Coats wins Sri Lanka Fashion and Apparel Award
- 31 Oct 2013
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.
ENDS
For more information contact:
Kristina Blissett, Communications Manager kristina.blissett@coats.com
T +44 (0)208 210 5084, M +44 (0)7714 539887
Notes to Editors
About Coats
With a rich heritage dating back to the 1750s, Coats is the world's leading industrial thread and consumer textile crafts business, at home in more than 70 countries, employing over 20,000 people across six continents. Revenues in 2012 were US$1.7bn.
Our well-known brands and strong relationships with customers and consumers mean our products and services meet current and future needs. Our company-wide understanding of our business partners and consumers, coupled with the deep expertise of our people, builds trust and certainty.
Coats’ pioneering history and innovative culture ensure the company continues leading the way around the world: providing complementary and value added products and services to the apparel and footwear industries; extending the crafts offer into new markets and online; and applying innovative techniques to develop products in new areas such as tracer threads, aramids and fibre optics.
- One in five garments on the planet is held together using Coats’ thread
- 75 million car airbags are made using Coats’ thread every year
- Coats produces enough yarn to knit 65 million scarves a year
- In three and a half hours, Coats makes enough thread to go to the moon and back
- 300 million pairs of shoes are made every year using Coats’ thread
- One million teabags using Coats’ thread are brewed every 10 minutes
- Thousands of surgical operations take place every day using Coats’ thread
- Thomas Edison used Coats’ thread in 1879 to invent the light bulb
- Coats produces enough thread to reach around the Equator every 11 minutes
- Coats is the second largest and fastest growing global zip manufacturer
To subscribe to news releases as they are added to the website go to www.coats.com/media