Touchpoint of View: A Glimpse into our 2023
The year 2023 has now been going on for a while and already at this stage we can say that another interesting and fast-paced year is ahead of us. We already have two new team members at Touchpoint. Nina Lindholm started with us in December as a sales support. Nina has a long experience in workwear and has previously worked with Leijona Group, Hejco, Leonardo Fashion and Newtop Oy to name a few. In addition to Nina, Essi Toivari, who started in January, works now in our company as a sample sewer. Both new Touchpoint team members are much-needed reinforcements on the path of growth.
For this year, we expect interesting new openings in Sweden. Last year, both we and Rester got our operations off to a good start in Sweden and now in the beginning of the new year, we can continue that good work from the start. Our country manager for Sweden, Marko Ruotsalainen, has positive feelings about the coming year: “After an intensive start in Sweden with Touchpoint in 2022, where we have received positive feedback and interest from both existing and potential customers and partners, we are very optimistic regarding the future of our business. During the last year we managed to launch our Swedish company “Touchpoint Workwear AB”, a new Swedish homepage, a Swedish LinkedIn page and strengthened the support organization for the Swedish market. With all this in place we have a strong belief that we are ready for future growth together with our customers and partners here in Sweden. Join us for the journey!”.
We've talked a lot about our upcoming closed-loop fabric. The purpose of the project is to make a "new" recycled textile fiber from the workwear collected from Touchpoint's customers that’s recycled in Rester's process, which our partner Klopman/TDV and its partners spins into yarn and finally make the fabric. For the sake of clarity, it should be mentioned that due to high quality requirements, the fabric is not 100% made of recycled fibers, but the proportion of recycled fibers is optimized so that the quality of the finished fabric remains high. Our biggest goals this year are to launch this fabric and make the first workwear from it. We have already come up with a name for the future fabric, but we will keep it still as a secret for a while! ;)
Another interesting theme for this year is the sustainable development of workwear and the development of our carbon-neutral collection. Regarding the carbon-neutral collection, we have taken a bit of time out, because as always, we strive to produce workwear only for the need, and on the other hand we want to offer our customers as accurate and transparent information as possible. We will inform you about the status of the project as the year progresses! We look at the sustainability of workwear and our business holistically, and you can read more about our current situation and the progress of our responsibility goals in our responsibility report for the year -22, which will be published in the spring.
We also want to remind our readers about the EU textile separate collection and recycling obligation that started this year, which concerns the recycling of end-of-life textiles (the obligation has flexibly applied to companies since summer 2022). In separate collection, the primary final treatment of textiles should not be incineration, as has usually been the fate of waste textiles until now. We at Touchpoint have already since the beginning of 2021 committed to recycle sustainably all the textiles we deliver to our customers in Rester, the textile processing facility we established. With the help of Rester, we get the valuable raw material into circulation again.
