Digital To Be The New Mantra For The Textile Machine Industry: Mike Horsten

Dyeing, Printing, Processing

Digital To Be The New Mantra For The Textile Machine Industry: Mike Horsten

Mike Horsten, General Marketing Manager Mimaki, speaking at the Frankfurt exhibition meet indicated that the textile industry is eying a paradigm shift towards digitalisation. Horsten made an emphasis on this count by declaring, "Everything that can become digital, will become digital."

On the face of it, a significant shift is visible towards digitalization in the textile manufacturing and supply chains. This compounded by advances in digital printing promises to be a driving factor in the digitalisation of the textile sector. In addition to becoming predominant in the fast fashion sector, it also looks to occupy prime space in home furnishings and technical textiles.

Interestingly, Amazon seems to be working symbiotically towards this end. The company announced a significant investment in the Israel-based digital printing equipment manufacturer Kornit.

Amazon which is well-known marketing chanel for making machine purchases, has picked on Kornit for supply of a large number of on-demand textile production systems. The company has decided to purchase nearly US$ 38 million in Kornit shares in the coming five years.

As of now, Kornit can boast of having over 1,200 of its digital printing machines installed worldwide. A majority of these machines are direct-to-garment systems. Kornit's unit at Allegro is a roll-to-roll system that can accommodate virtually any fabric, and this has some obvious advantages over the rest.

The main features are that the machine is flexible and simple to use. It involves little investment risk. In addition, the wastage of water and energy is far less than in analog production," explained Merav ZImerman, Product marketing manager for Kornit. She further said, "It's possible to print endless designs in continuous mode and we have customers running machines 24 hours a day on orders for just one or two meters, with up to 50,000 designs being cut and mailed directly to people. The technology is so popular that it is lending itself to order activated production."

"Manufacturers and retailers are both moving from supply and demand to demand and supply, and to purchases before production," she said, adding, "Imagine how much money both manufacturers and retailers can save."