Interview: Christophe Lambert, President of TDV Industries

PME familiale spécialisée dans la fabrication des textiles à usage technique destinés aux vêtements professionnels et de protection, TDV Industries habille chaque année, via ses tissus, plus trois millions de personnes sur leur lieu de travail. Son Président Christophe Lambert, actionnaire de la cinquième génération, est un “textilien” fier de cette belle entreprise au profil atypique, devenue l’un des symboles d’une filière textile français conquérante, innovante, disruptive, et dynamique. Ardent défenseur d’un projet d’entreprise durable et humainement responsable, ce dirigeant avant-gardiste revient pour nous sur les choix stratégiques qui permettent aujourd’hui à la PME d’afficher une santé florissante, et sur les perspectives d’avenir de la filière textile.

TDV Industries is a company whose complete integration turns out to be a winning strategic positioning.In your quest for textile excellence, how do you still feel the desire to innovate today at every level of activity of this company with a rare profile in Europe?

The most effective stimulation is the collective desire to register in long time.The motto of Coisne and Lambert families, shareholders of TDV for 150 years, has long been "what matters is what lasts", currency completed about twenty years ago by "what lasts it is who knowsadapt ".I would add to adapt is not necessarily to do like everyone else.We know that to last- survive- in a world in constant boiling, you have to want to reinvent yourself constantly, to alternate small dead / little births and large metamorphoses.We must therefore seek to be structurally innovative, as much in our economic model, in our management, as in our fabric offer and our textile solutions.Integrate Lean Management, invest in the French spinning to serve our weaving, our dye and our finishing workshop, calculate and display for each of our fabrics their carbon and water clues are as many examples that I can give you to illustrate a point, obviously easier to express than permanently achieve.

Our product innovations should not be “cosmetics”, only concern nano-markets.They must be locomotives and allow our company to market and produce millions of meters with high technical, societal and functional added values every year.

Innovating is therefore constantly reinventing oneself and the quest for textile excellence which aims to push walls at all levels to make the impossible, is therefore in fact stimulated by all employees in an existential approach.This desire is instilled in the teams by showing them that the CAP is that "what was to say Has-Been yesterday will be essential tomorrow";And tomorrow we will be there.

Process respectueux de l’environnement, smart textiles…vous êtes engagés dans plusieurs projets de R&D avec d’autres acteurs de la filière, et ce depuis plusieurs années.Is working in collaborative mode still essential today to innovate in certain areas?

Essential, certainly especially if you are an SME, but it is not enough to be in ambition of leadership.We have chosen to be present both in the collaborative mode and the individual mode.The collaborative for the magnitude, emulation, addition and complementarity of skills and individual to make it a commercial differentiation axis.

Work in collaborative mode for a textile that is both connected and autonomous, hand in hand with, upstream, schools, research centers (textile specialists, electronics or connectors) and, downstreamSpecialized in the transfer of data and a clothing maker, allows you to bring, at your level of the channel, your skill and your clean energy and to help transform the utopia of today in reality tomorrow.

The future of textiles-and the textiles of the future-I believe, will combine technology and environmentalism.Autonomous energy connected textiles (AUTOIOTEX project), UP CYCLING POST CONSUMING (Rewind project) where fabrics and then clothes will be obtained from other end -of -life clothes, or removal of the formula production of fabrics (Noformol project), these are the collaborative projects in which TDV Industries is very strongly committed.

But our company also works on individual axes, aimed at offering combined features, especially for military tissues, as well as textile solutions in the fields of thermal comfort, alert tissues, wellness fabrics, organic fibersSugarly, self-cleaning fabrics.

Social and environmental responsibility is a major strategic axis of your own development.How do you also raise awareness of your partners, your customers about this necessary awareness?

In the year 2000 we felt a soul of prophets in a world economy which, in the West and in our eyes, had lost, the meaning and the reason.Aware that companies had a very great responsibility in the future of the planet because of both its impacts and its own resources, we wanted our economic model to be part of what we called the economyPositive (lack of words at the time), but also that the professional clothing sector becomes the most "" advanced ", which is the case in France today.

Our goal has always been to be contagious, to create strong virtuous impacts, and far beyond our borders.It is also because sufficient collective awareness is always too late, that we have decided to be an actor of the compact global (under the aegis of the UN) and to take as a repository of our new agenda 21 2018/2022 The 17 sustainable development objectives (ODD/ SDG).The whole world should align on these 17 o.D.D.All new philosophies and all religions should integrate the strong humanist dimension, in order to avoid reacting when we reach the points of non-return.

Today all the stakeholders of the company (internal and external) are convinced and can appropriate the whole supplement of our tissues, and that Materialisentos Agenda 21, our CSR reports, our environmental and societal calculators,Our labels, certifications and commitments ... In summary, we carry out our share every day and we want to lead new players in our commitments which are already today for all a "vital" necessity.

TDV launched an augmented reality application, a real innovation in the professional clothing market.Could you tell us a little more about this new service?Do you think that personalization is a real growth relay for the textile sector dress today?

Our economic model is irrigated by CSR, Lean Management and more and more now by digital.And it is true that we made the buzz on the last Expo Protection fair with our original app, created to stage a whole new color range intended to customize professional clothes, via colors and/or specific colors alliances.

The app allows you to view dozens of color combinations and easily choose.It was designed to be a sales assistance tool to facilitate rapid decisions (let's not forget that the time race is non-stop!) When the choice is too big, to disrupt with the known tools ofToday but also to bring an "experience" to our user customers to life when work has to rhyme with "fun".This application also allowed us to differentiate ourselves by showing that a hundred-five company could have 2.0 or even 3.0 in the blood.

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Personalization contributes to the image and therefore to the positive or negative impression that the garment returns from us.Being different and valued, even in uniform ....Note that it is complicated in the textile industry to combine special products and competitiveness.The intermediate size of TDV allows this compromise.

Today you offer fabrics manufactured in France, responsible materials, quality products, comfortable and technical, manufactured with great responsiveness and personalized service, all with the promise of great transparency and reflectionOn the end of life of textiles.All this tells a story, your story;Was it fundamental to present/guarantee the meaning of your activity, to differentiate itself to a relationship of trust with your customers?

Thank you for perceiving our material and intangible reality.We are proud of this story, which we want to write and offer to our customers for a long time.In fact we are to build robust and reassuring answers which combine, as best as possible and in transparency, (ultra) fast, tech, fair and smart, and which aim to contribute to the commercial success of our customers and customers of ourclients.Our sector must be secured over time; professional clothing must contain security, image, comfort, responses to citizen expectations.It is a socially strategic purchase.

Do you not believe, that at a time of all possibilities and all dangers, it is necessary from the actors who secure, who engage in transparency?But to get involved, you have to master, have principles and means of its principles.When you exercise the profession of textilian for 150 years (without change of shareholders), by preserving and developing your fundamental values, you are more credible than if you arrive on the market.

Our customers or end users are also consumers and in their professional and private lives, they want to know where the items they buy come from, how and by what companies and they were obtained.To trace the origins is obvious;So it was logical to put us in duty of transparency- declaration of declaration- before this was asked.

TDV bought the Italian Klopman in 2016;Beyond sales already made at export, why pass the course and opt for an international acquisition?

Our 2010-2020 textile transformative vision aimed to make us grow all the walls of our skills and our knowledge, but also of our commercial geography.Globalization now pulling up, the labor differences fading from a competition where the mastery of the complexity prevails, the time had come to grow, and to significantly widen our commercial grip.We took the opportunity to densify our research and development, our marketing and to develop synergies of all orders allowing more competitiveness and overall always more expertise.And all this by keeping each of the two companies its identity and its autonomous management.Klopman is undoubtedly the most international of Western textile companies.The TDV Industries brand therefore greatly benefits from this influence and it is important.

Another strong reason, an SME has due to resources that it can generate limits to its ambitions that an ETI does not necessarily have.If the competition no longer takes place on labor differences but on the best combined fast-tech-fair and smart contribution, we need more resources to release more means.This marriage allows us to strengthen ourselves in all areas of the company.He benefits two companies, but also the whole European sector, as we are complementary.

The next industrial revolution, the famous industry of the future, is underway in French companies.Regarding you, what would your factory of the ideal future be?

For the first time in its existence, the man's brain cannot pretend to imagine what he will be able to create in the next twenty years.Humanity is therefore at a particular critical moment in its history.It has also become occupying the planet, and history is no longer a help to read the future.Organic ethical, active artificial intelligence, excess carbon, lack of water, augmented reality, diminished humanity, increasing world population, non -extensible arable surfaces, 3 d printing, the future is a challenge and above all ... ”you have to breathe”(As Mickey 3D sang)!

In this context, I like your question of the factory of the ideal future.Already, I hope that robots, if they replace all humans at work will wear TDV textiles!The factory of the future will be deployed in an eco-system:

And predictability will allow excellence and local production.

Finally, what do you think of the evolution of your profession, and on the textile-accommodation industry more generally?

The textile-habilion will still be tomorrow and the day after one of the oldest trades in the world and it will be exercised in vertical in each of the populations of populations.Women, man and child will always have to protect bad weather, nudity, fire, radiation, and all new risks to which her brain will help expose it.But clothing could also become a second skin and sixth sense, the textile material would become the digital extension of the human being in a universe economical in resources ....

Notre industrie sera toujours au service d’un monde au travail qui va continuer à muter, mais qui aura toujours besoin d’une supply chain “advanced”, durable & responsable, et de proximité.We are going to dye or functionalize textiles without water, with parts partly organic, we will make new clothes from others, arrived at the end of life.Life cycles will be radically revised;We will do better or more, with less.

My gaze has always been optimistic in the long term, careful in the short term and I have been seated in textiles for 30 years ....Whatever the technological, societal revolutions, whatever the unique thoughts, industrialists who take risks and stakeholders who exercise enlightened choices.In my generation we have invested 5 % of our turnover every year to produce French fabrics - during the late 90s and the early 2000s we fell for fools.I am hopeful that in the new generation of shareholders Coisne et Lambert - already in training and soon ready to take over, the torch - the look remains the same.Could it also be a story of genes?

Interview by N.Right - September 2018