From Laboratory Swatch to Finished Garment, the Promise Must Hold at Every Stitch

The textile substrate can determine the adhesion, release behaviour, handle and durability of an encapsulated treatment. What fibre compositions, fabric constructions and surface characteristics are proving most compatible with your process, and where have you encountered technical limitations?
Akhilesh Karni: Our development work has deliberately included different stretch-jersey platforms, including cotton/elastane, bamboo-viscose/elastane and MicroModal/elastane systems. We chose not to assume that a treatment developed around one textile would automatically translate to another.

Fibre chemistry, surface morphology, fabric construction, elastane content, finishing conditions, absorbency and other surface characteristics can all potentially influence how a treatment is distributed and retained, and how it ultimately performs within the garment.

At this stage, it would be premature for us to declare one substrate technically superior, because comparative characterisation and validation are still progressing. That is an important part of the development process itself: identifying where the system is most reproducible and where a particular fibre, finish or construction introduces limitations.

For us, substrate selection is therefore part of the technology-development decision, not simply a sourcing decision.

A treatment may perform successfully on a laboratory textile sample but behave differently after dyeing, finishing, garment manufacture, repeated wear and washing. At which stages is NITISI applying the microencapsulated treatment, and which downstream processes present the greatest risk to its performance?
Akhilesh Karni: In our current development work, the treatment is being evaluated at the fabric stage rather than being applied to an already completed garment. The exact sequencing relative to preparation, colouration and finishing needs to be controlled according to the substrate and production route, because processing conditions themselves can affect the treatment.

From there, the textile still has to move through cutting, sewing, garment handling, wear and repeated care cycles. That transition from a treated textile sample to a commercially manufactured garment is one of the areas we consider technically important.

Potential risks include treatment loss during processing, changes in surface distribution, disruption of capsule integrity, changes in release behaviour, alteration of hand-feel or other textile properties, and progressive loss during laundering. We therefore do not regard a successful laboratory or development sample as proof of commercial readiness.

The objective is to determine the processing window within which the treatment remains sufficiently reproducible through the wider garment-manufacturing and care cycle.

What exactly is being measured in your independent testing programme: the presence of the bioactive, concentration and release rates, wash durability, changes to fabric properties, biological activity, or effects on the wearer? Which of those tests will determine whether the technology progresses towards commercial production?
Akhilesh Karni: It is important to separate what we are examining now from the broader validation programme that may be required before stronger product claims are made.

Our immediate analytical focus is on material characterisation—understanding the treated textile in comparison with appropriate untreated material and examining treatment-associated characteristics at the textile surface.

Microscopy and analytical techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS/EDX) are among the methods we have been exploring at this stage. We have also been discussing complementary characterisation approaches with academic and laboratory partners where they can provide useful information.

That does not mean that one microscopy result will prove bioactive efficacy. It will not.

Further stages can include laundering and durability assessment, active-content or release analysis where an appropriate methodology can be established, textile-performance testing, safety or biological testing where relevant, and ultimately meeting a higher evidence threshold if claims are made about effects on the wearer. We have not designed the programme around obtaining one favourable result.

Progression towards commercial production will depend on whether a coherent evidence chain can be established: the treatment must be characterisable, reproducible, compatible with the textile, sufficiently durable for the intended use and capable of supporting the particular claims eventually made. If one of those links cannot be demonstrated adequately, the development route will need to change.

Microencapsulation adds chemistry and processing to a textile that is also being presented within responsible fashion. What is being assessed around capsule materials, binders, additional processing, water and energy use, wash-off, biodegradability and end-of-life so that a sustainability claim accounts for the treatment itself rather than only the plant origin of the active ingredient?
Vamsi Sivalanka & Akhilesh Karni: We agree with the premise of the question. A plant-derived active does not automatically make the resulting textile sustainable.

The assessment needs to extend to the complete treatment system and manufacturing route, including capsule chemistry, binder systems, processing requirements, energy and water inputs, potential material loss or wash-off, durability and what happens to the product at the end of its useful life.

These questions are part of the reason we prefer to talk about responsible development rather than make a blanket sustainability claim around the treatment itself. We are not currently claiming that every component of the treatment system is biodegradable or that the treatment carries no environmental trade-offs. Those are questions that need evidence.

Our approach is therefore to distinguish between information that can already be documented, areas currently being assessed and aspects that remain part of the development roadmap. That distinction is important because responsible innovation, in our view, also means being transparent about what is not yet known.

NITISI has partnered with Reloom, described as an AI-powered sustainability verification platform. Sustainability verification and verification of bioactive performance are different exercises. Which claims can that system substantiate, which require laboratory evidence, and where will NITISI draw the boundary between the two?
Vamsi Sivalanka & Akhilesh Karni: We see them as fundamentally separate evidence streams. Our work with Reloom relates to strengthening sustainability information, transparency and the evidence framework around sustainability-related attributes.

We would not use a sustainability-verification platform as evidence that a bioactive treatment is present at a particular concentration, survives laundering, exhibits a particular release profile or produces a biological effect. Those are technical questions and require appropriate laboratory or scientific methodologies.

The boundary is therefore quite clear for us: sustainability claims require appropriate sustainability evidence, while treatment-performance and bioactive claims require appropriate technical evidence. The two can complement one another in building a better-informed product, but one should never be used as a proxy for the other.

A proprietary material protocol may protect process knowledge, but commercial textile production requires reproducibility across mills, batches, machinery and operating conditions. How far has the process been tested outside controlled development conditions, and what degree of variation can it tolerate before performance becomes inconsistent?
Akhilesh Karni: This is one of the principal scale-up questions we are working through. It is also important to clarify what we mean when we refer to our proprietary material protocol.

We are not using that language to suggest that NITISI invented microencapsulation itself or that an internal protocol is evidence of exclusive ownership of the underlying encapsulation chemistry.

The protocol refers to the framework we are developing around material selection, treatment requirements, processing and handling considerations, quality control, validation and the way those elements are brought together for a NITISI product.

Our work to date remains part of the development and validation stage. Moving from controlled development into repeatable manufacturing across batches, machinery and production environments is a separate hurdle.

The objective is to identify the parameters that materially affect performance, define an acceptable operating window and then establish whether different production runs remain within that window.

We would not describe the system as commercially mature until repeatability has been demonstrated under manufacturing conditions relevant to the intended scale.

In that sense, reproducibility is not an assumption within our development programme; it is one of the things the programme has to prove.

The difficult test for bioactive apparel may ultimately be economic rather than technical: additional treatments, testing, quality control and evidence all add cost. What performance threshold, durability level and manufacturing cost would make this viable as more than a premium niche product, and what result from your current testing would lead you to conclude that the proposition is not yet commercially ready?
Vamsi Sivalanka & Akhilesh Karni: We agree that a technically interesting textile is not automatically a commercially viable product. Our initial route is deliberately premium because the product combines material selection, garment design, additional textile processing, validation and quality control. However, premium positioning cannot be used to compensate for poor economics or weak technical performance.

For the treatment system, our development objective has been to investigate meaningful performance and retention across an extended care life, with approximately 30–50 domestic wash cycles being explored as a target range within the development programme rather than a result we are currently presenting as proven.

The actual commercial threshold cannot be reduced to a wash count alone. We also need repeatability between batches, acceptable hand-feel and garment performance, manageable manufacturing complexity, evidence appropriate to the claim and economics that allow the product to operate sustainably as a business.

We are not publishing a definitive per-garment treatment-cost threshold at this stage because the final production route, scale and validation requirements are still being established. However, there are clear circumstances in which we would conclude that the proposition is not ready.

If achieving the required durability produces unacceptable changes in the textile, if treatment performance varies materially between batches, if the necessary processing becomes disproportionately expensive or complex, or if the evidence does not support the consumer proposition we intend to communicate, we would refine or delay the product rather than launch it prematurely. For us, the current validation process is therefore a genuine decision gate, not simply a process intended to confirm a predetermined commercial outcome.