Crypton

Crypton's a performance fabric industry leader - continuously innovating high quality fabric protection with the lowest environmental impact.

Driving the Sustainable Fabric Threshold

When Crypton was launched back in 1993, it was a company established with the core values of changing the way people interact with their environment. Its co-founders had the vision to develop fabric that exceeds expectations in performance, and yet, remains aesthetically captivating to consumers. This vision for Crypton’s products systematically created the performance fabric category and set the industry standard by which fabrics were evaluated. As an innovator in the fabric industry, the company established itself as a leader, developing durable products that extend its lifecycle usability - setting a high bar for themselves and their competition.

The Forefront of Fabric Innovation: Performance, Safety, & Sustainability

Being at the forefront of innovation in their industry means being highly aware & in tune with their customers. Crypton is committed to continuously innovating the highest quality performance fabric solutions with the lowest environmental impact. They strive to keep performance, safety, and sustainability top of mind as new products and technologies are developed.

As a company, they encourage their customers and their industry to hold themselves accountable to this commitment. Julia Gillespie, VP of Marketing, explains that “at the end of the day, we owe it to our customers to be as transparent as possible – to educate them about both what they are or are not getting.”

To achieve these goals, Crypton knew that this was going to require commitments into systems beyond their current data infrastructure capabilities. They needed a platform that would enable them to be transparent about their technologies and easily share that information across their customers and distribution base.

Challenges Creating a Transparency Standard

Implementing high standards of transparency is no easy feat. For Crypton, they recognized that they’d face specific challenges on two fronts: improving their suppliers' engagement to identify valuable chemical data needed for transparency reporting, while at the same time, protecting proprietary information that’s key to their company’s success.

The first step was finding a way to implement a robust product transparency program while simultaneously improving regulatory compliance. Tracking Crypton’s product and material data was becoming a burdensome process managed through the use of excel spreadsheets and cross-referencing data on pdf’s of supplier letters. Monitoring both state regulations and EU regulations in a very detailed and manual way was easily seen as an unsustainable solution for the company long-term. It was apparent that these challenges were hindering their ability to meet such ambitious transparency goals.

While transparency efforts enlightened supplier challenges, Crypton would also need to confront securing the technology that’s key to their success. Sustaining the highest standard in fabric performance means competition is never too far behind, and as with any industry, competitors are always watching and often imitating developments.  As such, demonstrating safety, sustainability and transparency can be challenging, making proprietary technologies a high priority to secure.

Transparency Founded on Data Protection

Crypton reviewed several solutions within the field of compliance; however, 3E Exchange stood out as both incredibly responsive and receptive to their unique needs. Crypton identified the 3E Exchange team’s flexibility, its platform alignment for industry & security needs, and the scalability potential for regulatory communication all standing out internally when the Crypton’s team scoped options.

One of the biggest challenges that most manufacturers' suppliers face revolves around the security of intellectual property and data security. Transparency efforts have to work harmoniously between manufacturer and supplier to succeed. As VP of Research & Development, Michael Grigat explains, “Crypton’s suppliers face similar issues regarding proprietary data and competition. It’s not always easy – we do spend quite a bit of time with some of our suppliers, stressing the importance of correctness, reiterating our objectives with our system of transparency within the GreenScreen system. They too need assurances that the information they provide us will not be misused. 3E Exchange provides those assurances.”

Additionally, Grigat noted, “3E Exchange worked with us to allow both ourselves and our suppliers to flag a component as proprietary. This was a critical functionality for us and our suppliers, allowing us to receive meaningful information from them. The creation of BOMs (Bill of Materials) for products and materials is not a straightforward process especially since we are pulling data from suppliers and accounting for all ingredients. The 3E Exchange team, Pete Girard and Evelyn Ritter, are knowledgeable and always eager to provide solutions. We certainly had a lot of challenges to overcome but the 3E Exchange team was and is very accessible.”.

Empowering Mindful Consumers

Crypton wants its customers to be able to access their information -  to empower them to learn more, and to be more mindful. With data infrastructure for sustainability & transparency reporting in place, the company can now work effectively towards its goals of information accessibility in a much more proactive way. Crypton wants all customers who use their fabrics - whether for healthcare, hospitality, or residential use - to understand exactly what they’re receiving as a final product. 3E Exchange has enabled Crypton to streamline and systematize their materials reporting to improve its transparency efforts, now it’s time to embolden Crypton’s vision to effectively empower mindful consumers.

Luckily, Crypton doesn’t have to look far to launch this vision. Expanding to third party organizations, such as Mindful Materials, Ecomedes, and Sustainable Minds, can be accomplished right within the 3E Exchange platform. To extend the reach of the company’s materials reporting data, Crypton can start driving data accessibility by pushing this information directly from 3E Exchange to these third-party platforms. In doing so,  helping to educate and empower consumers with new knowledge so they can make truly informed decisions within their design process.