The advanced materials industry is going through a tremendous transformation, with sustainability taking center stage. Increasingly, consumers and industry professionals are seeking innovative fabric and material implementations.
For instance, market disruptors consistently create new advanced material standards for the market, meeting evolving consumer needs around style, design, and global appeal. With autonomous vehicles on the horizon, and as automotive interiors continue to morph into the mobile living rooms of the future, there’s growing consumer demand for innovative automotive interior design.
It’s clear: product engineers and designers need to consider the entire experience a person has when using their creations when it comes to design and finishes. They need to look beyond the components and construction of their material choices and make strategic decisions across appearance, design, and finishes, and how that impacts the senses and emotions to make them appealing to the target audience.
Here are some insights on how product managers, designers, and engineers can work with advanced materials manufacturers to create striking exterior and interior textile designs by sourcing the highest quality fabrics in design and using world-class textile coloring, finishing, and dyeing processes.
The art and science of color matching
Cutting-edge advanced materials manufacturers can typically leverage a customer’s set of colors, fabrics, or lamination processes they want and match it with incredible accuracy.
But what if you are not sure just what you want? Then you’re going to want an advanced materials partner with extensive research and development capabilities to give insight into novel interior solutions, creating new color, finishing, and dyeing treatments. This approach can help you respond and meet the next-generation consumer tastes and trends.
When evaluating an advanced materials partner, look for one who demonstrates a commitment to scientific color processes from hypothesis to synthesis, which means they can meet specifications and requirements across a wide range of methods and provide better performance and better products for you.
Jet dyeing, the gold standard of color application, is another color competency to investigate. This technique gives auto manufacturers and other advanced materials projects an unmatched presentation and the most options and variations to meet ever-evolving and complex marketplace directions.
Versatile finishing processes and capabilities
Beyond color, product designers need to also factor in ideal finishing techniques for their designs. These methods could include napped and unnapped processes and material selection such as nylons, polyesters, and cat-polyesters.
Sometimes you’ll still want something entirely new. In those instances, you’ll want to leverage a solid and experienced R&D team again to develop a process that meets your innovative needs. Whatever your bill of materials, specific fabric standards, or design request, seek a partner who will meticulously design and test finishing treatments to determine what works best for you and your customers.
And when you’re developing in mass quantity, consistency is critical. You should have a quality check to get a high percentage of textiles, advanced materials, and automotive interiors solutions to match in color and appearance. Your goal? Color match for construction and consistency, batch after batch, with high yields and low waste.
Insight drives design innovation
When it comes to the coloring, finishing, and dyeing of innovative and advanced textiles, your advanced materials partner needs the right expertise to guide you through the process with a refined and technical approach. The right partner will provide guidance and global collaboration to keep you on the cutting edge with color, finishing, and dyeing processes. With that potential at the ready, advanced material manufacturers can meet global trends and consumer needs during a time of transformative change as sustainability changes the materials paradigm, and consumers demand innovation in their designs more than ever.
From daytime to nighttime, factory floor to product delivery, the right advanced materials manufacturing partner will bring experience and insight to take your color, finishing, and dyeing practices to the next level. Look for a partner that recognizes that to create interiors that innovate and reach global appeal, you need more than just a lightbox or shade room. You also need a measured understanding of the art and science behind these processes.
