2018 was a very busy and exciting year for natific! We celebrated 10 years of digital Color Lifecycle Management, hosted our first International Color Summit and we also hit several other major milestones we’d like to share with you here.
natific Senior Partner, Doug Bynum, leading a breakout session at our International Color Summit
What we’ve been up to:
In February we attended the Product Innovation Apparel Conference in LA, as well as their New York event in June. This was a great opportunity to network with others, not only in the textile industry, who are doing some great things in the digital realm. Key focuses were data management, sustainability, and digital product development within apparel and footwear. natific will continue to attend these events in the future – we hope to see you there!
natific also spoke at the Re’aD summit in Dusseldorf, Germany regarding the value of color. This event hosted more than 200 guests from key German brands and retailers across multiple industries. natific co-exhibited with Color Digital, X-Rite, Pantone, Assyst, Epson and Premiére Vision Paris. It’s exciting to see that the concepts and methodologies that our US and Canada-based clients have successfully been implementing in their global supply networks since 2009 has started to impact European brands and retailers.
We’re growing!
natific Team:
This year we’ve added several new people to our team to help with our growth in all areas, and we’re still looking to increase our support in Asia. Please help us in welcoming:
Jenny Chuang: Certifications, Taipei, Taiwan
Mike Ou: Certifications, Taipei, Taiwan
Mark Kovac: Business Analyst, Budapest, Hungary
Caitlin Wilson: Sales & Marketing, Minneapolis, USA
Our current job openings can be found at https://natific.com/careers/
natific Clients:
We’re happy to announce that we’ve onboarded several new clients in 2018, including PVH, Levi’s, VF, and C&A. We continue to deepen our relationships with long time clients such as Under Armour, Hugo Boss Knitwear, LuluLemon Athletica, to name a few. We’ve also onboarded several new industrial clients such as:
- Dong Guan New Horizon Elastic Fabric CO.,LTD
- Formosa Taffeta Vietnam Co., LTD
- Huge Bamboo Enterprise Co.,Ltd. TW
- C&T VINA. CO. LTD.
- INNOTEX
- Nan Ya Plastics Corporation
- Sun Tak Holding (Shenzhen) Ltd.
Certifications
The number of factories we’ve certified continues to grow each year. Since we started the CAP certification, we have completed over 2500! This year we’re proud to announce the natific Color Certification Program, or CCP.
This is a new certification which bridges the gap for mills that aren’t prepared to participate in the full CAP program, but want to work towards it. CCP was designed as a program to onboard new suppliers, extend color matching competence at small to medium suppliers, and to allow brands to collect production QC data from more suppliers.
Our certification and auditing team has already started performing these new certifications with great results! We will continue to expand this program in 2019 and beyond. The first mills to become certified were EPO Technology Co. LTD in Taiwan and Textilia in Columbia.
Why CCP? Here are a few reasons:
- Train & Evaluate Suppliers on Color Matching
- Improve Color Development Results
- Reduce Team Review Submissions
- Improve Color Coordination
- Created for suppliers who are not technically ready to go through CAP
- Lower Cost Option
- Transparency for the Brand
- Reduce Color Process workload at the Brand
Software
Our software development team has been hard at work making improvements to our existing systems, ASAP & ColorWarehouse, many of which are direct results of your valuable feedback. You will see some exciting changes to functionality and appearance roll out over the next few months.
They’ve also developed the WhiteWarehouse, an extension of ColorWarehouse that uses 3 new natific-engineered whiteness indices to evaluate uploaded whites. Now our customers are able to achieve more accurate whites, which were previously unmeasurable in the ColorWarehouse. Look out for more information on this in 2019.
QcExpress
Those of you who are uploading data from spectrophotometers into our systems are familiar with M3K, the tray agent that allows the spectro data to populate into ASAP or ColorWarehouse. Although it is an effective solution, we’ve been working on something that’s going to save hours in uploading time. It’s called QcExpress and it’s going to be a game changer for many of our clients. We’re already starting to roll it out this year to replace M3K for ASAP users and will have it connected to the ColorWarehouse next year. In several professional pilots we’ve found that QcExpress saves operators 2 minutes of entry time for each measurement compared to Datacolor Tools® or X-Rite iQC®. That’s an hour saved every 30 samples uploaded!
Lastly, you may have noticed a slightly updated natific image lately. If you haven’t already, we welcome you to take a look around our refreshed website (www.natific.com). As you can tell from this newsletter, we’re working hard to keep bringing you unrivalled digital color technology. With over 10 years behind us we’re not stopping now!
Happy Holidays from your natific team