Factory Talk: Isko’s Italian hub offers inspiration
Isko’s Creative Room in the picturesque northern Italian town of Castelfranco Veneto houses a design and style research hub and marketing team that helps bring the fabrics to life. Isko is part of Turkish textile group Sanko, which has a 90-strong R&D team working across its textiles divisions. The group is known for innovation and holds 20 patents, with 100 more pending and 100 trademarks.
“We have to follow every market, just following denim is not enough,” Sanko textile engineer Fatma Korkmaz tells us. “We analyse fabric such as sportswear, then we match the technology and try to apply it to denim.”
Some of the latest developments include wellness fabrics Mantra, which use microcapsules to impart small amounts of aloe vera, Q10 and coffee onto the skin; Vulcano, which makes the fabric laser ready; and Ultradry, which encourages wicking from cotton.
Its recently launched R-Two project reduces the amount of raw material sourced by relying on a blend of reused cotton and recycled polyester.
“Our boss is a textile engineer and invested in eliminating waste while some other companies chose not to so that they could sell it as ‘pre-consumer waste’,” explains Ebru Ozkucuk Guler, Isko’s sustainability manager. “From the cotton fields, around 10% is lost because of the yarn to fibre process. “Isko worked with the Textile Exchange to prove that we are reusing the lost cotton – we monitor every single step, managing loss and reusing the fibre.” She adds that all of the group’s fabrics conform to ZDHC standards, among others.
In the Castelfranco division, brands and design departments can work with Isko’s team on developing new collections, using nearby laundries such as Everest. In San Benedetto del Tronto (on the Adriatic coast of central Italy), the company also operates a finishing R&D centre, Iskoteca, which produces around 50,000 wash samples per year. Washing research manager Moreno de Angelis describes the department as a tool for sharing washing know-how with customers. It is close to more than 12 industrial laundries, all of which are part of a longstanding tradition of textiles and manufacturing know-how in the Marche region.
For 2020, Isko says there are many more developments in the pipeline. “We have biologists and physicists who are preparing very different and experimental products,” adds Ms Korkmaz.
