Welcome to the Interior Design Podcast. We have just recorded ourselves for the last
ten minutes talking about the catch-up for the week and realised we hadn't turned the
on switch on the microphone. Well done us.
Good start, really good start. Happy New Year 2024. So, how are you? What have you been
working on? I feel like I haven't seen you for ages. We were just saying weren't we?
Literally for the last ten minutes. When we thought we had the microphone on.
No, I'm really good. I had a really nice couple of weeks off at Christmas. Work's been a bit
mental. I think I mentioned last year when we were doing the last podcast that I'm doing
some quite in-depth design management at the moment on a quite big hotel in London which
is quite challenging but really good. I was saying to someone the other day that I kind
of wish though that the New Year, can we just make it a thing? I think it needs to be like
an industry standard that the first week back in the New Year isn't a thousand miles an
hour. Like it would be really nice to just come back and have like three or four days
of just a gentle build up to the level that you were working at before. You know the run
up to Christmas is always like insane. It's always insane and every year I say the same
thing. I'm like I'm going to take a week off before Christmas so I can actually enjoy the
run up to the festive period and start getting a bit Christmassy and festive. It never happens.
I'm always running around like a headless chicken. And then yeah, you get back in the
New Year and it's like bang straight back in. And it's quite stressful. I find it quite
stressful. I think a lot of people do that though because it doesn't really ramp up for
me until like people don't start really going at me until like the second week of January
and then everyone starts coming out of the water. I thought about this the other day
when I was having a bit of a moan in my head about for God's sake why can't the first
week just be nice and chilled? And I was thinking yeah when like I remember obviously when I
was you know working with you that the first couple of weeks of January are always quite
a nice kind of a bit of a slower burn. But yeah it's been mental but it's all good as
I say it's.
You're working for the contractor aren't you?
Yeah and it's keeping me you know it's keeping me on my toes which is really good so lots
of drawing work to do, lots of procurement stuff to do and dealing with a lot of you
know consultants as well which is cool so yeah it's going to be amazing. So I've got
that and then I mentioned that I'm helping out you know on the free time that I do have
at weekends and stuff I'm helping out a friend of mine who's got a little deli in the town
that I live and he's opening a little cafe so I'm just helping him whilst he's sunning
himself in Australia at the moment for a month by just clearing the unit for him and you
know getting some prep work done and stuff in the evenings and weekends.
It's always nice when you get involved and a hands-on project like that isn't it?
Yeah I really love it I really love it yeah and actually it's quite nice when I quite
like working on things where I'm helping people like that because I don't feel the I don't
feel the pressure because I'm not getting paid for it like I'm doing it as a favour
do you know what I mean so it's nice to just yeah I don't feel like there's any pressure
on me and which is really nice.
It's quite conducive to my my brain work.
I just finished a project at the end of last year when you were saying about how mental
it was before Christmas I literally finished this on the 22nd of December and it was so
it's a local project it's called Jukes in St. Osith and it's such a the people who own
it are so lovely they've just let me design it and I've designed and project managed it
and it just looks amazing.
The owners as well are really lovely of Jukes and she's a brilliant chef and he's just really
methodical so I'm really hoping that they do well because they're so lovely I think
I reckon they will because it's so local I love it when I do local projects because
I can go and eat in there like we did the noodle bar last year as well and we've been
going in there and every time I go in there they go this is my designer they always introduce
me to a couple of the customers it's so nice but yeah now we're doing a race course at
the moment doing all of the race course which is really making me happy we did a nice elevation
drawing yesterday and I coloured it all in Photoshop and I love doing stuff like that
and lots of mood boards and yeah so we're doing a lot at the moment we're really busy
I think we've probably got enough work for the next six weeks Italian restaurant as well
we're doing Fratelli's which we did the upstairs they've got an upstairs called Fratelli's
Cecchetti in Ampt Hill and Tanya yeah he used to work for Harp Designs yeah and so they
called me the other day and said can you do the downstairs so with that doing a pub in
Bedford as well what else? Golf club local golf club so yeah lots of projects going on
so yeah we are busy happy very happily busy so yeah so who have we got today? Today we
have Spencer and James from iLive James is our local rep or he is the key account manager
and Spencer is the commercial director and apparently Spencer is a right geek we've not
met Spencer before but apparently he's the best person to educate everyone on the podcast
so because they've got such a lovely collection of fabrics very you know hugely diverse collection
it'd be really cool to hear what they've got to say they do curtain fabric and upholstery
fabric as well and they've got lots of patterns and planes and all sorts of different things
they're quite a big company so yeah I'm excited to hear what they've got to say cool let's
bring them in shall we? Shall we let them in? Let's let them in.
Welcome to the interior design podcast today our guests are Spencer Brennan and James Vardy
from iLive Spencer Brennan is the commercial director at iLive and James is the key account
manager welcome guys. Hi, morning. So how was your journey guys? It was okay yeah it was
Spencer's come down from Preston and iLive in Nottingham so we've come down and stayed
overnight specifically to do your podcast. Oh my god I'm so honoured. Thank you for coming.
I've not been snowed in which is good. Yes. Touch wood. But did have to wait 20 minutes
for me to turn up. Yeah. It's been shining. So how long have you guys worked for iLive?
I've been there now just under 14 years. Oh my goodness. So straight out of university.
What did you do at uni? Marketing at Lancaster you know seems ages ago now. Luckily enough
met Jason our CEO you know how these things work conversation and then luckily enough
had an interview and worked on another area of the business originally and then had the
opportunity at that time we had a brand called Swatchbox and then my main project at that
time was kind of doing the transition from what was Swatchbox then to where we are today
with iLive and grown since then doing different things. Wow. To kind of now effectively my
role as commercial director is everything to do with new product and product development.
So I work very closely with our design studio at SMD iLive in Preston and then a lot with
our quality team and spend a lot of time with our suppliers and supplier management and
that's kind of the role. So yeah it's quite varied. I enjoy it. How about you James? How
have you been doing? This is 11 years now. So I left college went into by going back
to the late 80s now. Going back doing net curtains for a few years then went to work
for Ashley Wild Group for a few years. It's about five or six years and then was national
sales manager for a couple of ready-made curtain companies. Rectella was one of them and then
decided to set my own business up called Curtains to Go online in 2000 and I did that for 11
or 12 years and then came back to work for SMD iLive and was doing the retail side for
four years and then made the switch to contract and never looked back really and I love contracts.
So we see a lot of James. Yes. Very cool in our office. Every five minutes. So James tell
us a little bit about iLive. So iLive has been going as a company called SMD Group.
So iLive is a brand within SMD. So as a brand iLive is now 11 years old. The company is
about 36 years old. We have two sides to the business. We have the iLive fabric side which
is the contract and retail and then we also have what we call our home brand of products
which is ready-made products for two big national multi retailers being John Lewis and Don Elm.
So you go into a John Lewis or a Don Elm and about a third of all the ready-made products
so you pick a duvet cover up, a pair of curtains or a cushion, a third of them will be ours
but you would never know. They have their own design teams, work with our design teams
and they then collaborate two or three times a year and come up with ideas. They're working
probably about 18 months in advance so they'll be working on autumn, winter, so many years,
18 months in advance so they've got to think of the trends and get the trends right of
what's coming in, what's going. But yeah, you get a third of all the products within
those companies are ours but they're all branded as their own branded products.
But manufactured by? Manufactured in the factories that we use
generally in the Far East. So we do all the donkey work of bringing it in and dealing
with all the mills out in the Far East and then we bring it in for them and it's all
dispatched from our warehouses into the John Lewis and Don Alms.
That's quite good to know. It's quite good. We've got a team, total staff
over 100 and we have three sites. So we have Preston which is our head office and main
warehouse. We also have a warehouse in Hyde in Manchester where we generally do all of
the own branded products from. And then we also have an office in a showroom
in Shanghai in China so they can deal with all the mills and everything so they speak
the language. They manage a lot of the ethical and technical
audit side of it as you can imagine. That side of the industry is very, very stringent
in terms of the suppliers you can work with and so on. And a lot of these suppliers we've
been working with for a very long time have got a very good rapport. We only work with
a handful of suppliers out in the Far East and they're great westernised businesses in
a certain sense. But we've got the team out there which is great for the day to day, we
need this, we need that. They can just run around and get what's required as trends change
and direction evolves over time. But it's a great asset.
And one of the things that I like is it's a family business. So we work for a family
business and we get looked after and we get treated like family. So it's a really, really
lovely company to work for.
Yeah, hence why you guys have both been there.
And then Kind of iLiv came out of a requirement in the market really. So as I touched upon
just before we had a brand called Swatch Box which at that time I wasn't in the business
when it first launched back in the 80s. It was built around planes and at that time swatches
in boxes, hence the brand. And then the market evolved to more pattern led so the brand lost
a little bit of traction and Jason our CEO saw there was an opportunity to relaunch a
new brand with a new meaning and that's where I started to get involved there. I'm working
with some local universities, getting them involved in terms of doing a whole brand exercise
of effectively what generated iLiv and the actual brand iLiv, funnily enough, came from
just a few internal meetings that we had with the internal team, having a chat around brand
values as you do and what we stand for as a business and all that fun stuff that you
kind of trying to get everybody involved because we are a very collaborative business.
And we ended up with these four words which were inspire, lead, involve and value and
it was Jason's, our CEO, his wife who said oh that gives that the acronym of iLiv. Oh
yeah, it works that. And then funnily enough that's kind of how it started and we've stuck
with it since then and 11 years on it's just grown and grown and grown. We tweaked the
brand, the logo a little bit. We started off doing quite a large category, to the product
category of base and we've narrowed that down to really focus on textiles and then we introduced
it into the contract side of it about seven years ago, eight years ago, I believe, I can't
remember now, everything's gone so quick. We introduced it as iLiv Contract Fabrics
and everything's history has just kept on growing and growing year on year but it was
really developed as a brand to make it easier for the consumer and also make it easier for
designers like yourselves to pick up our books, pick up our designs and be able to bring them
to life effectively and how we lay them out, how we create the designs, what about that
scale, colour, different design categories, different stories. We've got a real eclectic
mix of looks and feels within the iLiv brand that effectively you can find anything under
our brand, you know, whether you want something a little bit more timeless and classical or
if you want something a little bit more contemporary and geometric or textured, we've kind of
got it all. We don't sit to one style, we kind of adapt to the trend and where the markets
go and the demands really, which is quite nice and diverse, I guess, from a design aspect.
I didn't realise how many books we had, I got all the books out earlier and I was like,
oh my god, we've got so many iLiv books in there and I found a couple of fabrics that
have been buried that I've been looking for, so that's good, thank you.
We must launch now 20 collections a year across the board roughly.
We've now gone on the contract side, pre-COVID we used to launch products every three months
for contract and on the retail side is every six months, so we always have two set launches
a year for the non-FR products for the housing side, the residential side, but on the contract
it was always every three months, so there was always something new. When I cover the
country apart from inside London, I'd always got something new to show, so every time I
come I've got something new. So then COVID hit and we had to slow down, so we just launched
a lot pre-COVID, so after we've all got let out of being locked in, we sort of had to
let that settle, the dust settle on the new ones and let everyone get used to them again
and now we're launching back again, it's every three months, sometimes even sooner than that,
it can be every month, every two months, but predominantly it is three months we've got
more new products, so it's a constant, we're evolving all the time, so it's all trend,
lead and colours, panter of the year, peach, peach fuzz, so we'll be seeing a bit more
of that this year, but it's exciting times.
We were talking about trends weren't we before and you were saying about how it's gone a
bit strange.
Yeah, I mean I find it every, well at the end of every season it's always a bit daunting
going, right we'll just signed off one season and we need to start the other one next and
it's kind of, what is it, you know, where do you look and I mean there's so many avenues
you can take direction from now, but yeah just what we were talking about before Hayley,
and it kind of links itself to the iLive brand, we don't have a set of handwriting let's
say, you know, we're so diverse with what we do and we get inspired from so many different
places in the market and whether that's fashion or any kind of like social events or things
going on at art museums, everything like that, but there's nothing I've found over the past
couple of years, nothing slap bang obvious of that's a new direction, that's a new trend
and a new style, but what I have seen and I think what's easier to track and monitor
is colour and the change in colour and you know and a little thing going on quite recently
is you know people are more confident with colour especially on the domestic side of
it and you'll see there's a big movement from very the cold greys which were really popular
about four years ago, yeah exactly, five years ago to now moving to much warmer neutral tones
which is nice to see and they're bringing in pops of colour, terracottas and things like
that and also patterns coming back and people are, big time isn't it, yeah and we were talking
about the, I like the word maximalist, people are just mixing patterns in the way that they
like and doing what they like to do and it's not really a set formula which is nice, it's
a lot more individual, individual, individualistic, yeah that's a good word, I don't know, I'll
try and think about it, but yeah no everyone sort of wants to do it their way and it's
a bit like when you buy a mini you know you kind of, if you buy a brand new mini you get
like a bit of that and you build it to how you want it and I think interior design is
a little bit like that isn't it, you kind of very much layer it for the person.
I think we've spoken about this though on previous podcasts, I think on one of the first
ones when we were talking to Karen about the psychology of colour, you know we touched on
that whole concept of how design has changed over the last few years, interior design from
a commercial and from a, probably more from a domestic perspective, that people are a
lot more open now to actually rather than just keeping up with the Joneses and having
what everybody else has because that's what's on trend and that's what they see in magazines
that actually they are more open to the idea of giving it a bit more thought about what
it is that they actually really like and what they're striving towards in terms of design
so it's positive I think.
So I'd really like to touch on sort of different standards today, what can you guys teach us
about different standards for things like curtains and we're talking about marine,
weren't we?
Well where do we start?
Obviously it's there for a reason and we have standards mainly down to make sure individuals
and guests in a commercial remit are safe in the environment they're in and ultimately
that's why we have these tests that we have to be certified for when we launch a product.
The key one for UK drapery so if you have a hotel or a care home or anything along those
lines, university halls for example, you would kind of look to use any type of these curtains
in a public space so the test method you should all be aware of is BS 5867.
Part 2.
Part 2 but then this kind of 2 you'll see that there's usually a B and a C associated
with them so you'll usually see it as BS 5867 part 2 B and C or just B or just C and effectively
this test method in a really simple way is just setting the curtain on fire and it's
all about the time of ignition and how long the flame basically rides up the curtain and
the time for it to extinguish and also that there's no smouldering in terms of droplets
of flames or melted fibre dropping off the curtain and these get examined by the testing
house at this time which is usually a UCAS accredited testing house who sign off and
certify the products and there's loads of factors involved throughout product development
which can affect that.
I'm not a scientist, I'm very much a creative but there's lots of things in terms of the
weaving of fabric which can affect how it performs so how thick it is, the density of
the weave, how it's been finished in the process of weaving it when they finish the fabric
and they set it basically in a big oven, if they've set it too wide or too narrow, what
chemicals they've used to wash it, you know these things go through really big machines,
you might get a bit of oil on it or whatever and they wash the fabric, sometimes they wash
the fabric with a handle to make it feel softer and there's lots of these things which can
effectively make it more or less flammable so we've always got to be testing the products,
you can't just take it for granted that it's using an inherently flame retardant yarn that
it's always going to be performing, you need to always test the weave construction and
everything like that before you can go out and confidently sell it.
You guys have got some new ranges haven't you where you're not, there's a lot more
inherent fabrics.
Yes, yeah so what's interesting about the B and C side of it because it comes into the
difference between inherent and treated FR is with B and C, B requires basically 12 washes
before it's set on fire and C requires 50 washes at 75 degrees Celsius so if you're
using anything which is inherently flame retardant, so the yarn itself is inherently flame retardant,
it will always pass C primarily and the fact that you're not washing any chemicals off
it which make it FR effectively so if you're in an environment where you are continuously
washing things it's great and also you don't have to keep any records, you know once you've
washed it it's going to remain flame retardant.
However, if you're treating a fabric and we don't favour Eberside because obviously the
iLiv brand we have treated fabrics and inherent fabrics and we sell both, it just depends
on the individual who wants to buy them.
With coated fabrics because it's like a topical treatment that's added after, after a certain
amount of washes the flame retardancy will start to degrade and so is that B or C?
B.
So B is the one that's...
So usually to get it past that, to get it over 12 washes you really should be changing
your curtains after that but also at the same time with the treated fabrics you should be
looking to basically track the washing so you know how many times a certain pair of
curtains have been washed in that environment.
So this is probably a short answer now.
What if you were using a treated fabric?
So in a commercial environment you can buy a non FR fabric and treat it effectively which
will form however you can only wash it a certain number of times and then you'd have to switch
it out or retreat it again, the curtain panel.
Whereas if you're using something which contains inherently flame retardant yarn, so 100% polyester
FR, you can wash it an unlimited amount of times and it'll still remain FR so you don't
need to track the washing records or anything like that.
So as designers if we're specifying a certain fabric that's a B class we need to make sure
we're informing the client that they can only wash it a certain amount of times, 12 times.
Correct.
And what the benefits though of treating fabrics is you open an offer door to a larger variety
of fabrics you can use whereas when you are talking about inherently flame retardant yarn
you're only talking polyesters, you know ultimately there's nothing outside of that or wool but
then there's a price point associated with wool.
So it's kind of like swings and roundabouts, you know if you're watching something which
is a nice cotton print or natural fibre base of cotton linen or anything like that you're
gonna have to get it coated and treated and therefore you've got a set number of washes
until they need to be retreated again or replaced.
Whereas if you are using something from the iLiv contract range and it's inherently flame
retardant you're bulletproof in essence, you're absolutely fine.
But don't get me wrong there are instances where poor housekeeping can affect the flame
retardancy of the curtains so dust is a big thing.
If you're not cleaning your curtains a build up of dust can make them flare still so it
is down to the responsibility of wherever the soft furnishings are that the housekeeping
are cleaning them effectively because dust build up can be a challenge.
It's hoovering them.
If you've got curtains that are in, dummy curtains in a reception area that will never
get drawn, they will never get closed, they're probably hiding something, they need hoovering
regularly because the dust build up on there even though they will be inherently flame
retardant or coated.
If a match or something gets near them, a spark, it's the dust that will go and that
will flare to the ceiling and the dust will burn but the curtain won't catch fire but
it will look like it's catching fire so that's why they need to be hoovered regularly.
And there is with the laundering records of rooms, so if like room 529 their curtains
were washed on the 12th of December 2003 then that has to be logged and that's part of the
law.
Accurate laundering records need to be kept.
That's commercial only isn't it?
What about domestic?
So funnily enough there's absolutely nothing for drapery.
There's no rules or requirements around FR in that environment for drapery fabrics, not
at all.
So you can basically have anything you want up at your window, tissue paper, it's your
own home, however you live in a shared accommodation flat in the centre of Manchester or something
like that out of London or whether you live in a row of terraced houses and you're connected
to other homes within your street, there's no rules.
Airbnbs?
Oh yeah, airbnbs, no rules at all.
Which is quite scary when you think about it.
And I know we've got customers on our side who do a lot of furnishing accommodation for
domestic, a lot of renovations and stuff like that and they have used things like our tundra
plain in those environments just because it looks like a normal fabric anyway.
You know, well I'll probably rephrase that.
The best FR technology has changed over the course of the past 10 years.
It got a bit of a bad reputation way back when anything that had FR yarn in it had a
particular hand feel which was quite poor, quite stiff, very shiny, whereas now the yarn
innovation has really improved.
I could quite easily show you Belvets, Jacquards, Embroideries which are all 100% polyester
and you would think some of them have natural fibre in them and you'd think they would
have viscose in them or something like that because they just drape so well.
And so far, like I was touching back on, we have customers now who just for that reason
around just being safe putting FR drapes into the environment even though legally they don't
have to.
So James you wanted to add something about FR retardens, didn't you?
Yeah, it was just, yeah, the main, the list of, it's fabrics used in most public places
such as care homes, hospitals, universities, colleges, hotels, pubs, cruise ships, schools,
churches, theatres, prisons and detention centres are required by law to have their
fabrics certified FR.
And then you've got the, it's the 2005 fire safety order, so the responsible person, the
owner of or person with control of those premises has the full corporate responsibility.
So the owner of a hotel group might be on the beach in the Bahamas because that's where
he lives now and the hotel group runs itself and one of the housekeepers is nipped out
because someone's damaged a pair of curtains, nipped to the local shop and bought some and
someone in that room is now having a crafty fag out the window in the middle of the night
and catches the curtains on fire and they can't get out of the room and they've died.
The guy who owns it, who's in Bahamas, he's on a corporate manslaughter charge but doesn't
know anything about it because that's what the housekeeping should be doing but that's
why it's so important that any of that list of buildings and companies that need FR curtains
and it is by law that they need it.
We've had the problems with Grenfell, the outdoor cladding that brought it to light
so it is quite, it's very very important that any of them, the grey area is the Airbnb
side.
Well you rent out your home don't you, they're encouraging you to rent out your home.
Rent your spare room out.
But is that, that should be then classed as a hotel.
But also there's something with Airbnbs as well which, you know, if you go back, if you
stay in your hotel now, I mean it's been like this for years, every door has a fire exit
route, do you have that in an Airbnb?
If you stayed there for the first night and something happens like that, there's a fire
and you have to escape and you're half way in.
But if you have an HMO, I used to have an HMO, you had to have a fire alarm put in the
whole of the house and you had to have fire, the doors had to shut and I think so, yeah,
I had it managed but yeah, I had to pay to get it all upgraded because I had an HMO,
I couldn't just rent it out like a house.
So I think it is, I reckon it will come, yeah.
But it will probably just blank it won't it, they just say that everyone has to have it,
they'll just end up having a higher fire retardancy rule and it will be everyone who's selling
anything into the UK just have to have it fire retardant.
Because upholstery is, upholstery isn't like that is it?
So upholstery has got the cigarette match BS58521 and then it's got BS5852 plus crib
5.
Yeah, which is a combination test which is basically called BS7176 which is a combination
of BS5852 and also BS1021 which is your cigarette match so it's a combination of all three
tests together is your 7176.
But people call it loads of different terminologies in our market, there's crib 5, there's BS5852,
there's BS7176 but if I was a designer and I was looking for one thing on the back of
a label because even the editors and the fabric providers print different things on their
care labels and stuff like that I'd be looking for two main things either it says BS7176
or it says BS5852 source 0, 1 and 5 and then if it says that I'd be happy.
I'd be confident with what I'm using for a commercial environment and that's your
medium hazard environments, your public environments just what James was saying before, your pubs,
your clubs, your hotels, your spa rooms, your universities whatever.
It's a higher one isn't it, so if you're, we were talking about this, if you're locked
in.
Yes, crib 7.
So if that only really applies to prisons and mental institutions anywhere where you're
locked in your room and have to be let out so you have to wait to be let out that's when
it needs to be crib 7 so it's a longer burn than a crib 5.
So it's, if you're in control of your own destiny to get out of a room like in a hotel
room it's crib 5 but if you're locked in and you have to wait to be let out it's got to
be crib 7.
Yeah, what you classify as a hazardous environment, submarines is another one you know where you
are literally locked in an area and something like you know where people will like a mental
hospital or something like that where somebody might be prone to arson or something like
that you make sure that the textiles are fit for purpose once again and the whole crib
thing where that comes from is crib 5 in a real simple term is five blocks of wood.
If I had if I could show you visually, it's a little crib of wood and then crib 7 is another
layer so you've got seven layers not five and it's a bigger block of wood so therefore
the flame is bigger more aggressive and therefore is harder to self- self- extinguish extinguish
is that the word?
Extinguish.
Yeah that's the word.
Put itself out.
So that's the difference between the two.
One of the biggest mistakes that we find that designers make is curtain fabric and they
are specifying crib 5 because they think crib 5 is FR.
They don't understand that the crib 5 is an only upholstery terminology so it only applies
to upholstery and not curtain so we end up having orders come through our sales office
and they're ordering crib 5 fabric for curtains because they think it's FR because they think
that's the terminology.
The other thing with upholstery that standard is it's a combination of foam and fabric so
you have to have a certain type of foam with the fabric.
I actually did a test with my dad in a warehouse and videoed it.
When I worked with my dad we used to import upholstery fabrics from China and we used
to do our own tests and god I'm probably...
Sounds safe.
It really wasn't.
There's a video on YouTube somewhere where there's, I've put it in the link it's funny,
there's loads of like cardboard boxes behind this chair.
You know what I think that's a bit...
I don't think fabric calls are all things like that.
I think if you type in crib 5 test actually it's probably the only video online but yeah
no so but the there is a little crib on that on that video and that's that's the crib 5
and we used to do that all the time just to kind of test the fabric because we used to
batch test every every lot that came from China and just to make sure it was right.
I'm sure we should have done it in a little bit more of a safe environment rather than
in front of a holiday box as a furniture.
It's kind of what we're similar to what we were saying about um
to create help create the char barrier between the fabric and the foam but also we have fabrics
in the iLiv range like Hampton's a great example of Elvira of ours which will be classified
as dual purpose so it's got no no treatment to it but it is 100 inherently flame retardant
so the yarn in it is a molecular level flame retardant and because there's no coating on
it it passes both the drapery tests and the upholstery tests which is great so it's really
versatile so if you if you were designing a room you could how many colours of is it
they've got have Hampton Algin 50 something 54 54 so you can use one velvet colour for
the upholstery another velvet colour for the drapery you don't have to pay any more pay
any more for it add anything onto it it's fit for purpose as you see it in the sample
book so there are textiles which you can do both at the same time yeah that's really handy
isn't it yeah and the only the only great thing about RIP5 about the treating of it
as well um is the fact that you can't wash a sofa so you can't wash it off so once it's
on it's on and it's permanent effectively so if you were to pick something from the
residential side of it and it obviously achieved the correct martindale that you need to use
for that end use and it would you basically do a trial coating yes it passes the standards
as long as it's not got a zip cushion that you can remove yes yeah i suppose if you so
if you wash it but you would need to you wouldn't wash if you're talking about the frame if you're
talking about the frame of a sofa you're not gonna you're not gonna wash it unless it's
like a removable cover but you wash it though you wash the top yes clean the top that's
fine but you know and where the treatment is all on the reverse you'll if you look to
the back of the fabric it's either like a a black or white lamination cloth um or it's
a is a paste and you can physically see it that's something that we are actually moving
away from now on the sustainability side on the chemical side and it's we're we're not
using any of our new upholstery fabrics we're not using any chemicals on the back of the
upholstery fabrics anymore so we're using a halogen free woven backing which um at the
end of life you can then part separate the two so they both can be recycled so if you
were using if you were using chemicals on the back that will be ending up in landfill
because you can't take the chemical off the back because it's on it's applied to the back
but with these now um and every new upholstery that we are going forward we're either using
inherently crib five where there is no backing or we're using the halogen free woven backings
and even though we can use those and make them waterproof as well because there's a
membrane in between the halogen free backing and the face yeah to make it waterproof so
we're trying to do our bit we're trying to be a bit more sustainable on everything um
where the world is telling us we need to to be more sustainable in everything we do so
um james has just bought a book in within today called what's it called alchemy collection
and it's just really affirmed my my opinion that the 80s are back touching about touching
on sustainability as well what's great about the alchemy collection um is as the markets
evolved and the markets changed and soon demand around sustainability and the requirement
for it um and everybody's got an esg strategy now or a csr strategy and and you know you've
got to you've got to cater for these needs but also you've got to wait for the innovation
to come um and now within this alchemy collection we've launched fabrics which have got recycled
flame retardant yarn in them it's a bit of a mouthful so inherent recycled inherently
flame retardant so we've got polyesters in there now which are recycled certified recycled
um but also performed from an fr perspective so it ticks all the boxes recyclable and recyclable
so that's quite incredible right yeah yeah yeah and we've also got um one of the new
upholsteries that we launched is a poly cotton mix so your polyester is recycled polyester
but the cotton side of it is bci cotton and bci is called the better cotton initiative
so we can trace it back to where the farmer plants the seeds so he signs up to the bci
program and he then becomes a bci farmer which means he'll recycle his water use solar panels
pay his staff properly organic fertilizers nothing that will harm the environment so
when you buy his cotton you take that accreditation of being a bci along the chain with you all
the way so that you can then supply bci cotton so um i was in i was in tesco's a few weeks
ago and looking at cotton t-shirts and we've all got cotton t-shirts but now the swing
tickets that you'll see you'll see a little three initials bci in block capitals and it's
a better cotton initiative and that's and it's starting to come through in lots of clothing
now that you'll see that so you know that that is coming from a sustainable source that's
really cool it's a it's a big initiative that's probably started i don't i don't know when
it started but we started working with bci eight years ago seven years ago we're quite
early to it um and effectively just what james said they it's a little bit like fair trade
but not fair trade it goes a little bit broader than that um and how they align themselves
with the united nations sustainability development goals if you're aware of them um but they
help with a lot of poverty challenges education gaps um fair pay everything like that and
it's quite easily tracked throughout the supply chain so you can you use something called
bc bccu credits it's like a fake coin and it goes from each step step in the journey
in terms of from growing cotton to effectively all the way through the process to weaving
it and creating it into a fabric of print or whatever you're doing with it that then
that bccu ends up with us when we acquire it and then we can then give that to somebody
else if we if they wanted it if they were bcu uh better cotton certified as well so
you're always tracking it so it's quite it's quite good to actually know where your product's
coming from yeah which is quite technical in our industry yeah so there's the other
thing the only thing that we haven't really talked about is marine yes so there's another
standard isn't there for marine cotton and upholstery so so again i mean the best way
to keep it i mean i i'm like i said i'm not a scientist but these are the best things
to take away if we're doing anything which is a ship or a cruise liner or anything like
that which is going on international waters uh whether that be a private yacht or whatever
there are three main tests you need to keep an eye out for so anybody's fabric which you
are looking out for are for drapery which is imo7 and then for upholstery imo8 and then
anything for bedding um imo9 so those are the only things you need to look out for um
test wise when when selecting a fabric to go into that NG's and is that like a fire
retardancy yes it's a fire it's a fire international one correct it's a it's a an international
marine organization test standard that you have to test for and effectively it's just
another way of setting up brick on fire uh with their own um methodology of doing that
but that's what you need to keep an eye out for so bedding that's the only that's the
only standard i've heard of for bedding yeah there is a bs standard for bedding as well
or yeah what's that for source five and source seven so every commercial is that commercial
your your bedding and throws your source five is bs 7175 uh suitable for hotels public buildings
and offices you've got your high risk side of it is source seven and that's uh hospitals
and healthcare environments but there is a bs 5815 part three and that's bed linen for
public sector so that's fabrics are tested against stringent requirements for dimensional
stability shrinkage colourfastness and um washing dry cleaning or light that's b8 bs
5815 part three
so just to recap bs 7175 source five yep is for hotel hotel yeah and then source seven
bs 7175 source seven yeah the higher is is a higher standard for hospitals and healthcare
yes that's correct and these are all fire retardants yes and then 5815 part three is
more of a public sector public sector standard for for durability yes yeah yeah i'd say that
that's interesting we touched on sustainability before and i always find it interesting from my
perspective um because we get asked loads of questions on sustainability what have you been
faced with recently around it oh goodness we've done a we've done a podcast called cradle to cradle
um with louis with louis and i mean it is just there's a lot of people sort of saying this is
just sustainable because so i think a lot of people are getting on board with it now but there is
still an awful lot of like what do we have what do we choose like this this one's recycled this one's
recyclable you know and and it is kind of trying to design at the same time as trying to choose
the right things and doing the right things um i think the the industry is catching up to the
expectation so everyone wants sustainable yeah um and also i think i suppose the biggest challenge
in sustainability is that it is more expensive so when you've got a budget yeah we touched on
that didn't we i think i mentioned that to louis it was like you know it's as a designer it's you
know part of our job it obviously is to is to try and direct as you know as best we can in terms of
um from a client perspective to to consider these things because it is important but at the same
time on a we're saying i think on a project of such a big scale if 50 of the product isn't
sustainable and the other 50 is and you know there's a difference in cost you know associated with
that ultimately it falls down to the you know it's on the client's shoulders as to how they want to
you know how they want to push forward with it and we all know that you know budgets are getting
tighter and tighter and tighter and it's i suppose you're a bit restricted as well so like say for
example you're designing a scheme and you're looking for a certain type of green which we were on a
project the other day as when um james brought a book in today and scarlet was like why were you
not here and we were looking for this particular type of green so if you would if you've only got
one particular type of green in your whole library and it's not sustainable but it works then you've
got you know it's almost like oh do i specify it do i not i need to specify because i need the color
and yeah so it's it's that's probably the biggest thing and i think i think what will happen over
the next few years is everyone will just end up doing everything sustainable it will go cradle
to cradle i hope um that's the hope isn't it just like you say this the technology catches up
yeah and that that's kind of what we finding is as the technology is there the yarns get more
interesting that are sustainable so i won't go too technical but you can now get a recycled fr chenille
you know compared to six years ago it'll just be like a really standard polyester yarn you can't
really do much with it so the the the market is basically changing and evolving and adapting
all the time but there's loads sustainability is so broad and it's kind of why i asked the question
because everybody always goes to product initially and okay in our industry sometimes
you can make something sustainable you know recycled or organic or whatever but there's a
price associated to it um but sometimes it's kind of and the reflection i have on it is it's the
people you work with as well and what the business is doing who you work with where it might not
necessarily pass its way down the supply chain from at your level in terms of using the fabrics
but a lot of my suppliers might use waterless dyeing you know they use no water and dyeing
you know it's great these waters are massive problem in our industry um and what do you mean
the lack of water using too much of it so they use use a lot of water um especially for things
like cotton and so on um and that's why some fiber types are more sustainable than others
so cotton is possibly the worst for using water so is linen it's quite bad for using water
viscose can be quite bad for using water and that's why some people prefer to use um
new newer yarns evolving sometimes polyester has got a bad rep you know virgin polyester you know
oil coming out of the sea made from dinosaurs you know it's it's got a bad reputation but actually
when you look at the process to generate it it's not so bad compared to to some things
oh we still need to do a podcast on this there's loads there's loads of green washing and
complexities about it all and you know you might go great well bamboo viscose is brilliant bamboo
grows really fast technically it's a weed it's a grass it grows it uses 20% less water than cotton
it's a great fiber it drapes really well it's got loads of um antibacterial antimicrobial properties
deodorizing and all that fun stuff you can write home about it but the process of it using basically
getting it from a bamboo root trunk whatever you classify it as to yarn uses a lot of heat well
where does that heat come from are they using gas burners to produce it or are they using agricultural
waste to create the create the heat and the energy you don't know well i know but that's really hard
for my marketing and brand aspect to go our bamboo viscose jars is this but i know my bamboo viscose
is fsc certified so great ticks the sustainability box because it's um it's accredited so it's really
it's really uh it's like a web of i think there's so many different processes for everything isn't
there like wood and fabrics all different types of fabrics where they come from what they're made
from and i think there's there's a and and as designers we can't possibly know how to manufacture
everything and um i kind of want to i'm like how's that you want to know i'm terrible um but but that
i think as designers you put your trust in a reputable company such as yourselves to know
you know to know that they're investing the time and the money into into developing that and looking
into and and and having the knowledge behind the sustainability in terms of the fact that it is so
broad that as we said earlier you know that we've lived we were talking about you know how it's going
to take a while i think for the world to catch up and i think it's as you say it's on its way because
we've spent so many years living in a in a world where we you know it's such a throw away society
and nobody kind of considered any of this yeah um but yeah i think you just put your trust in the
reputable suppliers that you know to to be doing their job properly and yeah and i think it's kind
of it is very much brand the brand story i mean we we've recently um about three years ago started
working with an organization called planet mark i don't know if you if you've seen them before
so they're they're a company who will audit and certify your carbon emissions okay um and i won't
go into so much detail but effectively watch your carbon footprint as a business um operationally
yeah measuring lots of different things they might measure your your utilities as an example
um or your business travel or your procurement all those all that fun stuff and effectively they
measure every year and it's audited so we have to go through all our accounts everything like that
in the my news is a detail and they give you your carbon footprint score and they certify it so all
the data you've done is right or correct and this is our second year that we've just been
certified so we've reduced our carbon emissions by 12.5 percent which is quite you know it's a
it's a meat feet because a lot of our data has come from covid time so it's a bit diluted because
we're not traveling you know you know james an example wasn't in his car as frequently back then
because obviously everybody was on lockdown and so on so a lot of the data was quite hard to perform
against so we've kind of um even though we've reduced 12 we've gone up a little bit in terms
of our carbon emissions for travel because the world's opened up again um but then we've reduced
our utility bills so we're not using as much natural gas for example our electricity in our
main offices because we've just put solar panels in and we've just got a new energy efficient heating
system and put new radiators in you know everything we're trying to do to reduce
the usage so as a brand as a business we are trying to be as sustainable as possible
while still trying to be operationally effective it's a really fine balance
real fine balance i'm just going to give give you a few numbers here go on go tech stars is
the second largest pollutant industry in the world um contributes 10 of all viable carbon emissions
17 to 20 percent of global industrial water pollution comes from dying and finishing
and 21 billion tons of textile waste per year pre and post production going to landfill that
those numbers though do include fashion so it's not just soft finishes this is the whole fashion
industry as well and what about water and things like that so we've all got a cotton t-shirt so
to get that cotton t-shirt dyed on your back is 2,700 liters of water to make one t-shirt now
that's enough drinking water for one person for two and a half years how many cotton t-shirts
have we all got in our wardrobes and when you dye a cotton t-shirt where does the dye go after
it does it go back into the the water the water is one to grow the crop so they need a lot of water
a lot of water and herbicides pesticides to grow the crop so then the actual dyeing process
to dye it a lot of heat involved so a lot to um for the yarns to take the color but then to answer
your question that dye then usually goes through i mean just because i know our suppliers have
nutrition water systems so they treat the water and recycle the water through so that that's a
type of supplier we would work with to make sure that they've got that process set up can you
imagine how many suppliers are not doing you know this is it this is it that's the problem isn't it
so if you throw up from growing the seed the cotton seed to get one kilogram of cotton is
20 000 liters of water and that's enough to keep 15 adults drinking water for a year
so to get one kilogram of cotton from seed to finished product so in effect are we taking
away people's drinking water well they've got to let them recycling the water now that's the thing
so it's just teaching them that's that's why they are signing up to the better cotton initiative
program so they are recycling their water so what better cotton do they'll they'll help educate
farmers in the best way to you know irrigate their fields and the best way to utilize the water and
maximize yield using as little water as they can but it's it's a crop you know you can have
too much water when it kills it you can have too little water it kills it it's an art farming is
an art no matter what you grow in it's uh it's an environmental challenge and you know it's not easy
for these guys and better cotton what's nice about it is it's um it's the educational side of it
which I like about it and how they grow they help grow the um this is bci yeah it's the social
responsibility around it which I like and the whole aspect of fair pay and the gender gap and
everything like that they really do work on that and I'd advocate anybody go and look on their
website because it'll talk about it 10 times better than what I can but it's just a great read and
there's a lot of reports on there about all the different um cotton producers around the world
who they help and um they'll give some real facts and figures about how much water they've
saved them so on year on year out um it's kind of like their accounts effectively
so we have touched on loads of different things um but we one of the things that I wanted to talk
to you about is LRV because LRV is something that I would associate and a lot of people I think
would associate with things like walls um but actually you really need to consider what goes
on furniture and curtains as well so Spencer do you want to yeah educate us on LRV effectively
it's the measure of the reflectiveness of a surface effectively so it gives you a percentage
so that percentage will go from zero percent to 99 percent um other than how much light it absorbs
or reflects and it's quite commonly used um where I've seen in care so we were touching about it
just earlier um I've seen it emerging in paint at uh you know um what's the feldspar paints in
b and q I saw quite recently I said oh that's quite interesting you can only get a score for
LRV on solids on solid planes solid colours you can't do anything which is multi-coloured
because there's too many colours within um a fabric to get an accurate measure um but where
you would use it and how how a designer would use it effects of these to create contrast within a room
to help the the guest who ever stayed in there to see easily clearly um key things were in the room
so for example it's really aimed at people with visual impairment and dementia isn't it exactly
yeah and you might go for example making sure that there's a contrast in LRV between your carpet colour
to your chair so the guest can clearly see where the chair is in the room um and don't mistake it
for something else you know um or you might create a contrast between the wall colour and then the
door frame colour or the door colour so you can clearly see where the door is within the room
and the same for any of your soft furnitures and so on like your curtains and so on
just really to make it quite clear and obvious that they're um they're visible for the people
in there and then as if there's different different things in paint i know we were touched
about it before Hayley where depending on the direction of sunlight within your room that you
are sitting in you can choose different LRVs of colours to help the room feel brighter or
dimmer and moodier depending on what you were what you were looking for and also the orientation
of the sun into your home it's quite interesting though that you picked up because obviously that
really is going to relate to commercial projects isn't it um as you mentioned earlier about kind
of care homes and um and you mentioned Hayley about people with visual kind of impairments
public spaces yeah the public but interesting that um you mentioned that you know seeing kind
of LRV being picked up in in the likes of you know trade centers that are you know for retail
domestic um customers what do you think i mean there's no there would be no reason why you
would need to use it residentially is there it depends if you've got someone in your house
who's visually impaired who can't see properly or who someone's got dementia i think it's a really
good idea to have that in your as a designer to have that in your in your back pocket because
if you're trying to navigate through um i did a course on LRV a little while ago done by the
director of Dulux and they were talking about you know people who've got there's a lot of people
who've got the visual impairment so you know as a designer if you were to go into somebody's home
and they've got their you know their their mum living with them and she's got a problem with her
sight then oh yeah let's let's tap into that LRV box and um one of the things i just wanted to add
with LRV you've got critical surfaces which are ceiling wall door and floor um i was really
surprised to hear that door and architrave should be the same because um that then frames the door
and so you can see the door when it's sharp but you can also see it when it's open and that and
that and then that's 30 points different the idea is you have 30 yeah you have 30 points different
and if you look at the Dulux if you look at the Dulux codes there's um at the beginning of the
code there is a a number and then two letters and then the middle of the code is the LRV
Dulux i love i love Dulux always work with Dulux um the decorators prepare it so that that central
number is is that and and if as long as you've got your critical surfaces so i think when you
go into care and when you go into a home where people are visually impaired having that chair
a different color in a solid color rather than a pattern i think as a designer is really important
um and having but it's so difficult because when you're starting to consider everything has to be
30 points to be able to see it so your floor and your wall have got to be 30 points difference if
you've got a chair that's next to the floor and the wall yeah well which which one so you you have
to do 30 for the floor 30 for the wall and then they're like it's it's really difficult i think
i think i think you've got to just really contrast everything um and have things light and dark
the percentages work on LRV values is the higher the percentage the lighter the color the lighter
the tone is and then the lower the number the darker it is so zero percent will be black and
100 will be white as an example and imagine all if it was grayscale all the gray in between that
that scale and i guess if you if you're designing or even black and white in grayscale seeing your
contrasts with all these great tones is kind of how you'd visually pull it together so but it's
interesting what you're saying with the um in your in your mark because you have to think about the
paint you have to think about the carpet you have to think about the furniture the soft furnishings
the bedding everything like that it's not on exact science because you can't possibly make everything
30 points different because there's only 100 you know so you have to kind of be really mindful of
it and just kind of go right that chair is going to be next to this so therefore you know the table
system chairs that sort of kind of like key objects in the region like key focal points and it's
interesting what you say about uh the chair as well you know and i talk about the pattern
but you can you can still include pattern because you could put pattern on the reverse of the chair
but the only bit that the sat on has enough has the the solid on the on the actual seat so they
can see it but it's like saying you won't put a for example a black chair call it black because
it's very dark and then a black rug underneath it because they might think all the same thing
yeah um a mistake and end up on the floor yeah i think it's just i think it's just knowing you
know i mean it please if anyone just disagrees with me and says it is in exact science please
can you let me know to know um how you do it um but yeah you just have to be really mindful of
everything that you're putting in and just make sure it is kind of really contrasted as
possible do other companies then buy lrv values because i know i'm like i've seen it on paint
obviously i've seen it on textiles tell me all of the um like the egger and all that they've all got
lrv values to them yeah holly ray and um or mica a lot of people do it and and more and more people
are doing it and i'm sure you could figure it out as well like it is just being mindful of contrast
so it is just sort of saying well okay i'm going to use a dark wood but i'm going to put it next to
a lighter color or whatever is it is just being very mindful about contrasting things um so you
don't necessarily have to know the lrv level to be able to be mindful of lrv if that makes sense
so just kind of yeah have it in your box can you talk yes that's a bit rude sorry
me
so friends would also like to educate us on acoustics
abrid's are you gonna are you gonna this is this is the fourth day of what he does so he's done all
that all the research into this he gives me the uh the details if i ask him to but he's the font
of knowledge on this yeah acoustic fabrics is obviously quite popular at the moment i would say
both in the commercial world as well as the residential world as well as people are working
on more and effectively you you're putting fabrics in a environment to either maximize
the acoustics in the room to minimize them or to avoid them completely you know effectively and it
all depends on the environment you are in so for example the room that we're in here um a little
studio and you've got drapes up on the wall to minimize the acoustic reverberation so the
echo of sound effectively that's what it is you know and depending on what you're trying to do
in that environment is what text you're putting so another great example is you might be you might
have a space a meeting room in the office and you want some privacy and you might just want to use
a shear to create the privacy but you don't want any acoustic sound going acoustics within your
little cubicle of your where your shear is so therefore it's it avoids any acoustic so the
sound just passes through so that's fine as well so there's no right or wrong with acoustics it's
all about just understanding the scoring behind it and kind of what that means another great example
is you might be in an airport room and therefore you might want a fabric which bounces sound back
out of the room so the sound hits the window hits the curtain and bounces back out and minimizes the
sound coming into the room where you're trying to get your sleep everything how how they do the test
is great you know absolutely this is the best bit about it so we work with Salford University
around doing our acoustic testing and they've got two rooms one which is called a reverberation room
which is a room where they have all sensors dotted around and they effectively fire sound out of a
speaker and then they measure whatever you've got hung up or it might be brick or it might be
plasterboard anything like that which has an acoustic property to it
how much that object bounces the sound off it off it or absorbs the sound
but then it had another room which had no echo in it at all which is brilliant so you could hear
your pulse it's really weird saying that so when you're talking your brain kind of like ignores
natural echo when you're talking but this room just stopped all of that so you
yeah so you had to walk on like a suspended floor so this room was like a room within a room that
was floating and it had all this like foam cladding around it yeah it's like it was surreal
and you could hear your pulse strange they say you can only spend so much time yeah you go in those
rooms because you go mad yeah really yeah because it's so quiet it's so quiet yeah and you all you
can hear is like your body things moving in your body heart beating everything it's weird
it's insane isn't it yeah crazy so anyway so how are they so you're just going back to your fabrics
in terms of acoustics is there a is there a like a gauge that you work to in terms of acoustics
for fabrics yeah so every every fabric has an acoustic property so some bounce sound off
so we've only probably tested i don't know 20 of our fabrics which is all on the all on the website
which you can get we've not printed everything on the back of the books because you just end up with
so much information in our in our industry but everything's on on the website so you take some
fabrics like i said are out sound off some absorb the sound and some let it pass through
so a great example is a velvet i don't know i talked about hampton before so when when you
test the fabric you are probably making curtains to a set standard at a set size and then they hang
them up at a fake window what they do and and there's a bs there's a bs standard to this as
there is to everything like that so the test method is the same so it is a standard to this
so it is you got your pen ready it's a bs en iso 354 and that's acoustic what's it called acoustic
it's basically it's the acoustics testing of a reverberation chamber so that's your room where
it's it measures all the echo and the bounce back so it's like it's like a fake room effectively
um and that gives you a score um and a value called the sound i'm gonna get really technical
the sound the sound absorption coefficient yeah and usually you'll see um a little a little score
um which is and got a little aw after it so and it's usually like a 0.5 aw or 0.7 aw
but to make it easier to give you a classification so the test value and the test method is called
the sound absorption coefficient and that's usually shown itself as a little aw score
and that score is usually like a 0.10 aw or 0.7 aw and to make it easier it gives you
a classification of a to e so the lower the lower the score so if it's 0.4 the less absorbent the
fabric is and the higher the score the more absorbent it is and that's really useful to like
i was talking about the environmental uses of how to use it so we have a fabric called hampton
which is a velvet and you know you only have to touch and feel the velvet you go oh that's quite
thick and dense and you know it's kind of common sense when you as a designer not everything has
a score but you kind of understand it all right it's quite a thick dense fabric therefore it's
going to be quite good at muting and absorbing sound and then that would give you kind of this
classification and an idea how to use it so okay i'm in a hotel room and or a meeting room or
something like that and i don't want the sound echoing around so therefore having some hampton
velvet around my windows will help prevent that or having hampton on my furniture will help absorb
that as well there's a another thing that we haven't tested so much but i do know it happens
a lot with in office space is you can get the acoustic panels as well which you can
upholster onto in office space so they work as an acoustic barrier as well which is a slightly
different test method because you test the fabric over the acoustic material as well so that's a
different way of using it so quite a popular trend is acoustic wall panels that you see you
could put them on the ceiling and so on but a lot of the acoustic properties come from the board
that you are wrapping the textile in yeah well i would say with that is don't use something which
is really reflective so don't put a leather a vinyl on it or a lever you know because you know
again you only have to look and touch the fabric and go oh that's not that's going to bounce things
off just by looking and touching it and feeling it so yeah the the usually the denser the fabric
the more salvage of and it is the less dense the fabric is the more transparent it is acoustically
so a sheer would yeah let things go through but you mentioned earlier though about a hotel yes
an airport yeah that needed to keep the sound out so that the sound needed to be
reverb from behind the curtain yeah what kind of so again would you use for that again you could
use something like a dense fabric like a velvet and also lining a curtain health so having something
where it's trapping air in between it because it can change the scores between a lined curtain
and unlined curtain so the classification though goes from a to e correct a being
super the lower super absorbent and e being transparent okay yeah so you take a sheer
that will be effectively unclassified yeah it wouldn't even pass through yeah yeah so usually
like lining curtains as well or interlining them does help with the acoustic blackout
blackout yeah yeah that that all helps with the acoustic properties of how a fabric can be for
like yeah yeah definitely definitely so one thing we touched on earlier
um that i'm quite interested to hear a little bit more about is sort of how to clean fabrics
on upholstery the cleaning of a fabric won't impact the fr ultimately if it's because obviously all
the fr coating is on the reverse so the face fabric you could as long as you're not taking the
covers off yeah and you're cleaning the surface you're just hovering it or watching it using a
clean on the it won't make a difference um at all to the to the actual performance uh until you
actually physically wash the fabric whatever reason that might happen but you wouldn't do that with
them like we touched upon before you can't do that with the sofa um counter intuitively obviously
a lot in our commercial environment a lot of our textiles come with a a stain resistant finish
applied to them and that can actually make things settle fire more you know completely on the other
side of it but obviously we have the technology there and the testing to make sure that doesn't
happen but a lot of a lot of textiles now within in this side of the market commercial will come
already with a stain resistant finish which effectively helps create a barrier to prevent
the absorption of oils and water and stuff into the fibre on the fabric so it sits on top of the
yarn giving you enough time to clean it away before it soaks in but we always emphasize whenever you
spill something on it on the fabric trying to clean clean it off immediately um so you're just
not allowing it to dwell and sit within a bit of fabric so make sure you mop up your red wine as
fast as you can a big a big thing in our industry at the moment uh which is always a challenge has
been alcohol and on vinyls especially um antiseptic wipes and hand gels it's a real challenge um
because you shouldn't uh really be using alcohol to clean vinyls a lot do you know what a lot of
companies at the moment i'm going out to see have got really sticky tables yes because they were
using yeah sanitizer um and it's the covid we've had instances of vinyls cracking and and drying
up and in certain just touch areas as well so we'll get a complaint that all your fabric's faulty
um so i'll go into somewhere and see a chair but it's just the top points of the arms
that have cracked where people have had people and and if it's an old if it's an old people's home
care home you are then asked the question what you're cleaning it with or soap and water right
okay so then are your residents being sat in the chair do you come around the nursing staff come
around and put hand sanitizer on them well yes they do they're just sat in the chair they come
and give them a squirt they rub their hands together and put their hands back on the arms
of the chair that's instantly just like cleaning with sanitizer on the arms of the chair and that's
the problem and it's we're seeing this now for probably going to be three or four years of
this problem and then once we've re-educated everybody and we're stopping using that and
we're going back to life as normal that will go away again because in my opinion you know soap and
water cleaning tables would absolutely kill covid as much as a sanitizer spray but it was just this
kind of avid kind of oh you've got you've got to sterilize everything to the inch of its life so
that's that was the law basically you know that's what we were told by the government
and all the advisors were sanitize everything and stay at home but we we we know a few um
upholsterers in and out putting care labels on the bottom of the chairs especially on vinyl
based products saying we stick to the specific cleaning instructions on this product because
it will affect its longevity and on our cards that cards with all the sample cards on we have
cleaning on the back you've got data sheets on your website as well which i always get into my
design packs now yeah so you you have got that cleaning advice from iron yeah we're just trying
to make it as clear as possible yeah i know it sounds it sounds daft but when you're putting
something together it really is making it as simple as possible it's it's sort of the mentality of
you've got to make it for to belong stupid people and it's got to be as basic as basic can be
um and that's what people understand it's quite easy to get an alcohol hand cleaner wipe thing
and just wipe down your chair write down where the where the people are sitting and stuff like
it's quick and easy it's just created a problem and like i say it's just trying to educate in the
best way that we can to know you can use when we use a bleach solution that's what we advertise
it's the best way to do it it's a little bleach it's going to kill whatever's on there um just
a that's just a low percentage yeah low percentage of bleach with your water mix it in
and that'll do the job you don't need to be spraying everything i've got my operators out
on and going yeah but all my staff wear black they're gonna end up covered in bleach
and then they're gonna be like well that's that's one that i've had as well where um a company had
supplied some dining room chairs in a cream in a hotel um but the staff area and all the staff are
wearing dark blue uniform and they they have got me in to say oh we've got some disdaining transfer
and it's the dye transfer from gene bleed and clothing how do i get rid of this and i said well
it's not an easy fix but hot water not boiling water but hot water good hot water neat fairy
liquid and a microfiber cloth and it's circular motion and you're just rubbing it in the circular
motion and then i've got the dye on the cloth and the what and it had come off and i said to them
the maintenance guy was there and then the owner was there and the maintenance guy was going yep i
get it no problem i can work on that the owner was saying well it's going to be ages we can't wait
that and he was saying the maintenance guy was saying it's fine i can now work on this and get
this done i know it's not a quick fix it's going to be a a lifestyle of a regular cleaning not leave
it and then it build up and then so you know they were happy once it was shown how to do it yeah
yeah everybody was happy yep that's what the podcast is for passing this knowledge
love it but some fabrics have naturally like stain resistant properties well depending on
you know some velvet's are great spent like very high pile dense pile fabrics naturally stain
resistant well you were saying about hampton yeah talking about hampton in the past i had a
customer that was doing headboards and they said to me what's the stain resistant like and i said
well i'll tell you what i'll get you a meter of the fabric i'll send you it and you can throw what
you want on it and see what what it is and because it's headboards they were using gels hair gels
waxes grease and they said they put it on and it wiped off and that was the velvet the properties
of the velvet yeah there is a a misconception i hear quite a bit which might be quite interesting
people listen to those is the difference between water repellency and waterproof
i don't know if you come across that so water repellency is effectively a stain resistant
what we classify as stain resistant so the stain or the liquid sits on the fiber of the
fabric and there's a treatment on top of the fabric which creates this barrier effectively
scotch guard was the all-famous brand aqua clean whereas waterproof is more of a technical thing
where it's a lamination behind behind the fabrics you can't see it and then you usually would have
your crib five your fr lamination or paste on top of that behind it and that effectively creates a
barrier so if liquid got through uh that means it won't it can't penetrate the fabric any deeper
than that lamination that uh film so it's good for care home great so it won't get into the foam or
it won't get into the foam or anything like that it will literally just stay on the fabric so it's
it's perfect for that environment um that outdoor so outdoors are real a real funny one so
you can because ultimately anything what that we sell which has got a waterproof
area is also not has an antibacterial finish so therefore it's anti-mildew naturally so you
can use it outside however without side becomes another set of problems or challenges in terms
of the light fastness and so on and the fr guidelines aren't very clear outdoor furniture
you've also got the problem with the seams as soon as you put a needle through to make anything
you've punctured it yes you can then seal the seams you want to take it the the next step is
you tape the seams so you can't you can do that but also it depends on then the unit you're using
to your race or your inner is anti-mildew and so on same time depending on where it's going
um but yeah we've got we've got fabrics uh burle is a great example where we've had it tested for
outdoor tests so that might include artificial weathering test there's a chlorine test there's
a seawater test and then the lightfastness test so it ticks all those boxes in terms of i was
going to put it on my yacht it's got im08 so it passes the upholstery and then i know it passes
all these outdoor tests for salt water or if i've got a sun lounger next to me pool in florida
wherever i can sit on it with wet wet trunks everything so there's lots of different tests
like that for outdoor that you have to take into consideration interesting my mind is blown yeah
so much so much information no thank you so much it's okay gonna need a bit of time to let all this
sink in um yeah no i mean we've covered so many things you know british standards of upholstery
marine standards curtain curtain standards um we've covered acoustics lrv sustainability cleaning
waterproofing amazing so is it worth to have a quick just like a top tip to look for so i would
i would definitely say i'm a designer now and i'm working on schemes and i knew it had to be for
i knew it had to be for the commercial environment so your curtains is bs 5867 part 2 b or c so you
know it can be either or or both um your upholstery where i think we touched upon it before so you're
looking out for two main things either it says bs 7176 so you know it ticks all the boxes or bs 5852
source 0 1 and 5 remember the five that's really important and then if you're going into marine
for your drapery is imo 7 and for upholstery iomo 8 and for abetting iomo now if you remember them
and you've got all the certification to show them then you're all right and then if you were
looking for anything further afield just by chance uh and just because i know we've not touched upon
them um if you're working on projects we're in france uh they have their own standard for
drapery which is called m1 germany has their own standard which is b1 and anywhere else in europe
use a standard for drapery which is called en 13773 so just keep an eye out for them if you
work on any projects overseas oh thank you so much there you go font of knowledge i know we try so
much well like i said you know i'm naturally a creative and not a scientist and you know some
of these methodologies you know the ucas accredited something would be set controlled environment
and that the fabrics and textiles is um you know a very frustrating thing to work with at times
because you might go all right well it's it's made out of this yarn it's treated in this way it
should be fine and then it fails and you have to change the weave again and then it passes it's
like oh but why you know you just dwell in it if you're doing that um so every year we do all our
due diligence testing as well so batch on batch and so on so we're always uh making sure that we're
retesting your me testing and me testing existing products as well as new stuff so
cool thank you so much for taking the time to come see us and come stay down the night just
for the podcast yeah um you've absolutely educated us so thank you much appreciated
thank you parvinos thank you
so that was fun that was really informative that oh my god spencer has his brain i was listening
to him talking thinking i wish my brain retained that kind of information but this i guess this is
why as designers you have to use reputable companies like i was saying about the whole
sustainability side of things you know you put your trust in them to be doing the best that they
can possibly do in terms of their industry before they obviously they know what they're doing and
they're doing it to the best of their ability and they're conscious about sustainability and
they're conscious of everything that goes along with that and then as designers because we have
our own things to consider and think about that you lean on them as a way of um you trust them
don't you like almost like as a way of directing to a point do you know what i mean but yeah i was
listening to spencer and just thinking why on earth how can you retain all of that information
i don't think he was i think he was reading a lot of it but one of the things that he did say
was bs 7176 and i know that there is a low medium and high acid for bs 7176 so low is cigarette match
this is for upholstery so bs 7176 low hazard is the equivalent to bs 5852 cigarette match
bs 7176 medium hazard is the equivalent to bs 5852 cigarette match plus crib 5 and then bs 7176
high hazard is crib 7 so it's cigarette match crib 5 and crib 7 or i don't think you have to have
both crib 5 and crib 7 you just have to have crib 7 so i that's the only thing that i think needed
a sort of clarification because he was just like just look for 7176 but if you if it's 7176 low
hazard you are cigarette match which is domestic but yeah i mean but like they're they're just so
involved with fabrics and they know it inside out because that is their that's their work isn't it
so um but there is a lot to you know from a design point of view that's a lot to consider isn't there
but um yeah really really really interesting really interesting yeah no thanks guys and and
we'll put all of the details of james and spencer in the show notes so you can contact them if you
want to contact james about um being you know having some of their books in your library or
if you want to furnish your hotel or whatever you're whatever you're designing um or if you are um
you know from a kind of domestic side of things you like what you've heard and you know you want
to try and find their product then it sounds like you need to find down sir dunelm and john louis
that's really comforting i think from a designer's point of view because you always you know always
worry about buying products online you know that's for domestic use thinking oh god what is it going
to turn up and be absolute shit um but to know that you know i live has been part of that design
process and manufacture process to a point you know you know you know that you're getting something
that's you know this good quality yeah definitely so if you like this episode please like share and
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