‘Technical textile offers breaks for value-added products’
November 05, 2014 - United States Of America
“By their very nature, technical textiles will always be a smaller volume segment of the whole textile industry. However, it is a space that offers many opportunities to market specialized value-added products, and capture significant market share,” a top official from US based - Glen Raven says.
Paige Mullis, Director of Concept Development at Glen Raven was responding to a query from technicaltextiles.net, on whether Glen Raven sees it as an opportunity or hindrance on her observation that, technical textiles account for just 10-15 percent of the overall Indian textile market.
Producer and marketer of high- performance fabrics designed for a wide variety of residential, commercial and industrial applications - Glen Raven had last month announced that it is exploring, expanding its presence and operations in India.
Glen Raven first entered India in 2007, by virtue of acquiring US-based Strata Systems, Inc., which owned 50 percent of Strata India, a manufacturer and marketer of geosynthetics, set up in 2004 as part of Strata’s global operations.
Explaining their India-specific plans, Paige Mullis informs, “We are only exploring the technical textile market in India at this time, and bringing our portable Concept Gallery to Mumbai for a few days through our subsidiary Strata Geo systems India Pvt. Ltd.
She added, “The purpose of this is to explore the potential for collaboration and innovation with a combination of many products and processes that we are involved with globally and also to let the creative juices flow.”
The original Concept Gallery is located at Glen Raven’s corporate headquarters and features more than 150 different Glen Raven products. It has been designed as a tool to promote creativity, discovery and collaboration in pursuit of innovation.
On India’s performance fabrics industry, she says, “We think it is a nascent stage, with many application-driven opportunities to consider. Producing high-performance fabrics is a challenging endeavor, but finding the correct marketing plan, distribution network, inventory management system, and long-range vision is even more daunting.
“Glen Raven has gone through this process multiple times during our 134 year history, in a number of different countries, and we are actively engaged in this evaluation for the Indian market.” (AR)
Click here to read the whole interview.