It's in their jeans...

On Friday my team toured a textile company that manufactures Çalık Denim. 

     http://www.calikdenim.com/

 

Çalık Denim adresses larger customer mass with a rich product range from denim fabric, threads to gabardine fabrics. The Company who follows world fashion trends closely has an substantial competitive advantage in terms of variety and balance of its product range.

Çalık Denim has a production capacity of 110,000 tons with its cadre, combed cotton, threads and ply facilities in Malatya and Turkmenistan. 50% of the its capacity is marketing to domestic market and 50% to the countries of European Unity. Çalık Denim who is a known establishment all over the world started up manufacturing gabardine fabric in the installation that was put into circuit in 2004 after having observing the rapid increasing of ganardine fabric in the world. With the entity of manufacturing gabardine the Company has been strengtening its competitive force in the world market of world.

Çalık Denim is working with the topliner brands in textile field. Some customers in customer portfolio in 2008 are as follow: Diesel Replay, GAP, Benetton, Lee, Wrangler, Mexx, H&M, Levi’s, Calvin Klein, G-Star, Tommy Hilfiger, Salsa, River Island, Marks&Spencer, Jack&Jones, Zara and Bershka.

After speaking with corporate representatives (shown center in above picture), they gave us a tour through part of the plant.



This is the raw material cotton that they purchase from locations such as India and China.

The cotton goes through a filtering system which removes impurities.

 

 

<><><>The cleaned cotton is pressed into a thin sheet.  The thin sheet of cotton  is coming off the maching (fan shaped in pict) and the forming the strand at front of machine.  This strand is the consistency of a cotton ball. The cotton strands are methodically placed into the canisters shown below.

<><><>In the picture above, you can see the thick cotton strands at top of machine being wound into tighter strands at bottom.  They tighter strands are then wound on bobbins as shown below.

In this picture you can see the large bobbins from the previsous picture.  You can also see fine lines of string below the blue devices.  This machine is joining the two to create a tread that is used for weaving the jeans.  The combined thread is shown above the blue devices.  Large bobbins of this thread as shown below are eventually dyed for the blue jean coloring.  This same thread may also be spun onto smaller bobbins and used as the white weaving thread in blue jean material.

The picture above shows thousands of spools being held which are strung to the machine below for tread bundling.  Below you can see all the individual threads coming together in the right hand part of the picture and then being wound onto the roll at the end.

Below is the roll of thread which will be for the jean colors.

  

<><><>This is weaving of the blue and white together to make denim.  The blue threads are running vertically above the blue line.  The white tread is weaved through and the blue line (mechanical device) moves up and down to tighten the weave.  The finished denim is at the bottom (this would be a view of the inside of your jeans).

This is a finished roll of denim.  From here it goes through quality control and a process to add additional character to the demin.  The character could be stretch, textures, etc.

This was a really interesting tour...not only looking at the process of demin production but also the engineering of the machinery that magically makes the cotton come to life!