WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT

What Are Fabric Developers Really Thinking?

Focus On Performance
The seasoned fabric development professional addresses the needs of design and merchandising teams within an organization, with fabrics that consumers can envision as being appropriate for a particular end use. The retailer also needs to perceive this appropriateness as correct for an end product. Simply speaking, that means focusing on performance, aesthetics and cost. If you include sales performance, consumer preference and availability as performance requirements, what you are really talking about is translating technical processes into products that retailers and consumers perceive as having positive attributes.

Attention To Detail
Consumers want textile products to be durable, colored appropriately, priced well, and, in most cases, they should deliver physical and psychological comfort. To the fabric development professional, this means attention to the fiber used to make the yarn into fabric and the wet processing. The entire textile supply chain must be managed and then proven through quality assurance testing.

It's not enough to just build it once. The product has to be consistent, credible and produced efficiently and sustainably for a continuing profit to occur.

Creating Cotton Demand
The yarn will only be as strong as the fiber from which it is made, and that condition will only repeat itself going forward if there is consistency in the processes and raw materials – in this case, the cotton fiber. Some textile terms have migrated to the consumer world, like ring spinning, fiber length, thread count, nanotechnology and a few more. It is important for this to continue, and for the industry to help facilitate this. These terms enhance demand for cotton! After all, how many times have you been asked why one fabric feels better or costs more than another, and how many times could you really answer the question?