Connecting brands and fabric manufacturers digitally–that’s the goal of German start-up Texdome. CEO Stefan Schmülling explains how the b2b platform wants to make sure that all partners on the site are reliable and what challenges they face.
What does Texdome offer that brands or manufacturers have not been offered so far?
At Texdome fabric manufacturers have the opportunity to present their company, their sustainability progress, their collections and new developments in a digital way.
...Which is a service that already exists at other platforms...
But at Texdome this is only visible for brands verified by us. Due to our program structure, the manufacturers' contents are not visible to competitors.
The brands have the possibility to find and compare all available articles and to order sampling material free of charge in order to be able to assess the haptics and optics more precisely. Likewise, the digital collection templates of the manufacturers can be used to make face-to-face appointments more efficiently. In addition, with Texdome the brands have a digital listing of their ordered articles with all technical data.
But how do you make sure you only gather reliable companies? Or can anyone who pays use the service?
No. We check anyone who wants to use our service beforehand. It is very important to us that we provide a b2b platform on which only the brands and manufacturers verified by us have access. Thus we minimize misinformation or wrong orders. In addition, manufacturers can exhibit their latest innovations with us and can be sure that this information only goes to potential customers and not to competitors.
What special challenges have you faced since the Covid-19 crisis?
The Covid-19 crisis has been a two-sided coin for us. On the one hand, like many others, we had the problem that our potential partners were unavailable both in person and by phone.
On the other hand, we also benefited from the crisis; because this crisis showed many manufacturers how important digitalization is in the area of sourcing. Almost nothing has changed here for decades and it is time to push digitalization in this area as well.
Even though Texdome has only been around 2019: What are the most urgent requests from brands or manufacturers in your experience?
The most important thing is to keep the brands up to date. It happens very often that innovations are discovered months later. We want to counteract this with our newsfeed feature. Here, the brands are informed about every change in sustainability or collections from all manufacturers and can react directly.
In addition, many brands want to be able to compare articles from different manufacturers. This is finally possible with our article filter, which we have developed in cooperation with different brands. With this feature the brands also have the possibility to consider suitable articles from non-standard suppliers.
Many manufacturers now see the chance to win new customers and are in the process of digitizing their content and articles. The possibility to present themselves online 24/7 like at a trade show is something completely new for the manufacturers.
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