Lycra has launched an online customer portal that empowers brands, retailers, and garment makers to connect to a global network of mills on a single platform. The company is known for its solutions in the apparel and personal care space. Staying competitive in retail means moving at lightning speed and the portal leverages Lycra’s connectivity across the apparel and personal care value chains and offers a one-stop seamless solution to rapidly move customers’ ideas from concept to launch.

The digital experience allows brands and retailers to connect with mills and manufacturers in a virtual capacity without losing the inherent advantages of an in-person connection. It allows users to source fiber solutions using its digital fabric library, directly connect with mills to begin or expand on business relationships, learn about new capabilities, and virtually peruse product catalogues. Its platform features a knowledge center, where users can access exclusive content such as webinars, white papers, and videos covering new fiber technologies, industry trends, marketing, and sustainability, among other topics.

Customers can scout marketing and merchandising solutions through the portal, inclusive of brand assets and garment hang tags. And requests can be submitted for trademark license agreements and fiber certifications. Lycra’s long-term goal is to get to a fiber made with post-consumer content.

International Sourcing Expo Australia will be held from November 15 to 17, 2022. The event is aimed at helping businesses and industries reinvigorate their global sourcing activities and build sustainable alliances with production partners. The premise is to bring companies together for commerce, connection and education.

The expo is for anyone looking to improve or diversify their supply chain and product offering, compare production capability and costs, produce their own label or start a new sourcing business. International Sourcing Expo will be co-located with Footwear and Leather Show and China Clothing Textiles Accessories Expo. Businesses can connect on an international scale and in a dynamic trade show environment rich with sourcing opportunities and potential production partners, as well as education and industry insights. Thousands of apparel, textile and footwear industry leaders from Australia and the Asia Pacific will converge for the event. The impact of the pandemic has affected and disrupted many businesses and supply chains. The event will be relevant more than ever before to businesses who seek to source and cooperate internationally.

International Sourcing Expo is being organized by the International Exhibition and Conference group, the seminal producer of global sourcing events in Australia. From 2023 the show format will be expanded to include additional dates and product categories.

Save Our Souls Clothing has implemented the Kornit Storm HD6 Lite system for just-in-time production of its alternative custom apparel.

Save Our Souls, based in the UK, offers print services to a community of artists driven by a love of tattoos, music, art, and life, with a growing catalogue of designs applied to a variety of apparel at the time it is ordered, ensuring minimal inventory waste and carbon footprint.Kornit Digital is a worldwide market leader in sustainable, on-demand, digital textile production technologies.

Adding the Kornit Storm HD6 Lite has provided Save Our Souls with consistency, quality, and reliability to print, pack, and ship most orders in a single day, offering customers an exceptional experience that keeps them coming back.Replacing a fleet of smaller, low-capacity digital direct-to-garment (DTG) machines, the Kornit system has enabled the company to scale its business upward with minimal time and labor needs.Kornithas enabled Save Our Souls Clothing to produce higher quantities with a single operator while eliminating pretreatments and heat presses from the routine. This has empowered Save Our Souls to launch the Buy That Merch platform for artists, broadcasters, and musicians to produce and sell their own merchandise directly, without the fees associated with existing online marketplaces.

Irish fast fashion chain Primark has debutedits first collection designed in line with the Ellen MacArthur Jeans Redesign guidelines.

The range uses organic cotton and recycled content. The collection meets all of the Jeans Redesign standards, with adult jeans in the collection made from either 70 percent organic cotton, 29 percent recycled cotton and one percent elastane, or 70 percent organic cotton and 30 percent recycled cotton. Children’s jeans are made of 78 percent organic cotton, 20 percent recycled cotton and two percent elastane. All of the organic cotton and recycled cotton used by Primark in this collection is fully traceable. Zips and buttons can be removed and the denim can withstand a minimum of 30 washes.

The Jeans Redesign guidelines were established in 2019 based on expert-provided insight as a way to set a standard for garment health that would make it easier to recycle denim at its end of life. The guidelines include minimum recyclability requirements such as using cellulose fibers from regenerative, organic or transitional farming methods, including easy-to-remove hardware, and foregoing the use of any hazardous chemicals. In addition the fabric should be able to withstand domestic washing.

Trade between Indonesia and South Korea increased 29 per cent from January 2021 to September 2021 compared to the same period last year.

Much of Indonesia’s textile exports are in the form of raw materials such as spun yarn which is later processed into cloth by the textile industry in South Korea. Finished goods processed in South Koreaare sent back to Indonesia to meet the domestic market demand and some are re-exported to the United States and Europe.

Indonesia’s textile trade balance with South Korea is expected to remain in deficit despite the Indonesia-Korea Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IK-CEPA) which comes into force next year.Under the agreement, South Korea will eliminate more than 95 per cent of its tariff lines and Indonesia will eliminate over 92 per cent and give preferential tariffs to support Korean investment. CEPA will not only impact industries such as automobiles but also technology. CEPA will also facilitate exchanges of professionals in areas such as science, technology, software and robotics, promoting cooperation in high-tech industry.

However the implementation of the IK-CEPA will not have a significant effect on boosting the export performance of Indonesia’s textile industry. The market structure created by South Korea has forced Indonesia to export raw materials.

Joulik haslaunched a capsule collection in partnership with C&A.

Joulik is a brand from Brazil. C&A is a Dutch retailer. The pieces include dresses, pants, blouses, accessories, and even shoes. This is the third collaboration of the brand with the Dutch retailer. The first collection in 2014 took almost two years to be launched, with Joulik closely following all stages of product development. In 2017, the second partnership came out, and now comes the third collaboration, which is already on sale in stores and in e-commerce throughout Brazil. But this collection is smaller due to the unpredictable scenario generated by Covid and when the partners started work on the collection, at the beginning of the year, they still didn’t have an idea of what the future would be like. Joulik made a hand-drawn sketch of the pieces, then passed it on to the computer and transformed them into vectors to carry out color tests. C&A has a bigger and faster production since their structure is much bigger than Joulik’s.

Founded in 2009, Joulikbegan with shirts and hand embroidery. C&A's supply chain encompasses more than one million people, employed through 788 global suppliers, across four different sourcing regions.C&A started trading in 1841 as a textile warehouse.

Lack of foreign exchange is hampering apparel exporters in Sri Lanka from realizing their potential.

A move by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka requiring apparel exporters to use only local currency for domestically sourced inputs has caused a furore across the biggest foreign exchange earning sector.Fabric and apparel accessory manufacturers sell their products directly to apparel exporters (locally and overseas) hence their businesses are classified as deemed exporters. The entirety of industry invoicing to apparel exporters has always been in dollars, euros or sterling pounds.The raw materials they require for their produce, such as yarns (both cotton and synthetic), dyestuff, chemicals etc., including machinery and spare parts, are not available locally and have to be imported from different countries around the world. The payment for such materials and machinery needs to be settled in dollars. The overall export and deemed export industry is facing serious challenges in logistics, both in terms of cost and lead times.

The country’s apparel industry has a 3,50,000-strong workforce.In addition, apparel exporters want access to key and emerging export markets through Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) Plus trade concessions from the European Union as well as the United Kingdom.

For the first ten months of 2020, Sri Lanka’s apparel and textile exports grew by 21 per cent.

Bangladesh has 152 LEED-certified Green factories.

Of these, 44 are platinum-rated, 94 gold-rated and 10 are silver-rated.

A total of 15 readymade garment factories have been privileged with the Green Factory Award in respect of their determination and contribution to saving the environment and creating occupation.

Bangladesh, the second largest readymade garment exporter in the world, has taken a leading position in sustainable green industrialisation with the world’s several top ranked green factories.Indonesia is the second largest, with 40 green factories, followed by India with 30 and Sri Lanka with ten.After independence in 1971, Bangladesh was held up as an example of a failed state. People were used to thinking of the Bangladesh readymade garment industry as a place of forced labor, child labor and small factories.In recent years a silent revolution has taken place in the garment industry of Bangladesh. In South Asia, Bangladesh has taken the lead in green initiatives. The world’s highest rated LEED platinum denim factory, knit factory, washing plant and textile mill all are situated in Bangladesh.

It’s hoped that about ten per cent of the total readymade garment sector in the next decade will use green technology.Bangladesh’s readymade garment sector is a 28 billion dollar industry.

The US has banned imports of products made with Xinjiang cotton.

The justification is that China oppresses minorities in this province and imposes forced labor and other forms of torture. Products made with Xinjiang cotton have been illegal in the US since January 2021. But nearly a year on, goods with tainted cotton are still reaching American consumers.

Dozens of intermediary manufacturers from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, China and Mexico purchase unfinished cotton goods from Chinese manufacturers who source Xinjiang cotton. Well-known international brands are supplied by those intermediaries and are thus at high risk of being seen as having Xinjiang cotton in their supply chains. But despite the US ban, exports of textiles and garments from Xinjiang increased by 53 per cent in the first nine months of the year 2021.

More than half of China’s exports of cotton semi-finished products are destined for countries within Asia such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia. About 85 percent of cotton grown in China is produced in Xinjiang, which amounts to 22 percent of global cotton production.

China has denied the existence of Xinjiang detainment camps or forced labor transfers, describing them instead as vocational centers and poverty alleviation programs.

Fashion for Good has launched the Full Circle Textiles Project – Polyester. The aim is to validate and scale promising technologies in polyester chemical recycling and to encourage financing and offtake commitments in the fashion industry. The project brings together a consortium of stakeholders including brands, innovators, supply chain partners and catalytic funders - a structure that has proven successful in driving and scaling disruptive innovation in the industry. To attain a clear idea of the innovations best positioned to address the challenges of recycling polyester textiles, Fashion for Good has enlisted promising innovators in polyester chemical recycling from around the world to participate in the project.

Polyester claims 52 per cent of the global fiber market. As the most common fiber in the world, it also represents a significant portion of the textiles that are landfilled or incinerated annually. A synthetic fiber derived from petroleum, polyester does not naturally break down in the environment. Chemical recycling is a key solution that promises to address the polyester textile waste challenge.

Fashion for Good, based in Amsterdam, has global accelerator programs that give promising start-up innovators the expertise and access to funding they need to grow. The platform also supports innovators through its scaling program and foundational projects, driving pilots and supply chain implementation with partner organisations.