Tintex is probably the most awarded of Portuguese textiles. How do you achieve a winning 20-year course?
Since its inception, Tintex has had a very serious concern with sustainability and innovation. Since 1998, it has focused a lot of its work on the use of innovative fibers with less environmental impact and on the optimization of both dyeing and finishing processes, assuming the less positive implications of these and starting step by step on a path to mitigate these impacts. The stabilization of these concepts and the continuous commitment to them along this path, fortunately, has brought the fruits that are in everyone’s sight.

Is the technological innovation brought to your products easily marketable?
Regarding Tintex, we must assess its positioning in the value chain in order to better understand the obstacles we may encounter. Thus, since Tintex was not in a position of direct contact with the fashion brands, it was difficult to convey the message of the true impact of the products we developed and marketed. In this context, a new business model was defined, which was very important to the company’s reputation, in which we started to contact the brands, so that we could create “new value chains” that allowed us to directly communicate the added value and benefits of our products. This paradigm shift, coupled with the change in consumers’ mentality, has increasingly helped to facilitate the introduction of new products and technologies in the textile value chain, thus facilitating their commercialization.

Sustainability is one of the pillars of Tintex and the sector looks to you when it comes to environmental responsibility. Do you feel this pressure when launching new products?
Now we do not consider it an additional pressure. We feel the pressure that all companies and even people must feel, since we all know the impact that our activities have and may have on the health of our planet. However, the pressure is on what is the definition and optimization based on all the processes and products we use, which makes it a mere formality in a final step to verify or not the final impact of our products. For us, more than the communication of this responsibility, the certification or validation of the final impact of the products we sell – both for textile certifications and for evaluating the life cycles of our products – is extremely important, to avoid falling into the demagogy of communication not supported in action.

Tintex is one of Fibrenamics’ major partners. What advantages do you find in this collaborative work?
The complementarity of industrial work with the one carried out by the various entities of the SCT is essential to guarantee the evolution and innovative capacity of the industrial tissue and, consequently, of our country. In this case, we perceive that Fibrenamics has a very product-oriented aspect, which helps in the objectives of the companies. This proximity makes it easier to communicate in a common language, even though the basic objectives are different, allowing both parties to achieve the objectives they set out to achieve.

Date: January/2020
Interviewed: Pedro Magalhães, Head of Innovation - Tintex