Talking textiles

12 November 2008
The introduction of clever new anti-counterfeiting technology is great news for the textiles industry.

An inventive new anti-counterfeiting technology was launched at New Zealand Fashion Week this year. 

The technology allows textile and apparel manufacturers to identify their textile products with a unique fibre that is naked to the human eye.  Textiles are woven using yarn that incorporates a small amount of this unique fibre.  Then, when you scan the textile with an ultraviolet light, it makes a low-level electromagnetic sound that is specific to that particular fibre.  This allows the fibre to act as a unique identifier. 

Textiles and clothing will literally speak up and let brand owners know whether they are the genuine article or an illegal copy.
 
This is great news for the apparel industry, which continues to be plagued by counterfeiters.

The first companies that are likely to adopt the technology are yarn and textile manufacturers.  

A common scam in the yarn and textile industry involves clothing factories swapping high quality textile, specifically ordered and paid for by designers, with lower quality textile.  When flaws inevitably arise in the finished garment, the company that has to provide a refund is the textile manufacturer. Meanwhile, the genuine high quality textile has since been sold by the clothing factory for a healthy, yet illegally gained, profit.

The technology won’t just be for high street fashion designers or textiles suppliers. You can also incorporate the inventive fibre into small parts of the garment, such as woven labels. 

In an effort to control counterfeits, some companies supply an exact number of labels to their clothing factories, which exactly equal the number of items they have ordered.  However, these labels can easily be copied! 

So even if a designer orders 10,000 units, and supplies 10,000 of their own labels, they can’t be sure to stop counterfeits.  A factory can easily make 20,000 units instead and brand those extra 10,000 counterfeit units with 10,000 counterfeit labels.  It is impossible for a brand owner to tell the difference between the real thing and the counterfeits.
 
With the introduction of this new technology, brand owners will now be able to supply their factories with woven labels infused with the inventive fibres. If one of your factories makes unauthorised overruns branded with copied labels, then these counterfeits will be immediately identified when their labels do not emit the unique sound associated with the thread in the genuine woven label.

This is not the first technology apparel manufacturers have used in an effort to prevent counterfeits. However, it does appear to be much more sophisticated, and harder to copy, than previous inventions such as hologram labelling.

This new invention will not totally solve the problem of counterfeits for apparel manufacturers.  However, it is likely to be a powerful weapon in the arsenal that brand owners have against counterfeiters. 

In the meantime, it is important to ensure that you have other brand protection measures in place to protect yourself against counterfeits. 

These measures include registering your trade marks in the countries where:

  • you do business
  • counterfeit copies of your brand are sold
  • you have your products manufactured
  • having strict terms of trade with your suppliers that describe how they must deal with your valuable intellectual property
  • conducting regular audits (both announced and unannounced) of your factories.

An edited version of this article was published in Apparel, November 2008.