A nonwovens manufacturing company that until recently has been little known outside its native China had no less than three of its materials selected for the ISPO Textrends Fibres and Insulations Top Ten at the 2015 sportswear event held in Munich, Germany, earlier this year.
This put the company a nose in front of long-established heavyweights such as 3M, Polartec and PrimaLoft and is a story that begins with a man on a tricycle shuttling urgently through the garment district of ShiShi City in China’s Fujian Province back in the late 1990s.
Around 2,500 visitors attended the daily Textrends forums and dedicated exhibition held within the ISPO outdoor sports show in Munich, Germany, from February 5-8 this year.
It identified the leading fabrics in a number of categories, including base, second and outer layers, membrane technologies and soft equipment, identifying some 240 products as representing the latest developments.
“The companies participating in this year’s ISPO Textrends experimented with a lot of colours, new structures and textures, combined with innovative processes,” said Louisa Smith, a trend expert and jury member. “I noticed trends towards lighter fabric qualities and combinations of new and existing fibres and finishes yielding interesting results and materials with extremely high performance.”
The Textrends top ten of current fibre insulation products for the sports and outdoors markets were named as:
- Fellex FP by ZiRan Nonwoven.
- Thinsulate Featherless Insulation by 3M.
- Celliant Heat by Imbotex.
- PrimaLoft Gold Insulation.
- PrimaLoft Gold Insulation Ceramic Blend.
- Sport and Exquisit by Baur Vliesstoffe.
- Thermolite Micro Insulation and HuaMao Fabric by ZiRan Nonwoven.
- R4411: 100g Alpha by Polartec.
- Lavalan Exquisit Cashmere by Baur Vliesstoffe.
- Fellex E-3HP by ZiRan Nonwoven.
Fujian
So who is ZiRan Nonwoven?
As one of the more affluent provinces in China, in addition to local companies, Fujian now benefits from foreign operations including Boeing, Dell, GE, Kodak, Nokia, Panasonic, Siemens and TDK.
The province is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west and Guangdong to the south, and significantly, with Taiwan lying to its east across the Taiwan Strait.
Historically, because of its geographic proximity to Taiwan, Fujian was considered a frontline in a potential war between mainland China and Taiwan and received much less investment from China’s central government before 1978. Since 1978, when China first started opening up to the world, it has received substantial investment from overseas Fujianese around the world, as well as Taiwanese and foreign businesses.
Most notably, there was an explosion of new sportswear brands established from 1994 onwards, including 361 Degrees, Anta Sports, Peak Sports and Xtep.
Sales for these companies peaked in the years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but consequently, their challenges have been compounded by sharply rising raw materials and labour costs for the textiles and apparel industries generally in China. Other problems for these sports brands have been retailing practices that have resulted in excess inventories and the practice of massive discounting, along with over-ambitious expansion plans by a number of players.
ZiRan
It was to supply this local industry that ZiRan, now based in JinJiang, Fujian, was founded in the late 1990s with a single insulation line imported from Taiwan – and the tricycle.
By 2003, however, it had expanded considerably with the installation of 20 automatic quilting and embroidery machines, which were replaced again in 2010. A year later, ZiRan started the production of its own in-house polypropylene nonwoven fabrics and in 2013 it also became a bluesign partner.
The company is now a licensed manufacturer of Invista’s Thermolite brand insulation, but it is for its own Fellex brand products that the company has been singled out by the Textrends Forum judging panel this year.
