It’s never business as usual at the office of Twinery in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The idea that disruptive ideas are born when free thinkers work together pushes along this subsidiary of MAS Holdings.
“It’s an innovation powerhouse,” Ranil Vitarana, chief technology officer of MAS Holdings, told Sourcing Journal, describing the daily exploration to build new textile technologies and come up with smarter apparel and soft goods.
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With more than 121 patents by end 2024, in the years since the company was created in 2011, the 20,000 square foot office in the converted warehouse in Southwest Colombo is buzzing with ideas. Another team in an office 25 kilometers away translates these further.
“MAS has eight plants in that one zone, including fabric making, lace making and sewing plants. A lot of our tech resides there because they are able to interact with the factories and the application,” he said.
Vitarana is clearly excited by the possibilities. “It is rewarding to see that we can make a change and have a company like MAS, which will back us into making that a reality,” he said.
The firm has a target for a turnover of $200 million for 2025, up 20 percent from the previous year. Approximately 40 of these patents are in commercial use, while others, granted in the last two years, are still in the development phase. Vitarana described the goal of creating “real solutions that allow us to continuously give a better product at a better price, to make transformations in a variety of ways.” Patents were not part of the valuation game.
“The industry is fairly competitive and Sri Lanka is not a cheap location when it comes to apparel sourcing so we’ve always had to be innovative in whatever we do. There is also a lot of copying, and we started patenting more as a defensive mechanism rather than an offensive one. When we come up with an idea we see whether there is a commercial opportunity or not, and if there is we go with a provisional patent which gives us a 12-month window to try the idea before we go with the actual patent and can see whether the commercial window we saw was real or not,” he said.
The successful patents span different concepts, including solutions-driven products that help wearers with various medical conditions, special needs or performance requirements.
“There are more than 18 patents in the space called Femtech,” he said. “We came up with products in different areas, including products for urinary incontinence, absorbent pads for breast-feeding, mastectomy bras, period panties, menopause solutions. We clubbed all these together and created an entire vertical within MAS, these products are in the market and have done more than $600-million worth of business in this space along over the last five years.”
Functionality is a big focus, he observed. “Creating fabric to make garments that aren’t just ‘worn’ but “worn with purpose.”
These include integrating sensors and conductive fibers into fabrics which can monitor the wearer’s vital signs, detect air quality, or even adjust to heat or cold. “These have gained traction in the military, in healthcare to monitor heart rate and respiration patterns. They also work for athletes who need monitoring, heating or cooling.”
He doesn’t minimize the challenges of incorporating electronics into textiles, which comes with a huge set of challenges. “How do you put the electronics onto the textile in a way that it touches the body? How does the washing affect it? The same technology needs to be adaptive for different situations,” he said.
“So when you’re skiing, for instance, you’re generating a lot of heat, but when you’re on the ski lift the heat needs to be provided for the body; it has to come on and off, maintain the battery and keep you at the right temperature. It means bringing different tech together in order to make the solutions exactly the way our customers want.”
Twinery patents have been focusing on new solutions too. One that has crossed several borders, now installed in Tijuana in Mexico and North Carolina in the U.S, is a printing technology called Promptly which has taken tech to a different level, but part of the innovation has been to create a business model solution. This has developed ink for digital printing so that it can print on cotton, polyesters and nylons. “We also brought in image processing, so it allows you to just put a garment under it, and the image processer decides what the garment is, how big or small that print needs to be. It can print the whole garment in a way that it looks like a printed fabric, without joints or seams. “We do the printing of the garment, the delivery of the garment too,” he explained.
Innovations at the factory level are essential as well, he said. “When we do automation at the factory level we try to understand different areas, like which areas do people get more tired when they are working? What optimal temperatures should it be at during different times of the day.
At other times it is devices that are connected to machines that reduce the movements an operator needs to make, or complex movements that slow the operator down.
We have 65,000 sewing machines that we operate on any given day, so when we do any developments they have to be scaled,” Vitarana said. Sixty five percent of these machines are in Sri Lanka, but they span other countries including India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, China among others.
“The main point about innovation is that we look at two things; the willingness to pivot and the willingness to kill” a project, he added.
“There is also the understanding that maybe 10 to 20 percent of what the team is working on will really be commercialized, going through a process involving eight gates, and at each we are very quick to say, ‘Have we been able to achieve what we’ve set out towards? We decide early on, ‘No, it looks like we can’t’, and then move on to the next. We have a pipeline that’s constantly feeding in.”
Surprisingly, only 40 percent of the team are from an apparel background.
“One of the ways the team works is to understand what the future of the industry is and come up with solutions that are valid in that five-year time horizon. We understand that better by looking at consumer trends, industry trends, we will also look at say national trends around legislation, and then we will decide what we should be working on now in order for us to be valid,” he said. “There’s the stuff that is patented. Then there’s a whole bunch of products that are not patented but held as a trade secrets. We constantly keep an eye on the impact between those two, and the impact on the industry.”
Innovations include:
onEKnit: Developments in mono-materials, 3D contouring, and complex knit structures which can be made-to-order and customized to create unique styles designed for each person. These have a lower carbon footprint, zero waste, and can be on-shored in-store or in the region.
Lifecycled: Biodegradable polyester which naturally decomposes in landfill within five years, compared to the 200-year lifecycle of normal performance apparel. Any polyester product can be made biodegradable by Lifecycled. This process starts at the fabric polymer level, before the yarn is made, and remains on the fabric until the end of its life unlike a coating that reduces after washing. It acts like a regular polyester for cutting, sewing, dyeing and bonding and decomposes only in a landfill, biodegrading only when it comes into contact with compost, rather than in the wardrobe.
Customizable men’s boxer brief: Awarded the prestigious 2023 ISPO award, these offer three customizable leg length options and three customizable elastic waistband options, enabling a perfect fit tailored to your unique body shape and size. This brief also features an anti-friction strip along with an anti-ride up function, with strategically knitted and placed sweat management zones using anti-bacterial and breathable material, along with enhanced moisture management.
