The Italian company has always focused on eco-friendly products and, from today, on digital services to meet the production needs of clients and respect the environment, as Alessandro Marengo, Marketing Manager, and Lorenzo Simoncello, IT Manager, explain.
ZAITEX S.p.A. is an Italian company founded in 1974 that produces and markets dyes and chemicals for the textile industry.
ITMA 2023 is the international showcase during which ZAITEX presented several novelties to the sector: an enlarged team of technicians present in several foreign markets; a renewed proposal of colourants for textile dyeing; a large group of auxiliary products approved by the main voluntary third-party certifications such as GOTS, ZDHC and bluesign; new application processes aimed at achieving considerable results with less environmental impact in the textile preparation, dyeing or finishing stages; the biggest update of the proprietary Rainbow colourimetry software.
One innovation stands out from the rest and that is the ZETATERRA dyeing process, which uses a selection of mineral pigments of natural origin, requiring a maximum temperature of 50°C during the entire process and using only GOTS and ZDHC approved dye auxiliaries. ZETATERRA is the answer of ZAITEX to the insistent demand of fashion brands to use environmentally friendly products in textile production. Overall high durability and low environmental impact.
In addition to the garment dyeing market, for the traditional textile market ZAITEX has always been a reference point in Italy and beyond for providing effective and environmentally friendly solutions for satisfactory results in textile preparation, dyeing and finishing. For each of these and for all textile fibres, ZAITEX provides a complete range of certified products, in particular GOTS, ZDHC and bluesign. Innovation is not only about products: ZAITEX has also invested in the digitisation of its services. ZAITEX is a company that focuses on maximum flexibility in order to provide reliable technical support in the various application phases of the products sold to all customers in the textile industry.
The Product Safety department is an example of how the company has evolved each department: today, it is at the forefront in providing, through software developed in-house, up-to-date technical data sheets and safety data sheets, as well as product certifications upon request.
Finally, IT presented a totally revamped version of Rainbow, the proprietary ZAITEX software for managing colour studies for industrial textile dyeing. It has now become a web application, further improved by integrating powerful artificial intelligence algorithms for the calculation of colour formulas. Distributed in SaaS mode in a microservices cloud, it allows the user, wherever they are, to use the application, read data and control equipment remotely, via the web. You can manage your organisation in locations and departments with different levels of visibility and authorisations, with multi-language management based on user preferences. Such a development demonstrates the total commitment of the company to continuous improvement and innovation.
Which was the first ITMA edition you participated in?
“The first edition of ITMA that we participated in was in 2003, the year we presented the DyeControl® system, which was created to take advantage, from an industrial point of view, of an international patent developed in collaboration with the Loris Bellini company. DyeControl® allows the dyer to monitor the consumption of dyes in the dye baths, identifying the progress of each dye in the recipe. Installable in both laboratory and industrial processing machines, it is connected to software that manages the automatic acquisition of measurements, the calculation of dye concentration and the recording of results. ZAITEX has been on the market for around twenty years with colourimetry solutions and software for industrial textile dyeing for both laboratory and factory production. Rainbow collects the wealth accumulated so far, to project it into the future of web technologies. First and foremost, it will be used internally to develop more software control and new algorithms. ITMA 2023 is the right showcase to present the new version’.
What exactly is Rainbow?
“Rainbow is a fundamental calculation software for industrial textile dyeing, but our ambition is to integrate this application with other characteristics of the products we use for our formulas. In fact, we want to create an office dedicated to formulas also oriented towards the choice of technical, ecological or sustainability characteristics of the products. The aim is to integrate data from safety data sheets, so that we have more information on the characteristics of the dyes we choose. Rainbow is only one piece of a bigger picture, our ambition is to create an integrated system capable of offering increasingly customised and sustainable solutions for the industrial textile dyeing industry’.
For you, what does this extra piece represent?
“Our company deals with everything related to colour, with the ambition of covering many areas of interest. Despite a very large catalogue of more than 3,000 products, we strive to classify them and monitor their information, including safety data sheets and analyses. Colour management is only one component of ZAITEX. The objective of the company is to offer our customers not only the product, but also the service and the industrial method to achieve the desired results in production. Our dedicated laboratory represents one of the fundamental building blocks: the study of the colour formulation. Thanks to this service, customers can obtain high-quality, customised colour studies.”
What is the most challenging request customers ask of you?
“That of constantly innovating. It is too easy to work on consolidated things. The challenge is to find alternative products when there are difficulties with the current ones, mainly for two reasons: to propose customised, flexible solutions quickly; to anticipate market demands proactively.”
Which markets are you most present in at the moment?
“Our company has 49 years of history and started as a small local distributor for industrial textile dye works in Italy. Over the years, we have expanded our presence not only in Italy, but also internationally. We have followed our customers as they have expanded abroad, opening new markets in North Africa, Eastern Europe, South America and Central America. In particular, our colourimetry business has also developed in Angola, Iran and Lithuania. With Rainbow, our distribution model will allow us to reach new markets because the main advantage of this system is that we can manage local equipment through the web, allowing us to be a business that can take readings on devices that are thousands of kilometres away. Naturally, there are some implications that we still have to consider, especially with regard to interaction with subcontractors, but we are enthusiastic about exploring all the possibilities that this new product offers us. In any case, our company will continue to look for new markets and offer our customers the best services and innovative products.
How many months have you given yourself to get initial feedback on Rainbow?
“We have already made a first sale and, thanks to our existing customers, we will be able to try to expand our market presence with this product as well and generate interest in new ones. If there are new interesting opportunities, we will be ready to expand our business. With the aim of maintaining high quality.
Did you present any other new products at the fair?
“We placed great importance on the results of the work of the R&D team, which is committed to developing products suitable for industrial applications with low environmental impact. At the fair, we presented dye + auxiliary packages dedicated to each of the main fibres – polyamide, cotton, wool and polyester – and on the new bluesign® certified product selections of which ZAITEX has been a bluesign® System Partner since 2020. In particular, for cotton and wool, we have a section dedicated to dyeing, which is our most popular business in the traditional textile sector. Our aim is to propose dyes for almost all textile fibres and all industrial dyeing applications, focusing not only on the dyeing sections, but also on special solutions and processes, e.g. for bleaching and dyeing wool with GOTS approved products. In addition, we have concentrated on the study of polyester dyes for the automotive sector, which is relatively new to us, but which represents an interesting niche in both textiles and leather.
What is your main focus today?
“Our main focus remains colour chemistry applied to textiles and, in this respect, we have always tried to optimise processes to save water, time and energy. This translates into substantial process optimisation, which we have always tried to put into practice and which we have renamed ‘Eversave’ for the dyeing part: save water, save time and save energy. We try to achieve maximum savings in water, time and energy with an approach that we presented at the trade fair, putting the spotlight back on the products we already had and on some new products that we specifically developed. In addition, our commitment to sustainability is always present and we try to adopt practices that allow us to be efficient and environmentally friendly”.