Future of Ralph Lauren, and retail, may be coloring clothes in store

If the colors that apparel retailers choose for their latest lines often aren’t to your liking, or by the time they hit the store shelves seem behind the latest trends on the sidewalks or on social media, a solution may be coming sooner than you imagined.

By next year, Ralph Lauren flagship stores may have the textile coloring technology to let shoppers have the blank slate of cotton polo shirt dyed in-store.

Chemicals giant Dow, a major player in textile dyes, has been working with Ralph Lauren on new processes for cotton dyeing that reduce use of chemicals, water and energy intensity.

“Ralph Lauren obviously is a big user of cotton and to dye textiles, it takes a lot of chemicals and a lot of water and you generate a lot of waste and mainly you do that because you’re trying to use heat and pressure to put that dye into the fabric,” Dow CEO Jim Fitterling said last Thursday at the CNBC ESG Impact summit.

Trillions of liters of water, for example, are used for fabric dyeing, which is equal to 20% of the world’s wastewater.

That is one of the reasons Dow developed what it calls ECOFAST Pure, announced earlier this year, which to dye cotton needs up to 90% less chemicals, 50% less energy and 50% less water.

But the sustainability project could also have major implications for what is called experiential retail — the effort by retailers to give consumers new reasons to come into stores as e-commerce’s footprint, already large, only grows as a result of the pandemic.

Ralph Lauren’s Color on Demand project uses the Dow technology to color cotton at any point in manufacturing, and result in shorter lead times for making color decisions. Halide Alagöz, chief product and sustainability officer at Ralph Lauren, said in an announcement about the effort earlier this year that the retailer will be able to “meet personalized consumer demands faster than ever before.”

And while he didn’t say it, that means potentially coloring a shirt in the store.

“Ralph Lauren will be able to do something like put Color on Demand in one of their flagship stores in New York next year so that you can go in and get your Ralph Lauren polo dyed in the store,” Fitterling said at the CNBC ESG Impact event. “That would have never been possible without this technology.”

A Ralph Lauren spokeswoman said, “We look forward to sharing more about this in due course.”