Single Texon material offers multiple woven-in functions
Footwear materials solutions provider Texon has brought to market a new, patented, jacquard material called ProWeave, which it says makes it possible to integrate multiple functions into a single sheet of material.
In practice, this will make it possible for footwear manufacturers to incorporate different “zonal features” into a single sheet of performance fabric, creating, for example, different elasticity, tenacity and abrasion zones within the same weave.
It said ProWeave is suitable for the production of all kinds of woven footwear. The possibility it offers of mixing together high-tenacity, flame-retardant, stretch, TPU-coated yarns and recycled yarns to create hard-wearing materials, could also create “significant opportunities” for ProWeave in industrial footwear. Its use in apparel and accessories is also possible.
Texon’s business acceleration leader for ProWeave, Paul Jackson, said at the time of the announcement that the technology will make it possible for manufacturers to “pinpoint the physical characteristics, functional zones and visual patterns they want to achieve in a performance fabric, and then make their vision a reality”.
He said the product is “radically different to anything else on the market” and that Texon has had positive feedback about it from customers around the world. He described it as “a technology that can free designers from conventional fabric restraints and help them unleash their imagination”.
The company is producing ProWeave at its factory in Prato in Italy and at its manufacturing centre in Vietnam. It said combining Texon’s know-how in footwear with the expertise in woven fabrics of its Italian division had been important in the development of the new product.
It has said it can use a single process to create multiple designs for woven uppers for shoes and for garments on one roll and that it can make ProWeave for mass production projects and in small quantities for limited-edition projects, it said.
A detailed article about the technology behind ProWeave is in the new issue of World Footwear magazine, which goes to press in mid-April.
