Creative Work
VeriVide - Color Accuracy in the Textile Industry
Color accuracy is critical across so many industries, but given the environmental impact of the clothing industry, the importance of ensuring color accuracy across textile batches and being able to remotely approve color swatches and samples will have a hugely positive impact on the carbon footprint of the textile industry.
We spoke to Russell Thorpe from VeriVide to understand how EIZO is a critical part of the VeriVide workflow, which helps streamline the approval process for many of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers. Russell is an expert in color in the clothing and textile industry, having worked for Timberland (a manufacturer of outdoor footwear and apparel) to define the process to ensure color consistency for the classic Timberland boots in its iconic colorway.
VeriVide’s 60-Year Journey
VeriVide has been supplying clothing manufacturers for over 60 years, starting with a traditional lightbox to British retailer Marks & Spencer. About 20 years ago, VeriVide started to move into a digital workflow. Having started out with CRT screens, they quickly transitioned to EIZO LCD monitors and have been utilizing EIZO ColorEdge monitors for their various product iterations ever since. As Russell explains, “We’ve always had a lot of trust in the [EIZO] product, and we do find as time goes by, the products get more reliable by becoming more stable. We have total trust in the product now, and our customers have trust as well because they’re making commercial decisions on what they see on screen as opposed to waiting a week or so for physical samples to arrive, so the trust in technology is important.”
“Once the monitor is calibrated, we can rely on it being stable and the accuracy we get from it. We’ve done trials where we’ve compared physical sets of samples to that of an on-screen image when we’ve asked people to look at standard and batch. We always compare the standard and batch, effectively a target versus something that you compare. In nearly 100% of cases, we make the same decision on screen because what you see on screen is the relative color difference between the target and the batch, just like what you would see in a light booth. Most businesses have been using light booths for 60 years and to get them to move over to a digital workflow is purely a change in mindset.”
Transforming Textile Sustainability: VeriVide’s Digital Workflow on EIZO Monitors
There have significant technology developments in the shift from an analog to a digital workflow, which has been led by the products and workflows developed by VeriVide visualized on EIZO ColorEdge monitors. Technology has not been the only shift in the textile industry. Like many industries, the awareness of and transition to more sustainable workflows have, over the past few years, gone hand in hand. As the changes in an industry that is often producing faster turnarounds and cheaper products continue to accelerate, VeriVide technology helps to ensure the consistency and quality without the needs for shipping huge quantities of test samples across the world.
Russell provides some details: “Brands were doing plenty of quality and color audits 20 to 30 years ago. But these audits now include process and product sustainability metrics. Most retailers and brands must report quarterly figures on sustainability aiming to get their carbon [footprint] down towards zero, and they are using data from what is happening in the supply chain. So, they’ll go to the factories and tell them, ‘You need to be a greener, more ethical factory by ensuring workforce diversity and fair wages. You also need to invest in green measures such as solar panels and wastewater recycling.’ Investing in systems like the DigiEye [calibrated digital image capture system] makes the color approval process easier and faster.”
“The textiles [industry] are the most advanced users of color and color measurement equipment. This is because color is critical in fashion. You need to get colors right to sell product. Going back 50 years, most retailers or brands probably had two seasons, winter and summer. They now have at least four seasons a year, with options to phase in new products when required. Suppliers can now offer a fast-track color service using digital, and this is becoming the way to visualize color and approve it remotely.”
“So having a digital approach has made them more flexible in terms of speed to market, and speed to market is very important in textile retailing. If you haven’t got the right color at the right time, you’re not going to sell a particular style.”
VeriVide and EIZO Leading the Charge in Sustainable Color Matching for Textiles
Historically the textile industry used dyed pieces of fabric or painted bits of cardboard as a way of sharing what a specific color should look like, matching these swatches against the material in question. Then the digital world started to creep in through the use of spectrophotometers, which measured the light reflected off a textile or material to provide you with the numbers you need to tell you whether a textile color is correct. However, this also has limitations because not every device is the same, and the data from black and dark materials can be particularly tricky. The spectrophotometers can give you similar results but there can be huge variance in what the color looks like in different lighting conditions, and that also goes for batches of the same item made in different factories to the same dye recipe. In the textile industry, this can be a massive issue, especially when restocking as having items that are meant to be the same look different to the human eye.
Russell provides same technical insight, “Spectrophotometers can measure color to three decimal places (creating data as light references), but at VeriVide we believe color is more than just numbers and you need to visualize color to check if it falls outside the tolerance. For example, say the tolerance is Delta E 1.0 and you’ve got production in China telling you it is at 1.3. This would usually be a cause for rejection, but do you need to reject it?”
“Do you put that batch of fabric back in the dyeing machine for another 10 hours? All that energy, steam, water, chemicals, and wastewater just to get a slight numeric improvement in shade. Redyeing requires the fabric to be subject to more mechanical rotation within the dyeing machine, and after a further 10 hours the fabric is surfaced [worn], so it automatically becomes second quality. So, you’ve just created second quality [material] because of a pass/fail number.”
“What we can now do with a digital workflow is to send to the customer a calibrated image of the sample for commercial review. It can be viewed on a screen and be given a much fairer consideration, i.e., accept what you’ve got. It’s a more sustainable approach, you’re not wasting product, and it gives the ability to make a second decision other than rejecting it.”
“Most brands and retailers are going for more sustainable approach, particularly on cotton. So organic cotton or cotton grown in a better way is the answer. The problem is, you’ve got more natural variation if you grow it organically since you’re not using pesticides and fertilizers i.e., you’re not doing bad things to the soil. You’ll get color variations from season-to-season and consumers need to understand that if it’s organic to expect more variation. We don’t want to chemically pre-treat the fabric being dyed if we know there’s variation in the natural color. Some brands are using enzymes before bleaching it and then dyeing it. This simply undoes anything organic.”
“So, you’re trying to process a natural product that’s got more variation, because the way it’s grown, but then you’re trying to eliminate the variation by doing additional chemical processes to it. If it’s organic, let’s keep it organic. Brands are becoming more aware that they probably have to increase the color tolerances a little bit just to keep the process robust and commercial (profitable for the people are doing it).”
It is well documented that consumers want to understand the provenance of where things come from. They want to understand that products are being manufactured in a sustainable way, not in sweatshops, for example. Essentially, whether or not they are being manufactured in a way that is going to pollute the environment.
VeriVide’s VisionView with EIZO Delivers Reliable, Remote Color Assessment Across the Globe
The lab dyeing process is a long one, as Russell explains, “Each lab dye will take probably a day or two. They can then submit these on to the brand or retailer for sign off. Once you’ve got sign off, you can then get orders coming through. They’ll indicate which factories have got color approval. They get the first choice of production. So, it’s in their interest to get the colors approved as early as possible to become a preferred supplier.”
“They can use the DigiEye System to speed up this process. When they’ve come to place bulk orders, they will obviously use the same factory that produced the lab dye and give them the order for the bulk fabrics. Once you’ve done a batch of fabric that made like 2,000 units of small, 2,000 units of medium, and 2,000 units of large, and if they’re going to the store and all the mediums sell out, you need to replace that with a similar color. Because what you don’t want is a rack of garments where the medium size is one color and the smalls are different.”
“Instead of sending a physical lab, or physical piece of the bulk that takes a week to get to the owner’s desk, you can do it digitally and get it within a few minutes of it being sent. Once you’ve digitized, you’ve got to visualize to see it. This is where EIZO comes into play.”
“EIZO is key to our business, and our brands expect to see an EIZO in our product, particularly within the new VisionView [VeriVide’s tunable, all-LED light booth with EIZO display for color assessment]. We can trust the digital twin technologies as digital twin imaging contains all the color information. You can open the image supplied as a RGB TIFF on the monitor, and it will use the embedded calibration profile of the system calibration. So, if the imaging system is in Bangladesh, it’s using that profile and will create a duplicate of the monitor image ready for immediate color assessment.”
“We call this system ‘vision based remote color assessment’. It displays the color of the actual product not just numbers on the screen. Our new DigiView software allows the creation of a swatch and moving it over [on the screen] or overlapping the batch allows users to perform a visual color comparison. If the swatch of the standard [target] disappears, it must be the same color. If it looks slightly darker and bluer, then it is darker and bluer. It’s as simple as that, and it has made the system so user friendly for people to use. You might be buying the bottoms from Turkey and the tops from China. You can bring them together now on screen and if it doesn’t look any different, then there isn’t a color difference that would cause concern. You’re trying to bring them together in the store and this is why you need color continuity.”
VeriVide has bought consistency to the textile industry and has selected EIZO as the key platform for providing the digital output for their solution, which is bringing consistency to, and helping to reduce the carbon footprint of, the textile industry. Sustainability is an important part of the EIZO business ethos, and we are proud to be able to work with organizations like VeriVide, who are working to help the vast textile industry on their sustainability journey.
VeriVide have been using EIZO ColorEdge monitors having previously included the ColorEdge CG248-4K and CG279X. The current version of VeriVide’s VisionView cabinet contain the ColorEdge CG2700S monitor as part of the overall package.
For more information about VeriVide’s VisionView with EIZO’s ColorEdge CS2700S monitor, visit here.
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