Coats Group PLC, the world’s leading manufacturer in thread and structural components for apparel, footwear and performance materials, along with its innovative software division Coats Digital, is pleased to announce that it has won five awards at the 2023 Just Style Excellence Awards.
Coats Group won three prestigious awards: The Investment Sustainability Award for its newly launched Madurai Sustainability Hub, The Environmental Sustainability Textile Award for its innovative, new Eco-B microfibre, and The M&A Award for the acquisition of footwear specialists Texon.
Coats Digital’s unique fabric buying and cutting solution, FastReactFabric won two awards, The Environmental Supply Chain Award and The Product Launch Digital Platform Award, for its innovative features and potential to drive positive, sustainable change in the fashion industry.
The Just Style Excellence Awards is an independent recognition program that uses business intelligence from GlobalData and Artificial Intelligence to identify and rank top-tier companies and their achievements in over 200 countries. The program recognises excellence in areas such as Business Expansion, Diversity, Environment, Financing, Innovation, Investment, Mergers and Acquisitions, Marketing, Product Launches, Research and Development, Safety, and Social Responsibility.
Rajiv Sharma, Chief Executive Officer at Coats Group, said:
“I am delighted that we have been recognised with five awards for the Just Style Excellence Awards. This reflects our strategic objectives of bringing Coats closer to our customers and accelerating our growth. We are immensely proud of our progress towards achieving our sustainability goals alongside our revolutionary technology solutions that continue to solve industry challenges whilst making the world a better and more sustainable place to live. This has only been possible with the support and dedication of our incredible team”.
1. The Investment Sustainability Award Madurai Sustainability Hub
The Sustainability Hub in Madurai will support customers and other stakeholders in creating sustainability in the industry, enabling Coats to streamline sustainability innovation, enhance brand collaborations and facilitate faster sustainable product offers and market entry capabilities.
It is part of a 10 million USD investment planned over the next five years in scaling up the development of green technologies and materials to accelerate the achievement of Coats’ ambitious sustainability targets.
2. The Environmental Sustainability Textile Award
Coats Epic Eco-B is a recycled corespun polyester thread incorporating an additive from CiCLO® to reduce synthetic fibre accumulation in landfills and oceans. The technology creates biodegradable ‘spots’ in the polymer matrix, where naturally occurring microbes in certain environments can break down the plastics just as they do with natural fibres. Fibres and yarns are traceable – CiCLO® technology has an authentication program that requires all fibre producers to validate the presence of CiCLO® in every batch they manufacture. It is certified to STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX® CLASS I and is less energy-intensive to produce in comparison to virgin materials, which results in lower carbon emissions during production. Delivers a similar level of performance as the virgin range whilst offering sustainability benefits.
3. The M&A Award
Coats acquired Texon in 2022. Texon provides high-quality structural components to the global footwear market and has a long heritage as a proven supplier to the world’s leading brands. The business is focused on sustainable innovation and supplies high-performance, sustainable materials, including heel counters, toe puffs and insoles to the highly attractive premium athleisure footwear market. Texon, which has operations in Asia and Europe, is a complementary addition to Coats’ existing footwear business with attractive commercial opportunities from leveraging Coat’s existing footprint.
4. The Environmental Supply Chain Award
FastReactFabric is the only fabric optimisation solution in the industry that uniquely connects fabric cutting and buying operations into a single platform, enabling fashion manufacturers to significantly reduce the fabric required which will have a positive impact on the environment.
FastReactFabric is being continually advanced to address changing industry needs and now offers fabric roll allocation which is a pivotal step in the garment manufacturing process. FastReactFabric employs advanced algorithms that consider various factors to provide a roll allocation plan within seconds. This plan is optimised for maximum efficiency, resulting in minimal leftover fabric remnants.
5. The Product Launch Digital Platform Award
Launched in September 2022, FastReactFabric provides the insights apparel manufacturers need to track real-time fabric usage and wastage, as well as efficiently plan for complex styles and colourways.
The solution has proven to significantly reduce fabric costs by up to 2.5 percent; shrink fabric buying and planning times by 95 percent and provide 100 percent fabric tracking, reducing overall fabric remnants that so often end up in landfill.
