Coats plc, the world’s leading industrial thread and consumer textile crafts business, has been named joint winner of the ‘Game changer through innovation’ category at the Sri Lanka Fashion and Apparel Awards 2013 held during the recent Sri Lanka Design Festival. The award was received for Coats’ innovative colour-matching service, Coats Colour Express.
Coats Colour Express is a revolutionary web-based service that provides the apparel and footwear industry with the world’s fastest and most colour accurate sampling facility for industrial sewing thread.
The unrivalled service offers customers a tool to help them select a precisely matched colour sample thread for their needs. It is the only truly integrated thread sampling service that connects brands, retailers and manufacturers online with Coats sales teams, laboratories and production facilities. The turnaround time for sample threads has been reduced from up to ten days to between two and three and in some cases as little as 24 hours.
Giles Watkins, MD, Sri Lanka, Coats plc, said: ‘This is an influential industry recognition of one of our pioneering initiatives. It was developed in response to customer feedback and our own research which found that customers were finding it difficult to match the thread colour to their samples and turnaround time was too slow. Customers wanted fast, accurate colour and that is what we delivered.’
The ‘Game changer through innovation’ category at the Sri Lanka Fashion and Apparel Awards recognises that innovation is the best way to win in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness and commoditisation. The award is for ideas that have shaped corporate life, helped leaders conceive previously unimagined strategic options and made ideas become a reality.
The judging panel included senior figures from the British Council, The Royal College of Art and The London School of Fashion.
