forward we only sourced organic cotton.

Nancy: I understand that Patagonia has a new program called Worn Wear where people can drop off used products – I don’t know if they’re Patagonia products, but I would assume Patagonia products either to be resold or recycled. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Rob: Sure, yes I think over the past probably decade, maybe a little bit less, Worn has definitely grown as a huge part of our business as we try to build this market basically for high value second use items, as opposed to things just being sold in the thrift shop. So, we’ve built one of the largest repair centers in the country, in our Reno facility and we’ve worked with a lot of independent contractors to reduce our lead times and turnaround times on repairing garments, whether they’re down jackets, or whether they’re wool sweaters or cotton t-shirts for that matter. Some of them are easier to repair than others, but it’s a huge part of our business and as we go forward, we’re dedicating space in a lot of our stores to have Worn Wear sections where people can bring in their old garments.

We’re finding out that people are really attached to their old garments too and they find value, so people don’t necessarily want to give them up if you can repair them first and reuse them great. If you’re not using them anymore, somebody else may very well want to. Some of those vintage pieces, vintage old Patagonia pieces, actually sell for thousands of dollars on Ebay and it’s amazing because they’re twenty, thirty years old in some cases.

Nancy: Yeah. I know. When I was at OR (Outdoor Retailer Show), an NPD seminar was saying how vintage is so the big thing now. So, I can only imagine that some of those pieces would go for high prices. Do you think that today’s consumer has changed at all? Or that Patagonia’s consumer has changed?

Rob: I do. I think they’ve evolved over time. I think the consumers today want to know more about where just like the consumer in the food industry wants to know more about where they’re food is coming, they want to know more about where their jackets are coming from, where they’re made, how they’re made, sometimes even who’s making their jacket. We have our footprint chronicles on the website that talks more about where the jackets are manufactured, where they move around the world. They talk sometimes about the good and the bad. We try to shed light. I mean we make product, it’s not a perfect system. We’re definitely contributing. What we’re trying to do though is set a precedent to demonstrate that you can do it in a way that’s much better than the way a lot of other companies operate. So, I think the consumer nowadays is asking questions like that. They have their fingers on websites, they can search, they can do research on their phones in a store, you can go to websites where a lot more information can be found than on a hangtag. And people are following some of these brands on social media to find out what are they interested in, what are their values, our values.

I think that those are some of the folks that are really aligning with the Patagonia brand moving forward. And what really leads me to believe that that’s happening is when we run these big campaigns, like when we donate all of Black Friday’s profits (from the purchase of Patagonia gear) to the non-profits that we work with, or our 1% for the Planet program or our Don’t Buy This Jacket program where we tell people, “Hey, you might be able to buy three of these (lower quality/priced) jackets somewhere else, but you really only need one good one. This one Patagonia jacket will last you ten years or twenty years or thirty years. You need to buy something once and love it and give money on it instead of buying something that’s subpar multiple times over and never being quite satisfied.” When we run this program, we can’t sell enough of them (jackets) it’s because people understand what we’re trying to tell them. And I see this happening more and more in our industry.

Nancy: Well Patagonia’s super transparent and has done a really great job with communicating those values and I’ve heard that again and again – buy quality, not quantity and I think that’s kind of, hopefully it’s seeping into people’s brains, there’s a trickle down. So in a previous email that you and I communicated a few years ago, you had mentioned that Patagonia fails over ninety percent of the materials tested in your labs, so what do you think makes a good material supplier? Or maybe a good material?

Rob: If they still want work with us if we’ve failed ninety percent of their product, wow. Honestly, it takes a patient supplier to work with Patagonia, we can be a very high maintenance customer in a lot of cases because we ask a lot of hard questions. We want to know a lot of details and we need somebody who’s willing to walk that walk with us and spend the time with us on that. It’s really easy to be like, “No, you know what, you’re not going buy enough (material).” In some cases we won’t. In some cases, we buy plenty, but a lot of companies will say that you only make up ten percent of our business, why am I going change my entire ethos to revolve around you? But a good supplier understands the value in putting your best foot forward and being the first to market and doing these things that we’re asking them to do whether it’s aligning with their core values and giving us the transparency and the scalability of these new fibers and the new tech or whether it’s recycled or bio-based or more environmentally friendly chemistries or reducing water or reducing energy. They’re working with us to do that because they know that it matters to us and if they do it for us and we’re talking about it, it’s going to matter to a lot of other people down the road.

Nancy: Do you think that a branded name material or a consumer recognized textile makes a difference?

Rob: I think in some cases it does. You hear a lot of instances that people walk in to big brand box shops like Target or Walmart and they ask for specific textiles that they know of. Gore-Tex probably being one of the most famous ones, but in a lot of cases if they’re associating with a brand specifically around Patagonia, I think a lot of the consumers are looking at Patagonia first and those ingredient textiles second. So they’re kind of playing a supporting role as opposed to the leading role. I think that in a lot of cases they can bring a lot to the partnership, but they have to be willing to do a lot of those things that we ask them to do to make a difference and that’s to be sustainable, that’s the traceability part of it, that’s all the things that we talked about earlier that make a good partner. And some are willing to do that and some aren’t and I think that in general though, if they can do all that and your brand has value, then I think it only helps the brand but it depends on where you’re buying these things at.

The more educated the consumer is, the more educated the retailer and wholesaler are, I think. They’re doing a lot of research from the brand’s perspective and at least with Patagonia, they definitely rely on the Patagonia brand first.

Nancy: I understand. A question on my mind is if consumers are becoming more savvy or savvier about the materials that go into products? I mean you and I kind of work and love materials, so we like to think that, but I’m wondering if the average consumer is a little bit more educated about what goes into their products?

Rob: That’s a good question. You know I would say the average Patagonia consumer has definitely become savvier, but I don’t know if the Patagonia consumer’s your average consumer. If that makes any sense to you. There are definitely folks that are willing to spend a little bit more of their money on a product that’s going to last them a long time. I don’t know if that’s the same person everywhere across the entire globe, across all different age brackets and income brackets. I think we have a unique customer regardless of their age. They’re definitely interested in supporting the brand. They definitely want to be a part of the company’s image whether it’s with a t-shirt or with a hat or with a waterproof jacket that costs six or seven hundred dollars.

So, I think our consumer is definitely getting savvier. I think that is going to be the trend regardless of whether everybody’s there or not. I think in general, a lot of general consumers – I mean it’s easy to get swayed by the hype, by the big signs and without a lot of substance because nobody asks them to go deeper than the initial catch phrase . So that’s the part that I’m always hoping that the consumers becoming savvier on that, they’re looking a little deeper than just the catch phrase.

Nancy: Where do you turn to find the latest news on materials and material trends?

Rob: Good question. There’s a decent amount of industry publications, however we work very closely with our suppliers honestly, in general our supply chain provides us a lot of textile trends and it’s amazing the number of things that we pass along that end up in the industry. And the number of things that we get on board with and we end up working with that show up in the industry later on. And sometimes we’re not the first to buy a material from a supplier, we’ll see it and we’ll pass because we don’t think it’s ready yet. Somebody else works the kinks out of it and then we jump on because having high quality product is really important and doing our due diligence is really important. We also have a dedicated material innovation team we house in our material team here at Patagonia and those innovation engineers are working on projects that take anywhere from two to five or even longer years. Things that they are trying to determine like what’s the next best synthetic fiber or how do we work better with blends or how do we deal with end of life of polyester or what’s the deal with micro plastics? Something like that.

Nancy: I was just going to ask you, are there any new cool materials that you’re working on? You probably can’t talk about or that you’ve seen in the market?

Rob: Yeah. That’s a good question. The coolest ones I can’t really talk about just yet.

Nancy: I bet. That’s okay. We’ll wait. We can wait. Three to five years maybe.

Rob: Maybe just two. Who knows?

Nancy: So, what are some of the favorite trade shows that you like to go to for catching new materials? I’m sure Outdoor Retailer, but are there any others that you?

Rob: Yeah. Outdoor Retailer’s kind of a staple. One of the reasons that I like going there is just because you can see what the brands are doing, catch a glimpse as to what everybody’s been looking at and meet with almost your entire supply chain, whether they’re actually displaying booths there or whether they’re just walking the show. So for us, we realized that show was developed as a buying show. People wanted to buy product for their wholesale or retail accounts, but for me and my team, I feel like that’s become a really important part of the show that supplier side of it. ISPO’s a fantastic show as well. That’s basically our European counterparts to Outdoor Retailer and that happens I believe they’re doing that twice a year now. The summer show moved to Munich as well. It’s a great show and it’s huge. If you think Outdoor Retailer is huge, then this show is even bigger.

Nancy: I haven’t been to ISPO in a while, but I think I will this year. And do you go to any of the Asian trade shows like I know that there’s the Intertextile Shanghai show is coming up.


Rob: I have not been to Intertextile, but it’s on my radar. I’ve heard from some of my suppliers that it is a behemoth of a show. It’s just huge and you kind of need to go into a show like that with a plan or a strategy or you just get lost like a deer in headlights. That’s what I’ve heard, but I’ve heard great things about it. Obviously, things like Titus in Taiwan are really popular and there’s a few other ones that are going on but honestly, I like to get a glimpse of the market. I still feel like on true innovation projects it’s better to spend some time with those actual suppliers, meet the people that are more than just the sales rep they send to the convention, and understand how they work, where they work, and what’s important to them. And so visiting these people and building a relationship with them is super important. You just can’t meet with five or six of them a day. You have to be very candid about that and pick the ones that are most important to you.

Nancy: Right and particularly where materials are so important to Patagonia, it’s important to build those relationships.

Rob: Absolutely.

Nancy: So I just have a few other questions here. What’s your favorite Patagonia piece? If you have one?

Rob: Yeah. I’ve got a lot of Patagonia pieces that I feel super passionate about, but one of the ones that I love having year round is my Nano Air Jacket just because it’s got kind of the warmth that you would get out of a traditional Nano garment, but I’ve used this walking around town, to go get coffee or go to a bar and have a beer, I’ve also used it hiking and biking and skinning in the mountains when I’m backcountrying in the middle of winter. So you can use it below freezing, you can use it in the summer in June in California, it’s a really popular piece and second only to probably the down sweater that you see everywhere.

Nancy: Yeah. Everywhere is right. Is there any material that you just love? And one that you just can’t stand?

Rob: Oh gosh. Honestly, I don’t really have one that I love or can’t stand. I think that one of the biggest challenges, it’s the love-hate relationship that everybody has with polyester is you know it changes our lives in so many ways but it’s one of those things that we need to figure out how to, the end of life, beginning of life, it does great things for us. It’s a technical fiber. But, it’s hard, it’s used so much in so many places and it’s tied to oil and we’re always trying to figure out how to make it better.

Nancy: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, what are you most proud of, Rob?

Rob: I’d probably say, out of the products that I’ve worked on at Patagonia, the Nano Puff and the Micro Puff have been true testaments to building versatile styles that solve a problem, keep people warm, are last a long time, and are versatile in a lot of different types of situations. Whether it’s layering or stand-alone pieces. And I think I really like the way they look. I think they’re great. I think, as an industry, things like Synchilla has been a staple product for what thirty or forty years? I mean it’s insane that that product has been around for so long. It’s truly withstood the test of time so I’m blown away that it still is one of the most beloved, I mean fleece, people still buy it. They buy it whether it’s from us or somebody else. I think ours is great and I own several of them. But I try not to buy them anymore because I want to wear the ones that I have out.


Nancy: Alright. So what are you looking forward to? What’s coming up?

Rob: Good question. I think we’re trying to. We’re looking at the future and we’re trying to find out what’s next, what is going to be the next performance fiber of the next fifty to a hundred years, how do we continue to build technical performance pieces as sustainable as possible? I think that’s the big question that we’re trying to get to the bottom of and I think that we’re looking at it through all sorts of different lenses. We’re not trying to get stuck on buzz words, just like recycled, I think it’s important but what’s really important is to understand why that’s important. What is it saving you from carbon emissions? What is it saving you in CO2? What’s it saving you in water or energy? How is this making an impact on the world and how can we make that impact bigger than us alone as a brand?

I think that’s kind of our big message. Whatever we’re trying to do, sure we’d love to get exclusivity on it, but we want to drop that pretty quickly just so we can talk about it and blow it out to the whole market. Hopefully the whole clothing market can have a piece of it and change the industry for better.

Nancy: Are you looking at smart fabrics at all? Is that part of, maybe you can’t share, but something that Patagonia’s looking towards?

Rob: I think that we’re always looking. I think it would have to be the right story for us to get behind the smart fabric. It has to be true to the authenticity of the brand and the ethos here. And a lot of the ways that it’s being done today are kind of clunky and don’t really feel authentic to the brand. So that doesn’t mean that we’re not looking at it and we’re not considering it and that in the future we might not find a way to do it, but we need to, if we’re going do it, we need to find a way to do it in a way that’s very Patagonia.

Nancy: Okay. Last question, can you leave us with a memorable fabric story? Have you got any good ones?

Rob: It’s hard to pick one. I think we could easily pick a super fresh one that’s probably out there right now being marketed with the Micro Puff and the fact that that started off as a project to change the way insulation is made. I believe those projects always kind of start off as a way to mimic natural fibers. Everybody wants to mimic down. And some reason down is very beloved, and I get it, it lasts a long time and it has a great feeling to it and it’s extremely warm so those are a lot of the benefits. But with our product, the goal was to say – can we make a product that’s just as light only maybe it’s more versatile? We spent ten years tweaking the product on and off before it was valid for being commercially viable.

Nancy: Wow. Well, it had an incredible launch didn’t it? It really did.

Rob: It did. I mean we can’t make enough of them right now which I guess is a good problem to have, but it’s another challenge.

Nancy: Well Rob, thank you so much for your time and I hope to see you in November.

Rob: Yes.

Nancy: Take care. Thank you.

Rob: Thanks, Nancy.

Nancy: You can find more information on Patagonia’s amazing apparel and gear and it’s outstanding corporate, social, and environmental initiatives at Patagonia.com. Thanks so much for listening to Material Wise. I’d like to thank the incredibly talented Woods Creative for their help in producing this podcast. Jake Nevrla mixes our episodes and our theme music is by Activity Club. For more information on Material Wise, please visit materialwise.co and please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again and until next time take care.

Episode 00: Welcome to Material Wise

Your Podcast on Material Matters

Material Wise is a new podcast created for those involved with or interested in the textiles and materials market hosted by Nancy Fendler, principal of Fendler PR, a communications firm specializing in materials and ingredient marketing. Driven by her deep curiosity, Nancy sets out to speak with designers, product developers and guests in the outdoor, fashion, home furnishings and other industries about what inspires and influences them to create, why and how they select the materials they choose and the relationships they’ve built with their customers and industry.