In the beginning... there were denim jeans made from a rugged fabric woven from indigo dyed cotton and worn as workwear. Then it became a fashion item and was subjected to every shape style and wash down finish imaginable. During the nineteen seventies I was designing for Stirling Cooper, at the time regarded as a very fashion forward label. It was towards the end of my tenure there that I was working on a collection incorporating denim pieces and had been despatched to Hong Kong to oversee the final samples. Among the many designs was a simple denim blouson jacket with matching knitted rib hem and cuffs, straightforward enough, or so I though. This simple quest was to lead me on an adventure never imagined. Needless to say the factories could not provide what was wanted, because the denim rib did not exist, I was shown a variety of blue and navy ribbings in all manor of different yarns, but nothing to match the exact colour of indigo with its natural fade out qualities. Thinking the Chinese suppliers were just not getting to grips with this simple request I insisted on being taken to the denim factory where I assumed that I would be able to obtain cones of the indigo yarn from which I could have my now precious ribs knitted up. Entering a vast factory building I saw before me the whole ground floor taken up with a machine the size of a row of terraced houses belching steam at each end and winding through its length there were multiple ropes of yarn gradually changing from creamy white to an inky blue. There were no cones for knitting, it all went, via some intermediate processes, from long ropes to woven fabric; such disappointment. In the face of this new found knowledge I had no choice but to drop the idea, but it was not destined to go away entirely. A few years later I was invited by a Scottish manufacturer to create and design a new brand of jeanswear. They were based in Watson Street, Glasgow, so I named the jeans ‘Watsons’ and immersed myself in designing the clothes, labels all ancillary aspects essential to its success. Wanting to distinguish the new label from the well established competitors in the field I wondered if it would be possible revisit the indigo rib concept and actually produce a knitted denim, and so to this end I decided to try a few experiments. Having read all I could get my hands on about the process of indigo dyeing I obtained the necessary dye and other constituents and tried dyeing hanks, sometimes known a skeins, of cotton yarn. Frankly, it was physically very difficult and messy, and the results were patchy, and when knitted up, the colour looked alright, but the fabric would not fade like denim. I also tried dyeing ready knitted fabric, but the results were no better. The conclusion was that the yarn had to be dyed the same way as it was when producing denim and then it somehow a method for winding it onto cones must be found, but how? Before taking the project further I had to find out how the real thing would actually look, so I took a piece of denim and tore the fabric down the middle and then painstakingly teased out the individual indigo warp yarns. The strands, each one only a couple of metres long, were tied together end to end then wound by hand onto a small bobbin until there was judged to be sufficient to knit a small square of fabric on a domestic hand knitting machine. This morsel of knitted fabric was given a good hard wash then dried; eureka! I had it, it looked just like the real thing, deep indigo with a little white showing through where it was roughed up. There could be no stopping now, this project had to to be taken to its conclusion, I had to find a way of producing this stuff. The first port of call was the only remaining denim producer in the UK, Smith and Nephew. They were much amused by my request, but said they would let me buy some yarn if I wanted. It was in the form of a rope consisting of 320 individual threads several thousand metres long and coiled into a container. The problem was how to separate it out and wind it onto cones for knitting. After all, Lancashire was the home of the cotton industry and if there were any processes that could be adapted to this quest it would be there somewhere. The ensuing detective work turned up a small factory that dyed super fine mercerized Egyptian cotton yarn for very expensive shirts. This yarn was also dyed in rope form and a small portion of it would be wound onto tiny bobbins to be used in the weft of the fabric. They had a few strange looking Heath Robinson type of machines called a ‘328 End Pirn Winder’ and I had to try winding our yarn on one. The denim yarn was considerably thicker than the fine shirting yarn and did not really have sufficient tensile strength, but it still worked after a fashion. The only problem was that because the denim yarn was rather thick not much went on each pirn making the winding very inefficient and it had to be knotted frequently when wound onto knitting cones which was not very desirable. However, even if the first efforts were a little crude, I now actually had a product. Some of the yarn was twisted up into two ply for sweaters and the rest was made into a fleece of sorts. Using industry contacts I specified and organized sample garments. The knitters hated it; indigo blue dye rubbed off on everything, but they were pursueded to persevere and the resulting garments looked impressive. The new consept was incorporated into the ‘Watson’ collection and certainly attracted plenty of interest. From past experience in the fashion industry I was well aware of the need to to protect ones creative efforts from the usual sharks, so in parallel to all the development work I inquired about the possibility of copyright protection for this new design. However, following discussions with, Beck Greener & Co, a reputed firm of intellectual property right agents, it was advised that the way the law was interpretated at that time the concept could not be protected by copyright law because it was neither a surface design, such as wallpaper, nor was it a product design like a chair or individual garment, so no design category was met. However, they expressed the opinion that it could be considered to be an invention by virtue of the fact that processes not originally intended were modified and used to create a new product. So, with that patents were applied for. In the meantime, S Meadow & Co, the jeans manufacturer was undergoing hard times. Their mainstay, contract manufacturing, was being exported to the Far East and they were not in a position to continue, so the newly created ‘Watson’ brand was sold off as part of attempts to fend off the inevitable demise. However, as they say, when one door closes etcetera… The principal of S Meadow offered to come in on the new enterprise and provide initial finance in exchange for a fifty per cent share in the business, so, in the light of the fact that Calvin Klein, the USA designer jeans brand, was now seriously interested in the product and I had no finance this had to be the way to go. The supply arrangement was odd, even by fashion industry standards; we were to export all the indigo yarn we could produce exclusively to CK in the USA at cost and they would pay us a royalty on the sale of each garment. This worked out fine up to a point, but then complications set in, Calvin Klein’s jean’s licensee, Carl Rosen, our contractor, died and Calvin decided to make a hostile takeover. In the interim all commercial activity was pretty much frozen, but we had a lot of yarn on hold for delivery which they were not taking up. This would have been a serious problem, except fot the fact that the interest CK had created by their publicity meant that considerable demand had built up from other fashion companies, so, in the interests of survival, we moved on and supplied these other organizations. Another side effect of the Calvin Klein deal was that we came to the attention of Burlington Inc, a major American denim and sportswear fabric manfacturer. They were interested in licensing the product, which by this time was also patent pending in the USA, and so after much discussion and long negotiations we agreed a licensing arrangement. The royalties from this deal later proved a lifeline when trading became difficult. For a while the product was very popular, but there was a fundamental problem. In the mid eighties fashion dictated that all jeans were stone washed to give them a pre-worn appearance. This process involved placing the new pristine garments in a large industrial washing machine with a load of abrasive pumice stones and tumbling them until the jeans looked well battered. The process could not practically be applied when it came to sweaters and T-shirts because, being made from much softer fabric than jeans, they would not stand up to such rough treatment. Consequently sales of the indigo knitting yarn declined to the point where we considered giving up, that is until I heared about a new stone washing process without the stones. Enzymes, designed to breakdown cellulose fibre (I understand were initially developed for the food industry) were being used to wash lighter weigh denim shirts with good results. The enzyme washing turned out to be the major that turned the business round for us. Once I got to grips with the basic technology of the process I applied it to garments knitted from our yarn with good effect. A denim sweater, sweat shirt or T-shirt could now be given a pre-worn treatment. The effect on the popularity of the indigo yarn was astonishing and from that point there was no looking back. With commercial success comes competition and this is where the patent came into play. The principle is simple if an individual or organization expends time, effort and expense developing a new product they are entitled to a degree of protection from competition in order to allow them to benefit from those efforts and inventiveness. We started to see denim manufacturers or affiliated companies producing a version of our yarn. All the suppliers were operating outside countries where we had patents, but they were supplying into territories where we did have patent protection. Therefore, when we saw the copies crop up in those countries we pursued the supplier or customer through the courts to good effect. Generally, those caught out settled quickly and in such cases we were lenient in our demands, agreeing to modest reparations and undertakings not to infringe further. Some suppliers were large corporations and not so reasonable preferring to wheel out the big lawyers and play hardball. However, not a single one of them was prepared to appear in court on the day of reckoning, so, we gained a reputation for tenacious defence of our intellectual property rights and, it was with some satisfaction, we eventually managed to see off the interlopers. The product had to be marketed effectively and to this end I spent a lot of time travelling, seeing designers from the most fashionable brands in Italy, France, the USA etc. Then further afield to their factories in Turkey, India, Hong Kong and China to provide necessary technical services: how to knit and, most importantly, how to wash. All this took the enterprise from next to nothing to a turnover of several million pounds. With commercial success come other problems; those of manufacturing a quality product consistently. Indigo yarn was and is not easy to produce. Because it is a slow linear process each individual thread of yarn on a cone is dyed over a long period, the net result being that the yarn at the centre of the cone is dyed several hours before that on the outside. The ropes of yarn are passed through a preparation tank to wet it out, followed by immersion several dye vats, then rinsing and drying over hot cylinders. Consistency is not just a question of the colour there is also the the degree of penetration, because the wash down relies on the fact that the indigo dye only adheres to the outer surface of the yarn, so that the natural core shows through where it is worn. If, during the dyeing process, the conditions change: the speed changes, the strength of dye feeding to the vats changes, the pH of the chemical balance changes, the temperature changes, any and all of these factors will effect the finished product. In order to meet the growing demand we developed our own specialist winding machinery for higher output and efficiency and set up a factory dedicated to processing the the indigo yarn, to the point that we were taking nearly half of S&N’s dyeing capacity. In the early nineties S&N were finding that their apparel textile division could not compete with ever cheaper imports of denim and eventually decided to close it. Initially they agreed to sell us the indigo dyeing plant, so necessary to our then thriving enterprise, but they later changed their minds and sold it to a company in Pakistan. Consequently, we had to either close, or set up our own dyeing factory in no time flat. (We had, in anticipation of such a possible problem tried setting up a joint venture in China, but soon concluded that this was a fools errand as the quality of the product was just too poor). The project of setting up a new dyeing factory was financially too enormous to undertake out of our own resources, so we had to look for outside investment. We were soon tied up in a deal with a major UK venture capitalist and an American/German textile machinery conglomerate. The first would supply investment capital, and the second would provide new, state of the art, dyeing equipment, all in exchange for a substantial stake in the business. All went smoothly at first until we hit a few start up problems at the new factory. The net result was that the two investors could not agree on a strategy going forward and in the fall out one obtained control over the business. Following the forced takeover I was retained for a short while as a consultant, but this was in reality to prevent me taking knowhow elsewhere rather than for the provision of beneficial expertise. The new owner, Kleinewefer’s policy was to reduce the product range for increased efficiency and target large multiple retailers rather than the specialist knitters and cutting edge fashion labels that had been the mainstay of the enterprise previously. The net result was that turnover went into terminal decline and within four years of the takeover they went out of business. The end Michael Quinnen