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G. Gurumurthy

APPAREL BRANDS

Coimbatore , Nov. 16

Can you gauge how responsible is your favourite apparel brand in terms of meeting the specifications it vouches on the product it sells? Yes; you can, if you can trace the origin of the garment/clothing along with the different stages of product-making it undergoes.

This scope for going back into the product chronology is now opening up, thanks to the efforts of Organic Exchange, the California-based non-profit organisation that promotes organic cotton world-over, which is developing a system of tracing the origin of the textile items made of clean cotton.

`Track and trace' is a new programme it is developing as part of creating consumer awareness on responsible products that will enable your computer to read the `bar-code' affixed on the price-tag of your new clothes.

The bar-code will take you back to the entire value chain of, say for example, the shirt or the T-shirt and will reveal how that product was made/subjected to various production process from fibre to garment, according to Ms Prabha Nagaraj, Organic Exchange's regional director of farm development programme based in Chennai.

The track and trace system will give out such specific inputs like cotton farm that supplied fibre and the ginner who processed it, prior to the weaving/knitting and garment conversion processes from the factory that is finally responsible for the finished product.

The customer who is interested to buy a `responsible' product will be fed with all the data under this programme and the data stacking would be so thorough that the system will enable identifying even the number of cotton bale that is used for making particular batch of products, according to Ms Prabha Nagarajan, who is currently on a visit to some of the organic cotton farms promoted by the Coimbatore-based Super Spinning Mills in tribal hamlets in Kalrayan Hills in Salem/Villupuram districts along with Organic Exchange's farm development director, Mr Simo Ferrigno.

The organisation propagates world-wide consumption of organic cotton, its marketing by facilitating the linkage between the growers, processors and garment brands. The US software company Historic Futures' is helping out in providing the software for the `track and trace' programme.

Ms Prabha told Business Line that while several international brands including the well-known labels such as the Nike, Adidas, Gaps and Wal-Mart or Mark and Spencers are extending their partnership/linkages for clean cotton production by working with the growers of organic cotton and suppliers of intermediary products made of organic cotton, the domestic textile trade is yet to enter into this sector because the concept is yet to make its presence in the market. Organic Exchange is trying to bring the Indian garment brands too into the organic cotton basket soon.

More Stories on : Brands | Readymade Garments

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