In fashion, apparel, and home goods, color is paramount, influencing textile aesthetics and customer satisfaction. Achieving the desired colors sustainably and efficiently across the global supply chain has long been challenging for brands and textile suppliers. Today, X-Rite Incorporated and Pantone LLC, global leaders in color science and technology, announced Textile Color Hub, a groundbreaking solution to make digital color specification more efficient, achievable, compliant and sustainable across the design to production workflow.
For most textile brands, color specification is a painstaking and subjective process. In a traditional workflow, brands and designers select colors and send a physical sample for suppliers to match. The supplier creates multiple lab dips and ships the options back to the brand for approval. This cycle can repeat multiple times, leading to unnecessary delays and excess waste that increases the carbon footprint of the textile industry.
“The future of textile color approval and production control lies in a cloud-based, data-driven, digital workflow,” said Pieter Mulder, Global Strategic Account Manager, X-Rite and Pantone. “The X-Rite Pantone Textile Color Hub transforms the way brands and suppliers communicate and collaborate to bring products to market up to five times faster. It paves the way for a modernized, digital approach to specify and approve textile designs while reducing waste and carbon footprints.”
Modern and Sustainable Textile Color Management
Textile Color Hub enables brands to combine their traditional and isolated solutions into a complete digital color workflow to securely communicate and control specified colors and designs. It is an open, cloud-based ecosystem that supports spectrophotometers from X-Rite and other manufacturers.
The brand selects a Pantone color or any private brand color for a new design, and creates a Color Specification Document using a pre-defined template that includes the spectral data for the specified colors, the required DeltaE tolerances, and the illuminants to measure against.
Selected suppliers are automatically notified of a new design through Textile Color Hub and use the Color Specification Document to begin color formulation and the lab dipping process. The platform compares the specified color against the measured best lab dip. Suppliers then submit through Textile Color Hub for digital approval by the brand.
Quantifiable Results
Textile Color Hub offers a smarter, more sustainable solution that streamlines color management. It brings measurable benefits and value to textile brands and suppliers, including:
• Get 95% of lab dips right the first time,
• Reduce waste with only one start up and wash up,
• Reduce Co2 with one dip and zero physical samples, and
• Improve time to market by 75%.
“Textile Color Hub is used by one of the world’s largest textile and furniture retailers and delivered immediate results for both the brand and its suppliers,” continued Mulder. “It is fast and easy to implement and with a digital color workflow, companies can start production in days instead of weeks.”
