How did professional clothing manage to stay on course through the health crisis?
No sector was spared by Covid-19. The workwear industry had its own share of worries and slowdowns in activity. Despite a few setbacks, the PPE (personal protective equipment) sector is confident it can bounce back strongly.
Rethinking products for safety and comfort
Although workwear manufacturing slowed down sharply, and in some sectors of activity stopped dead, the workshops found ways around it. Judging by the accounts gathered in the October 2020 issue of the Journal du Textile, professional clothing specialists saw the crisis as an opportunity to reinvent themselves.
Alongside the masks produced by most of the factories still operating during the lockdowns, innovative new forms of protection began to appear. Because equipment has worn out less and been replaced less often this year, the industry has come up with multi-risk garments. No more changing outfits during the day: these garments are versatile enough to guarantee both the comfort and the safety of the people wearing them. But what about the way they are allocated and distributed?
Digital tools serving the collection and distribution of PPE
In this period of crisis and exceptional health measures, fitting sessions and size allocation on professional premises became impossible. With sales teams barely able to travel — or unable to travel at all — to fit out employees, processes were redesigned to work remotely.
E-commerce for PPE therefore grew, and made it possible to get around the ban on try-on sessions inside companies. It is with solutions such as Fitizzy's Fitiform in particular that the collection of morphological data has been able to go digital. All the employee has to do is enter a few details, along with how they like a garment to fit, and they are assigned the size they need for the outfit they require.
Long queues to try on uniforms (with extra hygiene measures to put in place to decontaminate the garments where necessary), surplus stock in sizes that will never be worn… All of that is over. Buyers and suppliers are finally finding a balance thanks to digitalised data collection.