Today’s consumer is increasingly demanding sustainable fashion. The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated this with 57% of fashion consumers already making significant changes to their lifestyles to lessen their environmental impact and 67% reporting sustainable materials as an important purchasing factor. (McKinsey, 2020) With sustainability often seen as an expensive and complex journey, how can Fashion brands and retailers easily make their products more sustainable while still meeting budget, aesthetic and performance requirements?
An area often overlooked is the brand’s labelling and packaging design. Traditionally, brands produce specs for their labels based on their requirements but, more often than not, are not aware of their choices’ implications on material consumption, cost and the environment. What’s more, rather than taking a consultative approach by applying technical expertise and innovation to identify small changes that can provide significant benefits, most label suppliers will often simply follow the customer’s brief and produce accordingly.
Fortunately, global apparel label manufacturer, ITL – Intelligent Label Solutions, have combined their expertise and innovation to develop a solution to remedy this: intelligen™. Offered as a free to utilise service, the award-winning* product re-engineering solution helps customers maximise the performance, cost efficiency and sustainability of their labelling and packaging.
The intelligen™ process consists of three steps to make labels and packaging more sustainable and cost-effective:
Step 1: Investigate
ITL gets to know their customer’s product and business better to see where problems might be occurring and what opportunities exist. After selecting the products to improve, ITL’s engineers study the existing design and determine what production platform improvements can be made along with the impact it has on cost and the environment. This information is then used as a baseline.
For woven labels specifically, they may even suggest that the customer use their bespoke virtual proofing LabelView™ that creates realistic and detailed digital images of their labels to help brand direction, colour choice and various other aspects of label design before committing to physical sampling for final approval. LabelView™ also reduces the sampling time from weeks to days while decreasing the use of energy and materials during the sampling process.
Step 2: Re-size
ITL’s engineers slightly alter the ‘Original’ product’s dimensions to offer a ‘Better’ alternative and present the results by highlighting cost comparisons, raw material saving statistics and the impact on the use of natural resources.
For swing tickets, the ‘Better’ alternative is optimised to the printable area of the sheet allowing for the most minimal changes. For woven labels, the ‘Better’ alternative is optimised in terms of weaving width to bring better material efficiency on the loom.
Step 3: Re-invest in ‘green’
Although the cost and environmental savings by now are already impressive, the final step of the intelligen™ process is to create the ‘Best’, most sustainable alternative option.
For paper labels, ITL offers customers the opportunity to re-invest their cost-saving achieved in Step 2 into even more sustainable materials which may have been considered a luxury otherwise. For woven labels, ITL further engineers the label by slightly reducing the weft density or picks per centimetre to bring even greater cost savings due to faster weaving and even less waste due to less yarn needed in production.
“With intelligen™ brands and retailers can now embrace sustainability without fearing complexity and high costs. It’s the perfect solution to help them quickly redesign their labels and packaging to ensure maximum efficiency and minimisation of waste; both of which can create significant cost and environmental improvements,” Jimmy Christopher – ITL Group Sustainability Officer.
