natific AG
Digitizing Textile Color Management

natific AG was founded on the promise to render textile manufacturing supply chains smarter by digitizing the palette design and fabric coloring processes. The company offers textile color management solutions and designs systems customized for that purpose. natific’s systems prevent the waste of development time and dollars through intelligent color design and process control. “Our color management systems are designed to be highly efficient and drive global best practices,” says Doug Bynum, EVP, natific AG.

natific offers a flagship Color Life Cycle Management (CLCM) suite. The SaaS suite is comprised of multiple products that aid designers and brand owners in various stages of the color process. The CLCM modules can also integrate color management into PLM. Voodoo vets the manufacturing feasibility of apparel design inspirations by analyzing the feasibility of the color/ fabric combination. It converts a “pretty color” into a production-optimized, digital color standard (nOSC). To ensure smart development of new colors, natific offers ASAP. By capturing all color development data in real-time, ASAP allows each stage of color development to be tracked in the cloud. Brands and mills use the ColorWarehouse to monitor actual production color consistency across all mills in the supply chain.

natific works with several apparel brands to optimize their supply chain, provide CLCM training/solutions, as well as other services. The crown jewel in natific’s offerings is the Color Accreditation Program (CAP). CAP defines a mill’s capability maturity through an exhaustive analysis of materials, equipment, controls, processes, and knowledge resulting in a dynamic score derived from actual production quality. A qualifying score indicates that the mill is digital-ready and can bypass the expensive lab-dipping process.

“CAP combined with natific’s systems, provides the most comprehensive color management solution in the world today,” states Bynum.

CAP provides brands with a color development fast-track to shorten the textile product life cycle time by eliminating wasteful churn.

CAP combined with natific systems provides the most comprehensive color management solution in the world today

CAP’s popularity has led many customers to seek additional consulting services from natific. Bynum mentions a brand that sought natific’s assistance to produce custom matched fabric, a process typically requiring at least a month. In one week, natific not only developed the nOSC color standard, but initiated production at the mill with full quality verification via the cloud-based ColorWarehouse.

Keith Hoover, VP Material Process & Color Innovation at Under Armour described his company’s reliance on natific’s services.

“Under Armour collaborates with natific to develop and implement programs that ensure our products have the perfect color and meet fastness and quality requirements. Together we have built the CAP and Voodoo resulting in the elimination of months of conventional color development through which our competitors must go. As a result, we have better conformance with our rigorous quality standards, as well as better mill sourcing opportunities around the world. All of our textile mills are CAP-certified, providing us not only with an onsite look of their facilities, but also a steady stream of cloud-based colorimetric data allowing us to monitor their production in real time – regardless of location.”

natific has rolled out Android mobile applications for ASAP and Color Buckets. iOS versions are underway. Bynum also mentions that natific AG’s services and solutions are agnostic to industry and applicable to all areas involving color management. With a vision to reach more customers across different industries, natific AG is well on the path to become a global leader in the arena.