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Ilkay Özkisaoglu

Since 04/2021 216 Episoden

#213 TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER (TIC) by KARL MAYER — The Place to Be During Techtextil 2026!

05.05.2026 18 min Staffel 5 Episode 171

Zusammenfassung & Show Notes

TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER (TIC) by KARL MAYER — The Place to Be During Techtextil 2026!

Dear LinkedIn Composites community,

after filming an exclusive video interview with Hagen Lotzmann and Jürgen Tröltzsch at Composite Technologies – KARL MAYER during JEC World 2026 I can confirm one thing:

👉 The TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER (TIC) is about to become the global hotspot for textile innovation — and you REALLY don’t want to miss its Grand Opening.

From 21–24 April 2026, parallel to Techtextil, KARL MAYER will open the doors of its brand-new 6,000 m² innovation hub in Obertshausen — just 20 minutes from Frankfurt.

Here, the entire textile world comes together: warp knitting, technical textiles, warp preparation, fashion, composites, footwear, home textiles — and next-gen technical applications.

🌟 Why you must be there (or risk falling behind):

🔍 1. See full-scale machines in live operation

Not lab demos — real industrial machines, including advanced warp knitting, weft insertion, fibre spreading systems, lightweight UD tape production and more.

🧪 2. From idea → prototype → near-series production

The TIC lets you test materials, simulate processes and validate concepts before scaling — cutting development time and reducing risk.

🏛️ 3. Access to 40 years of textile archives

The InspirationHub gives you access to an extraordinary archive of patterns, fabrics and structures — a treasure trove for new ideas and market-ready solutions.

🧭 4. Get guided Innovation Tours

Experience market-driven textile trends, new applications in defense, workwear, sports, filtration, composites and more.

💬 5. Talk directly to the experts

Machine specialists, textile developers, application engineers — all ready to engage with your challenges and projects.

🚐 6. Exclusive Shuttle Service every 30 minutes

Seamlessly commute between TIC and Techtextil. I’ll use it myself — you should, too!

🎀 Grand Opening Ceremony — 23 April

Ceremonial ribbon cutting, CEO keynote, food, networking and an evening event until 21:00.

This is where the industry meets — and where partnerships for tomorrow are born.

🎥 I’ll be there on April 21 for the opening day.

If you’re attending, drop me a message — let’s meet at Obertshausen or at Karl Mayer's booth at Techtextil (Hall 12.0 / B079).

See you where the future of textiles begins!

Transkript

So wonderful good afternoon dear LinkedIn community Composites, Lounge members, JEC visitors exhibition visitors. I’m now with one of my key customers here with KARL MAYER. And we have fantastic news for you. One is the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER that will be opened on the 21st of April until the 24th of April, and we will be talking about an upgrade and update on composites on the booth of KARL MAYER. So to my left is Hagen Lotzmann, he’s the Managing Director. Thanks for being part of our show. And we got Jürgen Tröltzsch here. And if you want to know more about KARL MAYER technical textiles, I’ve been there already in 2023. And we made a full factory tour about their solutions. But today we will be talking first about the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER. And as you guys probably know by now, I’m a textile guy by heart, so it is always a heartfelt matter to talk about textiles with experts from KARL MAYER. Yeah. Hagen. So we see here the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER is opening, and it’s not opening in your place. It’s opening at the headquarters, right? That’s right. Tell us about what the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER? Who is it for and why should someone care about it? So, yeah, the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER is basically happening at or opening at the KARL MAYER headquarters in Obertshausen, which is just a 20-minute ride from Frankfurt. And we will be opening this TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER during the Techtextil, which is taking place at the same time in the same week. Yeah. And the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER is basically covering the whole textile world, the whole KARL MAYER textile world, but not only KARL MAYER, also the whole textile world. So covering anything from fashion and apparel, sports textiles, home textiles, and footwear, and of course the vast area of technical textiles, where we come from, business, you know, technical textiles. So, but it’s not covering only our business units. It’s also covering warp preparation and warp knitting. So we will display solutions, KARL MAYER solutions of course, and all the end applications. As I just mentioned, in total there will be more than eight machines from the whole KARL MAYER technical world. Yeah. The aim is to reach our customers, but not only our customers, but also the customers of our customers. And in the apparel world, we talk about brands, and together with them we want to create new applications, find new trends, and together develop new applications and new textiles. Now we understand the purpose of the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER. So there will be a grand opening, and the community, you are invited, you have to fill in the form. We will put the link into this vlog here today, so you can apply, fill in the form, and then you will get approval to visit that factory. The reason is you will be having a full program for the full week. You will even have a shuttle service from your TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER to Techtextil and back. I think every 30 minutes there will be a shuttle service. I will also use it actually, because I will also be seeing you guys at Techtextil, you know. Jürgen, Maybe you can walk us through the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER step by step. So because I understand you have a system whereby you want to inspire first the visitor or the future customer or regular customers, and then you are moving towards solutions. So how does that work? What is the concept? Yeah. So when you enter the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER, you will see first the world of our customers or the products coming out from our machines in our Showroom. So you see the end application parts you can make from our machines. That means, of course, apparel and wearables, but also, in the focus of technical textiles, products made out of reinforcement fibers, glass fibers, carbon fiber, structural parts for lightweight applications, but not only, also coming from our weft insertion machines, which have a wide variety of Applications - geotextiles, geogrids and other building and filtration textiles. And this is where you enter. And from this, like an exhibition room, you have windows looking directly into the rooms where the machines are producing, as you can see directly, all our business units with windows. If you look into the exhibition of our machines and what we will present in our business unit, technical textiles from machines is new development from weft-insertion machines, which is in the, let’s say, idea of producing ultra-fine structures where you can handle really sensible polymer fibers, monofilaments, in a way that you make like a parallel orientation of the fibers, which are then knitted, stand on like a spacer. And application, for example, can be in medicine, for example, for filtration. But not only, it can be used for everything that you need really polymer fibers, parallel oriented. On the other hand, we have a modular test system for our customers. If you are interested in using reinforcement fibers, you want to make a lightweight spread tape. So this is a machine for producing UD tapes. This can be made out of carbon fibers, can be made out of glass fibers, can even be made out of high-strength polymer fibers. We will show there an example for producing thin tape, really lightweight tape made out of high-strength polyethylene, which gives a much, you know, how it is, and can be used for protection textiles or protection applications. . And this modular system can be used by our customers for testing the fibers, for spreading and embedding with some dispersion or liquid impregnation. Now, you can give me an idea. Obviously now, like an exhibition like this, you cannot move machines from one place to the other so easily. I remember your geotextile machine at ITMA, for example. That was, was it one week set up like this? It’s a huge undertaking. So what scale of machines are you having at the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER? Do we have full-scale or are these reduced versions, laboratory machines? No. For example, this weft-insertion machine, this machine is a full-scale machine. Yeah. All the machines are full-scale machines for full production. Of course, as I mentioned before, our testing machine for spreading tapes, this is a modular, let’s say small-scale machine for producing, not a the whole width, but only, let’s say, for testing, enough 30 cm. But other machines obviously are full-scale machines, basically. And these machines are there for the longer term. This will not be dismantled anytime soon, but they will be staying there for a longer term so that visitors can really get into this technology. Exactly. The machines we display there will stay for a longer time. The TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER is not for the short term. It’s for the long term, as I mentioned, we want to go into really textile developments. We want to develop new markets together with customers or end users. That’s our aim. And that’s not for the short term. The machines will also change from time to time. So I can speak for technical textiles. We will bring in, at the end of the year, also another machine. We will start off with two machines. But that’s not the end. I hope at the end it will be maybe 4 or 5 machines we will display in the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER. That is cool because then we can always upgrade the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER and see the news as they come in. So we’ve touched the fibers, technical textiles. We are talking about the thermoplasts some thermo sets. What other kinds of fibers are in this TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER? The most used ones, most standard ones, maybe if you can group them according to production. You mentioned shoes, for example, and other sectors. Basically, the fiber is mostly influenced, I would say, by the end use. If you think about wearables, it’s, it’s of course, sports textiles. It’s more polyester fibers, functional fibers. If you look into suits or shirts, it can be cotton, it can be viscose yarns. And if you look into technical textiles, of course, the range is even more wide. It can be aramid for ballistics. It can be carbon fibers for high-strength ultra-lightweight composites, glass fibers also for composites. But for more, let’s say, economically driven applications, like for example wind power, glass fiber is still the standard fiber. It’s comparatively cheap, but it has a good performance. The range is vast now. So let’s come back one more time to the machine setup and the process. So initially, people are watching and inspecting your materials that you gathered over a period of many years. So there’s a huge selection of different kinds of materials and textile in our Inspiration Room. Why do you think it is important also to look at past projects, past materials? Why did you keep 40 years of materials? Well, it’s like a library. And when you are walking into a library, you can see, yeah, it’s nothing that was not invented already before. Yeah. But in a different way. A little bit. So it makes sense, of course, to look back, especially in our fast time and digital driven. No one looks in the books from 90 years ago, but there you can see all the samples we produced over 40 years. It were all business units, and it makes sense. Maybe just from some 20, 30 years ago, as you know, especially in fashion, you have to trace something from ten years ago, comes already again as a trend. So it makes sense to see, just to get ideas what can be done. And this is not only for fashion, it is also, of course, for technical textiles, because it makes total sense to see what can be done with reinforcement fibers in fiber orientation, it’s using the grammage, using different types of yarn count of fibers. And so this makes total sense to have an overview on all And maybe one argument is also, rather than producing a huge lot for a trial, you have some samples from the past which may not be 100% what you require now, but at least you get a feel for it, and then you can go into the larger lot without or with less risk of having a miss production. Yeah. So that’s a risk reduction measure actually. Yeah. At the end, it’s the inspiration, it should be used as an inspiration, because I can say, for example, in the past we had machines which we don’t have anymore, which were capable of certain fabric structures which the machines we have today maybe cannot do. Yes, but we can use the textile we have in the inspiration room, in the archive, so the customers or the end users can look and see, hey, could this be something interesting for today? And then we already know how the machine needs to look like. And that’s the idea, because old stuff is not necessarily bad stuff. It was just not the time anymore for that. And the time may come back. There’s a revival of many styles of different kinds of fabrics. Now, one of my favorite topics, of course, is quality assurance. So this world, particularly, we are talking here about advanced engineering, advanced materials. We are flying with these materials. We are driving cars with these materials, but also in the sporting goods industry, the medical industry. Is there quality assurance in the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER? Anything that can be looked at? Do you have specifications? Do you run through them? The idea of the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER is, in the first step, it’s really to innovate in textile structures, new ideas. It’s not in the first step of, yeah, assuring qualities, which we, of course, later on, when we develop a new application, we will develop a new textiles and with that the new machine, we will then, together with the customers, bring in the quality assurance and measurement devices what we need. But the first idea is really to think why, to think new and not in this specific assurance. So it’s like the ideation process. First get the idea, the feasibility, is it feasible at all? Why should you think about concrete KPIs and metrics if it’s not feasible? I mean, can it be a market, that’s important. I mean, at KARL MAYER we want to serve the whole market. We don’t say KARL MAYER is only a premium supplier. We want to serve, let’s say, the wide market. We want to go from premium down to the general, also the commodity market. In all our fields where we are active, and we don’t want to do what happened to, I have to say, a lot of textile machinery makers in Europe only went to the premium premium. But we want to cover the whole market. That is our aim. And so we are looking into niche and wide applications. I think then we covered the TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER. Thank you so much for these insights. I’m really thrilled dear community that this TEXTILE INNOVATION CENTER will be opening. I will be there on the 21st of April, so make sure you are there also. You will be there. You will be there. Then later on I will go and see you also at Techtextil, at the booth 12.0/B079, before I then head off to AERO in Friedrichshafen. Thank you so much and have a great rest of the show. Thank you Ilkay.