California Apparel News

Coats, the British industrial-thread manufacturer who has been on an acquisition binge, recently acquired for $12 million ThreadSol, a cloud-based digital-applications provider, which becomes a part of Coats Global Services.

ThreadSol’s technology focuses on fabric-usage optimization in apparel manufacturing and helps customers reduce fabric waste and cost and establish accurate product costing.

“ThreadSol is an exciting acquisition that supports a key aspect of our growth strategy: to build an innovative software-solutions business for the apparel and footwear industries,” said Rajiv Sharma, group chief executive. “We will be able to draw upon our demonstrable track record of successfully integrating bolt-on companies following the acquisitions of Patrick Yarn Mill, Gotex and Fast React Systems.”

ThreadSol, headquartered in Singapore, was founded in Delhi, India, in 2013 and now has development centers across India as well as offices in Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Its sales in 2018 were expected to be $2.3 million.

ThreadSol has more than 100 employees, services some 130 businesses in 13 countries and plans more than 1.5 billion garments a year through its platform.

“We are very excited to become part of the Coats family, which is a major step in the growth and development of our business,” said ThreadSol co-founder Manasij Ganguli. “We will be able to leverage Coats’s unrivaled global footprint and strong corporate brand and have the opportunity to collaborate with and gain additional levels of expertise and insight from a global industry leader.”

Coats’s growth plan recently has been to collaborate with companies that have unique capabilities that can leverage off Coats’s existing network.

Coats recently made a strategic investment in Twine, an Israeli-based technology startup, which has developed a revolutionary digital thread-dyeing system.

Its recent acquisition of Patrick Yarn Mill in North Carolina adds high-performance engineered yarns to its product lineup. It also purchased Gotex, a Spanish company that designs and manufactures high-tech industrial yarns and tapes used in the telecommunications, energy, and oil and gas sectors.

In October, Coats opened the first of three innovation hubs it has planned for around the world. That first innovation hub was formally christened in October at its Sevier manufacturing site in North Carolina.

Sometime in early 2019, Coats will open an innovation hub in Bursa, Turkey, and another in Shenzhen, China.

These innovation hubs will develop pioneering products and processes in apparel, footwear and performance materials, which encompass hi-tech products for end uses in the automobile, oil and gas, protective-wear, and telecom industries.

The hubs comprise three zones.

The innovation gallery features a video wall, display pods of recent product developments and a timeline tracing Coats from its beginning in Paisley, Scotland, to the major corporation it is today.

The materials lab is where customers are able to collaborate directly with research-and-development technologists in the idea-generation and creation processes.

The prototyping area is where ideas and prototypes can be created. It includes a pilot factory with a full range of manufacturing machinery used to fine-tune production processes in a controlled, stand-alone environment.

Coats is a major player in the industrial-thread business with 19,000 employees across six continents and annual revenues in 2017 of $1.5 billion.

Each year the company makes enough thread to go into 8 billion pairs of blue jeans, and more than 450 million pairs of shoes are made every year using Coats’s threads. It is also the official thread supplier to the Royal Shakespeare Company.