You know your underwear customers care about comfort and style—after all, they chose your intimates and shapewear because it allows them to look and feel their best.
They also want their next-to-skin clothing to be as healthy as they are. That’s difficult when the fabric is treated with potentially harmful chemicals that can contribute to the chemical load their bodies—and the planet—carry. But that’s what happens with conventional textile finishing, which often relies upon chemicals like formaldehyde and PFOAs to achieve desirable characteristics like moisture management and softness. These chemicals have been linked to everything from skin irritation to diabetes and even cancer. We believe your customers deserve better.
They also deserve clothes that keep the planet healthy, an issue your customers see as linked to their personal health: Women are likelier to view their own lives as being connected to the health of the planet. They’re right to do so, given that many of these chemicals pose a lose-lose situation.
Addressing these issues is about taking steps in the right direction and meaningfully moving the needle for your brand, your customers, and your industry. At Evolved By Nature, we’re working to help our brand partners take this step with our Activated Silk™ technology, an all-natural nylon finish that outperforms standard, potentially harmful finishing chemicals and is better for the health of your customers and the planet. Best of all, it’s cost-effective, and it can be seamlessly integrated into your existing manufacturing processes.
In research we conducted with apparel consumers, about 80 percent said they would think more favorably of a brand that had apparel treated with healthier, more sustainable Activated Silk—and that it would make them more likely to purchase that brand’s products.
With Activated Silk, comfort, health and sustainability require no trade-offs. Replacing the harmful chemicals used to finish your nylon-based apparel with Activated Silk—pure, liquefied natural silk protein—is a real differentiator and is something your customers are eager for. In research we conducted with 1,200 apparel consumers, we found that Activated Silk’s health and sustainability attributes are seen as new and compelling purchase decision drivers. Of the apparel consumers we talked with, about 80 percent said they would think more favorably of a brand that had apparel treated with Activated Silk, and that it would make them more likely to purchase that brand’s products.*
Activated Silk is our way of delivering the comfort your customers demand, without sacrificing their health.
- Activated Silk makes underwear feel better: Activated Silk imparts a cool and luxurious feeling to nylon-blend fabrics and can be customized to match your desired hand. In SynTouch tests, textiles treated with Activated Silk were both smoother and finer than those treated with conventional textile finishers.
- Activated Silk makes underwear perform better: Nylon blends treated with Activated Silk wick moisture 10 percent better than traditional finishes, and dry rate is 35 percent better.¹
- Activated Silk makes underwear better for the planet: It is sustainable, made from a renewable resource, and free of toxic chemicals, which makes for garments that align with your customers’ sustainability concerns.
- Activated Silk keeps underwear looking good: Colorfastness to washing is improved² over the life of the garment compared with traditional treatments.
Claims above are based on data from comparative tests run on real commercial nylon-blend fabric. Results may vary based on blends and finishes used. To test your fabric with Activated Silk, please contact us.
So what is Activated Silk, exactly?
It starts with silk, a natural polymer with amazing performance properties that have been studied in scientific literature for 80 years (and coveted for thousands). In essence, we’ve extracted and liquefied pure silk protein using natural silk cocoons, salt, water and heat. Manipulated one way, Activated Silk can wick moisture; manipulated another, it can make wool less prone to pilling. We have more than 75 patented Activated Silk molecular configurations (you can find out more about how it’s made here), and that’s just the beginning.
Activated Silk performs as well for the planet as it does for the human body. The conventional textile finishing industry is hazardous to the environment—25 percent of global chemical output stems from the textile industry. Take wicking agents, which often contain formaldehyde and PFOAs, harmful to our health and persistent in the environment. Or softening agents, which usually come in forms like silicone derivatives that accumulate in the environment. They’re washed out of clothes during each laundering, and that wastewater finds its way into our rivers and oceans. It also finds its way back into our bodies in the form of harmful silica biogas. And those are just a few examples.
Twenty percent of industrial water pollution is linked to wet processing of textiles alone, according to a study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, cited in CMF’s (Changing Market Foundation) report.
In contrast, Activated Silk is safe for the planet and the people on it. Our pure silk protein is:
- All-natural: Made from natural, responsibly sourced silk cocoons, salt and water.
- Non-GMO: We don’t use bioengineered proteins that mimic silk, which raise as many questions about sustainability as they purport to solve.
- Sustainable: Silk is renewable, and its production mitigates its own carbon footprint. The elegance of Activated Silk’s ingredients and purification process mean that it’s low-impact and ready to scale.
- Free of formaldehyde, BPA, phthalates, PFOAs, and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals commonly found in textile processing: These chemicals can damage the reproductive health of fish, birds, and mammals—including humans.
The best part for your supply team (besides not having to handle hazardous chemicals any longer): Activated Silk was designed to be cost-effective and easy to implement into the manufacturing process. It’s as simple as swapping out your current textile finishing bath for a bath containing our technical yet elegant silk protein, and faithful to our name: Evolved By Nature.
When you’re ready to take the next step in making clothes that will love your customers as much as they love your underwear, contact our team. Your intimate apparel, Evolved By Nature.
*Evolved By Nature primary consumer research, n=1200, fielded August 23–27, 2018.
