Texbase Inc., a cloud-based data management and collaboration platform for the textile and consumer products industries, announced the launch of MaterialFirst Marketplace – the exclusive material marketplace built into Texbase.
MaterialFirst gives suppliers and ingredient brands a cost-effective, secure, and direct marketing channel to both current and future customers right from within Texbase itself. Suppliers easily track library requests and control the security around who can see their shared materials. Sales and marketing teams become empowered with specific and timely information to close more business.
For brands and retailers, MaterialFirst is the first place to look for new materials from current suppliers or find fabric or trims from new suppliers that are completely vetted by industry peers.
Material developers and sourcing agents can search, find and dynamically import material information directly into their Texbase libraries to speed development and eliminate repetitive data entry. MaterialFirst is the tip of the sourcing spear while the balance of Texbase functionality accelerates the testing, commercialization and adoption of new materials while tracking them through production to ensure both quality and compliance.
MaterialFirst allows both suppliers and brands to shorten the development cycle and accelerate adoption especially as it relates to marketing and sourcing sustainable materials and tracking their certifications.
“There are several aspects of MaterialFirst that make it unique” stated Joe Walkuski, Texbase CEO. “The first thing to note is that it’s exclusive to Texbase subscribers. Suppliers are vetted by brands creating a curated list of material sources for brands to connect with and conversely, suppliers are confident that the inquiries they receive are coming from established customers. Second, we understand the challenge of maintaining content and to that end we’ve implemented tools that allow suppliers to easily maintain the data describing their collections. Finally, because both supplier and customer are operating on the same platform, we get to do some interesting data integrations. Overall MaterialFirst has a great future as we continue to evolve its capabilities to provide validated sources of digital material data for our customers.”