Addressing Color Management Challenges in a Hybrid Analog/Digital Textiles & Apparel Industry

For many using conventional manufacturing processes in the textiles and apparel industry, consistent color management is a given. It is routine to have garment components manufactured in different locations, and using different fabrics. However, in the end, these components must match when they come together to create the final product. Consider a ski jacket; you have the body of the jacket, but you also have the lining, zippers, buttons, cuffs and other components that need to match the body. With conventional manufacturing techniques, manufacturers rely on lab dips to match color, and in many cases are required to match with a Delta-E of 0.5...a much more stringent tolerance than the graphic arts is held to.

While digital textile printing only represents some 6% of overall printed textiles today, it is growing at double digits. And digital textile printers are not only getting more reliable and accurate, but they are getting faster. Consider, for example, the EFI Reggiani BOLT printing at up to 90 linear meters per minute with a width of 1.8 meters. The company reports that four have already been installed (one in Italy and three in Pakistan) with a decent pipeline of sales opportunities underway. And both Mimaki and Mouvent showed digital textile printers operating at 400 square meters per hour at ITMA recently. These are some examples of faster printers that can begin to replace some of the analog processes currently in use.

Add to that the need for brands to bring more collections per year to market—in some cases as frequently as every few weeks without the luxury of the lengthy development times they previously enjoyed—and the resulting lower quantities per item being produced, and you have another spur to the growth of digital textile printing.

So why does that matter from a color management perspective? In conventional textiles, not only are there longer runs that allow set-up and startup costs to be amortized over a larger quantity, but these manufacturers also use custom colors—or what the graphic arts refers to as spot colors—making it easier to ensure matches from lot to lot and location to location. But with digital printing, process printing is used; that is to say, custom colors are made up through a combination of CMYK inks (sometimes with the addition of other colors to broaden the color gamut). It’s one thing to control the color of a dye bath or spot color inks for screen printing that use the same colorants for large batches of dyeing or printing. It’s entirely another to achieve consistent color with 4+ color process printing—not only consistent from run to run, but consistent with any production that is being done using conventional technologies. In hybrid environments that combine conventionally and digitally produced components, the colors must match no matter how the components are created.

As Omer Kulka, vice president of marketing and product strategy at Kornit Digital recently pointed out, while it is unlikely that two shirts ordered on demand through e-commerce will ever meet up, digital printing is also being used to refill retail inventories. Consider the shirts that remain on the shelf: when new inventory is added, it definitely needs to match that remaining stock, or the retailer will likely have a fit.

Getting Color Right from the Get-Go

Color consistency starts with getting the color specification right. Color Solutions International, for example, has a stock offer of 3,700 colors on its ColorWall, but also works with brands to develop new and custom colors. In fact, only about 30% of color requests are satisfied via the ColorWall library, with 70% being addressed through the development of custom colors. The company has 140 brands and retailers that use its color standards services to select either an existing ColorWall color or to develop a custom standard to more closely meet their needs.

“Whatever the inspiration is—fingernail polish or a Dorito chip—we help them create a custom color or select one from our ColorWall,” said Tim Williams, CSI’s marketing manager. “Once the color is agreed upon, we provide a highly quality-controlled mounted fabric swatch that contains printed information including reflectance data, the color measurement tool that was used, color formulation recipes, light sources, etc. This, together with our software that integrates with PLM systems, allows brands to better manage color and control the approval process across the supply chain. And with the data that is provided, their digital textile printing suppliers can assure their printers are outputting the right color as well.”

Not all buyers are as concerned with consistent color as major brands, however. Consider Spoonflower as an example, that serves a range of buyers from one-time visitors and hobbyists to small business customers, some of whom are knowledgeable about color and others who are not.

“We do offer design tools that allow people to sample a design if color is an important feature,” said Kerry King, senior vice president of research and development at Spoonflower. “They can purchase an 8-inch-by-8-inch swatch for a minimal cost, plus we have color maps and guides for customers who are designing their own artwork, allowing them to enter hex codes or other color designators into their design software. Our goal is to produce the selected color consistently if the customers don’t change anything on their end.”

Streamlining the Supply Chain

Another challenge facing the industry is how to streamline the design and development process and to improve color communication across the supply chain in order to meet these shorter cycle times and faster speed to market. King, who also serves as president of industry association AATCC, points out that many AATCC members are still working within a more traditional workflow in terms of their color development process, and communication between product development and production may not always be optimum.

“Most of our work in AATCC has been to bridge the gap between product development and production,” she said. “There is a long history in design where numerical values for color have not always been the way people communicate color. This is one of the things we are trying to move the needle on, bringing all stakeholders in the supply chain together to talk about what works and what doesn’t, and bridge the knowledge gap between technicians who are dyeing fabric and those that just want a beautiful product. This becomes increasingly important as the role of e-commerce grows in the textiles and apparel industry, where brands need to ensure brand integrity, customer satisfaction and reduction of returns due to unexpected color.”

Collaboration for Better Outcomes

Increasingly, industry players are collaborating with each other, and with industry associations such as AATCC, to help resolve some of these issues. A good example of this, announced at ITMA, is the collaboration Adobe has in place with Datacolor and CSI, which we exclusively reported on just prior to the show. Mike Scrutton, director of print technology and strategy for Adobe’s Print and Publishing Business Unit, explained that Datacolor’s ColorReaderPRO is now integrated with Adobe Textile Designer, allowing designers to measure color inspiration in the real world and transfer the data to Photoshop automatically via a Bluetooth connection. It works like an eyedropper tool: the user simply places the device on the sample, presses the button, and the color is identified for them within Textile Designer. The ColorReaderPRO works seamlessly with third-party color standard libraries, including CSI’s ColorWall and brands’ color libraries. This integration offers time and cost savings in the textile design process by eliminating the need to manually search and match textile color samples with swatches or color codes. We expect to see a growing numbers of collaborations like this as the industry moves to tackle color and other challenges associated with the analog-to-digital migration it is undergoing.

Key Takeaways

Suppliers to the market are educating users on how to use hardware and software, to better understand the impact of lighting on color and appearance, and even on the basics of color theory as we enter a hybrid world where digital and conventional technologies must work side by side.

“The best way to deliver a better color-managed process across the supply chain is through specific, objective communication," said Chris Hipps, global director for Archroma Color Management, "from defining the light sources and a digital QTX color standard to objectively agreeing upon colorimetric acceptance tolerances and limits. A common goal is to allow suppliers to be able to make the same acceptability decisions as their customers faster, remotely and with fewer physical samples. Aligning on the process and controlling as many variables as possible supports better, faster and lower cost color development processes.”

It is clear that digital technologies, whether for design, specification, measurement, color communication or manufacturing– both digital and conventional–have a growing role to play in the future of textiles and apparel. The good news is that lots of progress is being made. But there is still a way to go. Stakeholders in the industry have many ways to stay current on these developments and should take advantage of them. This includes attending shows like ITMA and Techtextil/TexProcess, supporting industry associations such as AATCC, SPESA and others, and taking advantage of the myriad educational opportunities these venues offer. For those who are more advanced in the process, their challenge is to work toward educating a greater swath of the market on the digital technologies that are a growing presence in the industry and the new opportunities they offer. And having a better understanding of color management challenges in a hybrid analog/digital environment is a critical element of these educational efforts.