Tool to ensure transparency in supply chains in B2B-context
Tailorlux develops concealed and individual marking concepts that ensure maximum counterfeit protection, because it is impossible to recreate a marking solution and its evaluation. In an interview with Fibre2Fashion, Tobias Herzog, Managing Director of Tailorlux, speaks about Tailorlux’s growth story since it started off in 2011, the way its solutions are helping in arresting digital thefts and counterfeits in products and future plans of the company.
What varied solutions do you offer to the textile industry?
We started in 2011 with filaments and launched the first pilot for inorganic luminescence in viscose for traceability in 2012. In 2018 we managed to enrich the first sewing thread with an optical fingerprint and had our first industrial scale project with Egyptian cotton. What we offer to the textile industry is our core business of marking and detecting which we offer also in any other industry context. Tailorlux takes care of the right implementation of a tracer and the detection during production or later stages of the supply chain in any form may it be a laboratory test or a handheld scan--this has been our business ever since. We consider ourselves as experts for marking and detecting without any ambition becoming a textile expert, we offer all the hardware for implementing the marker and to verify the marker in the field.
Issues pertaining to transparency and counterfeits across the textile/fashion world is huge. What are your observations since you stepped into the field?
As a solution provider for a covert taggant that becomes an inseparable part of a product, we have been involved in discussions on all levels of the supply chain. The main observation is, that brands often lack real material knowledge and oversight. We at Tailorlux have the feeling that brands try to change that by re-connecting to trusted, mostly 1st tier suppliers. Because of that transparency and counterfeits become a manufacturer and supplier problem while the awareness on brand and consumer level remains low. Consumers as well as brands lack information and education about the real price and environmental impact of counterfeits and legal goods they buy. I believe the consumer awareness might quickly raise as we have seen it for example in the discussion around meat-pricing in Germany.
Please give a brief on how and when the company was founded.
Tailorlux was founded in 2009 as a spin-off of the university of applied science Münster (FH Münster). Münster has proven to be an ideal environment for a start-up at that time. With a strong scientific background from the university and our own laboratory it was possible to take a steep learning curve to bring covert tags to the market.
Do your solutions cater to all kinds of customers whether big or small? What does your feasibility study involve?
The textile industry and the beginning of its supply chain is business based on scale and mass production. Hence the production of our tracer fibre is obliged to the same rules. Making an individual tracer for a customer consuming 200 tonnes of cotton each year demands a batch size of 200 kilo viscose tracer fibre. This is possible but demands a considerable price on each kilo of yarn minus flexibility in sourcing. But we see that especially smaller brands are the forerunners of transparency and we want to serve them with our technology as well. Therefore, we are now looking at generic tracers for recycled, organic or European content. This means we can make one big batch of tracer fibre and service various small customers buying only small amounts of yarn.
What steps do you take along with your end user – the industry -- to educate the consumer who picks up the product from the shelf?
We do not see ourselves in the position to educate consumers or discuss pros and cons of LCA data or even make claims on the environmental impact. Tailorlux provides a tool that can be utilised to ensure transparency in supply chains in a B2B-context. Anyone who wants to use this tool for transparency is our customer. Customer education and presentation of transparency is a special business which we can support with nothing more than machine-to-machine data.
How does Tailorlux differ from certification and testing organisations (Testex, GOTS etc)?
Tailorlux is neither a standardisation organisation nor a verification and testing organisation. From the beginning of our textile journey in 2011 we have defined Tailorlux as a solution provider for marking and detecting material. The combination of marker and detection know-how is our core business. This know-how can be utilised by various actors of the supply chain for traceability, anti-counterfeit solution, content verification or production monitoring.
What is your USP?
The unique selling proposition is the machine-readability of marked products. Our tracers become an inseparable part of a product. This leads ultimately to the digitisation of materials from fibres to polymers at the very beginning of the supply chain.
What is the average cost of your textile solutions? What has been their acceptance level around the world?
Costs vary from €5 to €15 cents depending on the volume and the demand on detectability. It is also possible to implement tiny dosages which can only be revealed by an ash test. This is interesting for manufacturers of man-made-fibres who need a “product insurance” on their own by proving the presence of their material in an ash test. If these manufacturers get approached by brands to implement a traceability solution, they can simply increase the dosage to get a machine-readable feature.
How do your solutions help in arresting digital thefts and counterfeits?
Our solution can detect counterfeits on the spot, and I personally believed that this was the major advantage of our solution to cope with counterfeits. However, the market has proven that interest in anti-counterfeit solutions is focused on the legal arena, on trademarks and designs. Our solution is closer to the production process itself. Customers approach us because they want to know if their customers are using the right consumer goods in their machine or if they replace adhesives, lubricants, AM-parts or filters by cheap copies to save money and still insist on in-service support. We have seen raids of state authorities where Tailorlux tags played a role, but this is not the intent of the major focus of our solution. Our solution is contributing to clarity and transparency between business partners by enhancing material integrity.
What has been your growth story in past couple of years?
The story of Tailorlux is a story of constant change and adoption. During the first years we considered Tailorlux to be a supplier of “intelligent materials”. Soon the detection component became a crucial part of the business when customers demanded anti-counterfeit solutions from Tailorlux. The individual taggant business will only work securely if you are able to bring your own hardware to the field which has been tailored to the specific need of material detection. Besides the chemical laboratory and production facility, we established an optical lab to fulfil this demand. Now that we have material and detection under one roof, we see a growing demand of digital services related to sensors and marked products which leads us a to a cloud-based material database which we envision in the next two years.
How do your permanent marking solutions help in traceability? Could you explain in detail?
Becoming an inseparable part of the product is strongly connected to a higher level of integrity. By changing the spectral fingerprint, we can detect products without changing their characteristics. We at Tailorlux believe that this is more than another identifier like a hangtag or data-matrix code; our solution contributes to the digitisation of natural and man-made-fibres and other polymers. By implementing the tracer in a viscose or man-made carrier fibre at the very beginning of the natural fibre journey (e.g ginning or de-hairing in wool), we make fibres “machine readable”. The value of this feature unfolds most efficiently when in-line verification can ensure the transaction of fibres during the supply chain at bottlenecks of the production (e.g extrusion or carding). These inline-verification sensors are the fundament for introducing digital transactions based on real production data to the industry. A handheld device can give you an indication on bails, slivers, yarn or even finished goods if the tracer is in the product or not. But the handheld device cannot quantify this result. Spectral content quantification is the most demanding technical challenge in this field. Therefore, we looked for support of the German Environmental Fund to develop the first quantification sensor in the world which combines NIR/VIS and image processing with elements of machine learning to determine the composition of a fabric. We presented this device for the first time on July 27, and we are continuously teaching the algorithm with more data.
Has the need for digital solutions increased even since the pandemic hit us?
Yes.
Where there any upgradations required in your solutions to better adapt to the pandemic hit world?
The pandemic basically halted all our projects as we need to interact with the technical staff of manufacturers on the ground. We are currently working on a better Internet of Things (IoT) integration to get more telemetry data from our devices.
How many textile customers do you have as on date? Which are the big names?
As a solution provider in an “enabler-role” we keep it rather silent on the marketing side. Tailorlux stands behind many successful traceability solutions which have other brandings in the public. A more prominent example is our cooperation with The Good Cashmere Standard or the Aware solution which connects our technology to a public blockchain transaction system. PVH has recently released a video where “luminescence fibres” are mentioned for the first time. Due to the Covid situation all our “big-name-projects” have been stopped, mainly in the field of organic cotton. Finally, our big-projects are not necessarily linked to big-names which would be known to customers as we mainly work with so called vertically integrated manufacturers or tier I suppliers.
What are your future plans? Any new collaborations in pipeline?
In an ideal future we can intensify our relationship with Eurofins to provide third party tests of the optical fingerprint around the world. We are also looking at the first bigger textile projects especially in R-Cotton to have at list one or two systems fully operational that can monitor and quantify the recycled content of yarn production online.
