Building on The Interline’s involvement with the leading denim industry trade show, in November 2023, we partnered with Sonovia – whose unique D(y)ENIM technology aims to drastically reduce the environmental impact and all-round footprint of denim dyeing by eliminating toxic chemicals, cutting GHG emissions, land use, and water consumption – to analyse the complex journey that genuinely disruptive, direct process interventions and supply chain innovations must take towards industrialisation.
This exclusive story showcases how the support of brands and suppliers will be essential to truly delivering on fashion’s sustainability objectives, and shines a spotlight on what a truly waterless and low-waste approach to denim dyeing looks like.
Key takeaways:
- Across market segments, fashion’s traditional material development, processing, and manufacturing processes have become entrenched, creating a kind of upstream inertia and slowing adoption of disruptive innovations.
- Combined, commercial pressures and climate regulations are influencing the industry to act, and new supply chain technology like D(y)ENIM, from Sonovia, is quickly becoming commercially viable.
- Successfully replacing traditional supply chain processes with disruptive alternatives – dramatically reducing their environmental footprint at the same time as revolutionising their efficiency – will require investment and support from both brands and suppliers if innovation is going to translate into industrialisation.
The fashion industry is no stranger to disruption, or to threats to business continuity. Brands have grown accustomed to the idea that the context they work in, and the consumers they sell to, can all change in an instant. In a globalised industry with a complex upstream supply chain and a shifting downstream market, certainty in the middle is in very short supply.
But the kind of threats that fashion has become grudgingly comfortable with in the last few years have all come from outside – from external factors that reshaped the wider world and recontextualised fashion’s place in it. Whether it’s the cost of labour, the price of raw materials, the availability of manufacturing capacity, or the mix of online and offline retail channels, these unpredictable, fragile variables are all things that happen to and around fashion. They don’t come from within.
Where the industry has, arguably, done a worse job of adapting is on the flipside: recognising and acting upon internal disruption. When shifts happen outside a brand’s walls, they have the resilience and the mechanics to handle it, forged in the flames of a worldwide pandemic and a series of tragic conflicts and geopolitical upheavals. When they happen closer to home – when new ideas emerge that challenge deeply-held traditions, or disruptive innovations raise pointed questions about entrenched value chain processes – organisations seem to find it much harder to adjust.
And this is especially true when those innovations and ideas relate to supply chain, sourcing, and production processes. These are elements that brands have, historically, preferred to leave untouched, since they generally “just work,” and because they take place offshore, out of sight, and beyond the purview of the brand’s direct control. And these are also the processes that should, in theory, contribute the most to the sustainability profile of finished products – meaning that a lack of visibility into them also easily translates into the making of ESG / CSR claims that are difficult to substantiate at best, or unfounded at worst.
As a result, fashion has landed itself with a kind of upstream inertia – which manifests itself not just as inadvertent “greenwashing,” but as more deep-seated inaction when it comes to wider supply chain transformation. Outside of vertically integrated organisations, very few brand and retail businesses are welcoming supply chain disruption and invention with open arms – preferring slow, iterative improvement instead of overdue overhauls. Despite some penetration of IoT concepts for connected hardware and preventative maintenance, and the steady inroads made by direct to garment printing, wide-scale industrialisation of new methods and new ideas is still rare. These ideas typically make it into “marketable” pilots and proofs-of-concept, but seldom much further.
And while sometimes these ideas stall because they are simply not viable, or ready for commercialisation, there are equally as many scenarios where a novel method, material, or process is under-utilised because it addressed supply chain challenges that brands simply weren’t aware of.
So, because the benefits of investing in change and innovation in those areas are less immediate and less clear-cut than investments made at brand HQ, and because the expected value is often split between supplier and customer, the responsibility for supporting and scaling these innovations typically falls to the suppliers and producers themselves.
And while those suppliers / vendors do more often have the appetite for implementing innovative and disruptive ideas that will improve their own bottom-line efficiency, or their ability to meet their customers’ expectations around sustainability, most of them are still reliant on investment and support from their brand customers. They lack the upfront capital needed to either industrialise new ideas, to pause lines long enough to test them, or both. And as a result, those disruptive ideas fail to find a foothold.
We need only look at the slow uptake of products like Renewcell, or the glacial commercial and industrial roll-out of other alternative materials, to see a demonstration of how difficult it seemingly is to find traction for supply-side disruption, or to build an appetite for industrialising upstream innovation.
But the maths behind that inertia are overdue for change, because fashion is now beset by two large-scale external forces that the industry is unlikely to be able to address without re-engineering and re-evaluating how it approaches sourcing and production.
External disruption drives an appetite for internal transformation
The first of these is the strong mandate for brands to be able monitor and more directly influence the speed and the profitability of the lifecycle of each individual product. As a result of a cutthroat economic climate, brands must now look much more deeply into where time and value are leaking out of their sourcing and supply chain processes, and is increasing the likelihood of those brands wanting to then influence or change those processes in partnership with their vendors.
In practice, this is also increasing the likelihood of brands pursuing vertical integration – simultaneously returning final cut, make, and sew to consumer markets like the US and the European Union, at the same time as evaluating other steps in the product lifecycle – including material processing and development, and especially intensive, entrenched processes like denim dyeing – that can also come back under brand ownership and be relocated onshore, unlocking new possibilities in localised, small-run, high-variety production.
Second is the rapidly-developing landscape of sustainability legislation, which is throwing into sharp relief the reality that a lot of entrenched processes consume a wildly unnecessary amount of resources, generate an outsize amount of pollution, or undermine the industry’s environmental or social objectives in some other quantifiable way.
And although iterative improvements to areas like denim dyeing are held out as delivering a measurable difference in environmental impact, the reality is that existing “water free” methods still consume extensive amounts of water pre and post-dyeing, as well as making use of toxic chemicals and creating pollution – none of which is a burden that brands will be keen to bring back into their domestic markets.
As a result, the opportunity cost of continued inaction and inertia is now higher than it has perhaps ever been. Fashion businesses that elect to leave their supply chains static and out-of-reach, or that choose not to support the new ideas their vendor partners might have, are facing the very real possibility of being left behind – both in their routes to market and in their ability to comply with critical sustainability legislation.
Fortunately, as anyone who has read The Interline’s Sustainability Report 2023 will know, forward-thinking companies like Sonovia – our partner for this story, and a company with significant experience building science-first industrial solutions for textile supply chains – have already invested significant amount of time and effort into pioneering new approaches that could offer tangible commercial and sustainability benefits to the brands and suppliers that are willing to support their expansion and industrialisation.
The difference between passive platforms and direct process interventions
The landscape of sustainability-focused solutions – whether they concentrate on people or planet – can essentially be divided into two categories.
The one brand audiences are most conversant with are passive innovations. These include supply chain mapping solutions, demand planning software, collaboration platforms, and other software methods of measuring and aggregating information. When the fashion industry talks about taking action on sustainability, this is the category of innovations that sit at the top of the pile.
Arguably, though, the biggest leaps towards reducing fashion’s impact lie in the other category: direct process innovations and interventions, which are often-radical changes to the way a particular upstream stage of the product lifecycle operates. The nature of these interventions can be as varied, as broad, or as specialised as the different lifecycle stages and operations that contribute to the creation of different product categories – from new solutions for cutting fabric and better ways to harvest raw materials, to standardised labour tracking and innovative approaches to dyeing, finishing, and treating.
These direct interventions also tend to be the most difficult for brand audiences to grasp the specifics of, since they are the result of deep, scientific research and development, and because understanding their mechanics requires high levels of familiarity with the existing process they propose to replace.
For example, Sonovia’s D(y)ENIM method uses a proprietary, patented ultrasonic, single-step process to replace a highly complex and unstable, multi-step process of pre-dyeing scouring & washing, dipping yarns in reduced leuco-indigo solution, and reoxidising them, before post-dye washing and finishing. The benefits of this swap could be clear and compelling (with significant savings on space, time, and cost, and a reduced footprint all-around) but the inner workings are not something the average brand is immediately familiar with.
And within that second category, there is also a broad spectrum of commercial readiness. Under the same umbrella reside alternative material inputs that require deeping funding to make it out of the laboratory, and fully-commercialised solutions that are in active use as part of pilot programme or innovation schemes by major suppliers and their brand partners.
The work that Sonovia is doing falls into this second bracket: the company recently announced a strategic partnership with the renowned and innovative Italian luxury denim producer PureDenim (who also had a prominent position at Première Vision Denim last month), with a pilot programme that got underway in late 2023, and a target for full industrial deployment and commercialisation by July 2024.
So what makes an alternative approach to denim dyeing so compelling for sustainability, speed, and bottom-line cost reasons? And what could successful uptake of Sonovia’s ultrasonic solution herald for the wider move away from supply chain inertia and towards greater support of direct process interventions?
How technology is challenging tradition in denim dyeing and finishing
The process of turning cotton yarns into woven indigo-dyed denim is both a prime target and a strong template for wider supply chain innovation for a few key reasons.
First, denim is both a buoyant and creative sector; from the basic foundation of a single material type comes a huge array of stylistic and scientific innovation, and effectively every organisations uses denim in some capacity, whether it’s as part of a multi-category, multi-brand, mass-market offer, or as the cornerstone of a high-end single-category brand.
And second, the denim sector has invested a great deal in new methods of producing, treating, and finishing fabric, but many of the steps in the denim lifecycle still hinge on inefficient, wasteful processes. Many dyeing methods (and the finished products that incorporate them) are promoted as being “waterless,” for instance, but this claim refers to one or more narrow steps in the cycle – not the dyeing process as a whole.
Whether it’s stood unchanged for centuries, or whether it incorporates one or more smaller, iterative improvements, the average denim dyeing process still involves a long line of sequential dye baths – each with its own water and chemical footprint – that are designed to progressively apply an insoluble dyestuff to create an end result that is as close as possible to the originally-intended shade. Combine this with pre-dye preparation and post-dye washing and treating, and it’s little wonder that denim is routinely labelled as being one of the most pollutive and resource-hungry sectors of fashion, despite a lot of attention and investment being directed at material innovation and novel chemistries.
At an industrial scale, the steps involved in turning cotton into denim, the resources consumed in the process, and the effluent that they output have remained relatively unchanged for centuries.
Crucially, unlike some traditional, craftsperson-centric processes that are venerated because the deliver results that are impossible to replicate in other ways, traditional denim dyeing is neither accurate nor efficient. At the end of the long, linear, wasteful process, the end result may still not be what the designer or material developer originally envisioned.
By contrast, Sonovia’s D(y)ENIM method is shorter, more stable, and has considerable benefits for cost, speed, resource and space saving, and sustainability. In greater detail, it works by using ultrasound to create what the company refers to as “cavitation bubbles” in a dye bath, which build up energy and pressure before releasing it to create ultrasonic jet streams (moving at in excess of 1,000 metres per second) that physically inject a unique dye chemistry onto the textile – replacing a long, linear process and vastly reducing time and environmental impact.
When compared to other dyeing processes, the benefits are stark:
- Sonovia’s approach supplants the need for an average of 6-12 sequential dyeing baths with a single step.
- The setup time involved in a new dye batch can be reduced from 2-5 hours to between 30 minutes and 1 hour – enabling producers to increase capacity and reactivity.
- The amount of water consumed in the full dyeing process for a single batch drops from 60,000 litres on average (comprised of 17,000 litres to begin with, and a further 8 hours of dyeing at a utilisation rate of 5,000 litres per hour) to >5,000 litres in total – delivering an instant uplift to the sustainability of any garment that’s produced from denim dyed using Sonovia’s process.
- The space required to run the D(y)ENIM process is considerably smaller than the existing line setup – a reduction from up to 100 metres to less than 20, creating the possibility for much greater capacity and throughput in the same footprint.
- Sonovia’s process uses no toxic hydrosulphite chemicals
- Nearly the entirety of the waste generated through other dyeing methods in both yarn, water and chemistry (which requires comprehensive waste management to deal with sludge and salinated, non-reusable water) is eliminated under the D(y)ENIM process.
- The dyeing process with D(y)ENIM is fully automated and provides consistent shade, contrary to the complexity required to maintain proper pH and chemical dosing using traditional methods, which introduce a high degree of variability.
- D(y)ENIM could enable manufacturers and their brand partners to target small batch production at a similar cost to high-volume runs but without the same commitment to scale, affording them extra opportunities for new fabric development, or providing chances to fill in small gaps in inventory in a way that isn’t current possible.
But what will it actually take to turn innovations like Sonovia’s into fully-industrialised solutions, ready to integrate into the supply chain? What needs to change in the way fashion thinks about upstream invention and disruption to make those benefits more universally accessible?
Overcoming supply chain inertia will rely on multi-stakeholder support
Unlike passive sustainability solutions, where cloud-native software can be almost instantly deployed for in-house users, Sonovia’s new machinery and chemistry are representative of a lot of direct process interventions in the sense that they will require support, continued investment, and a willingness to challenge inertia to achieve their full potential.
These kinds of direct innovations will not simply find their way into the hands of established dye houses, weavers, and denim producers one day – their integration into real, working production lines will require active participation from the full spectrum of fashion stakeholders, from committed suppliers to their brand customers.
There is also active participation and preparation required on the part of the technology innovators themselves, and Sonovia is a strong example of how disruptors can smooth the grade of their own onramps. The D(y)ENIM process requires less capital expenditure than might be expected from a full overhaul of an long-established upstream process, with straightforward setup and ease of integration. At the same time as delivering what Sonovia positions as “the greenest indigo dyeing technology ever developed,” the company has also secured patents and built out the proof points and partnerships to demonstrate the proximity of full-scale commercialisation – something the company and its industry and brand partners plan to phase in during 2024, with scaling-up completed by PV Denim in July, accompanied by an official launch, and then full-scale production for notable brands that contract with PureDenim in the final quarter of 2024..
Provided that level of support is made available, then, the pathway to return on investment industry-wide is clear. Solutions like Sonovia’s D(y)ENIM are challenging entrenched methods, and promising positive disruption not simply for the sake of it, but because the chance for real and lasting change is within reach – whether it’s eliminating a large amount of resource utilisation, cutting waste, reducing cost, increasing speed to market, bringing complex lifecycle stages back in-country, or any number of other metrics.
These positive impacts will not be realised overnight, but the hard work of research, development, and invention has already been done. The torch is now being handed to the wider fashion industry, and the question is how far the most forward-thinking brands and suppliers are willing to run with it, in tandem.
About our partner: Founded in 2013, Sonovia is leading the way in sustainable denim dyeing and textile finishing through its patented ultrasonic technology, reducing water, toxic waste, and energy consumption in production. The company specialises in developing and selling this technology and eco-friendly chemical compounds to manufacturers for integration into existing production lines.