In its newest collection the sportswear brand PUMA has found a way to reduce its water consumption during the production process up to 17% as well as the used chemicals significantly. And all that by implementing new technologies such as new dyeing procedures and digital printing.

Sustainability is getting more and more important in almost all areas – even in the fashion industry. In fact, there are many different options to make the production of clothes and shoes more sustainable. The sportswear brand PUMA has explored two of them for its newest collection, one of which is digital printing.

PUMA Boosts its Green References

In May, PUMA has launched their newest Collection PUMA x Central Saint Martins in cooperation with internationally renowned London-based art and design school Central Saint Martins (short: CSM) to raise awareness for the water shortage all while supporting the preservation of drinking water. That’s why the designs are depicting South African water maps. But the CSM collection is not only representing sustainability with its look, the pieces have all been produced sustainably.

Together with students from the CSM fashion course, the brand applied two technologies in the production process of this collection: new types of dyeing technologies such as the “Dope Dye” method and digital printing. By combining uncoloured materials with digital printed or spun-dyed materials, the design team was able to reduce the water usage drastically. In this way it was not only possible to save water, but also not as many chemicals were necessary as with the conventional wet processing.

The reason why “Dope Dyeing” uses much less energy, water and chemicals compared to the traditional textile manufacturing processes is that it eliminates one whole step of the dyeing process. But one of the main factors that made the collection as sustainable as it is is digital printing allowing for printing the logo directly onto the fabric and thus reducing waste and chemicals.

All in all, by taking innovative approaches to the manufacturing process PUMA is really boosting its green references. Their aim was to make future fashion – and they’re convinced that they have done so successfully. PUMA itself said, that they wanted to test new technologies in the collaboration with the design school, but now they are all set up to use them even beyond this collaboration.

Digital Fashion – The Fashion of the Future?

But that’s not the end of the story: The fashion class from CSM was not the only partner for this collection. In order to create the marketing images for the promotion campaign, PUMA also worked with “The Fabricant”, a digital fashion pioneer who is designing and selling clothes only digitally – without any material, production or production chains. For that they used digitally sampled images, which means, that the campaign motifs were never actually captured in real life, they only exist digitally. That made the collection even more sustainable, because there are neither materials nor any production chains necessary. PUMA decided to work with them for promoting the CSM collection by only using digital sampled pictures for their marketing campaign.