The TEX-MED ALLIANCES project is launching a new initiative to promote the digital market placed on the Facebook Leftovers Platform. It's the Special Week from 27the of September to October 3rd.

This virtual market for textile stocks is hosted under a Facebook group and aims to promote the commercialization of textile leftovers, difficult for production companies to get rid of them and difficult for potential customers to find. What the visitor finds in this digital space is a textile showcase with photographs and technical sheets of the product, as well as the contact details of the seller. There is also a space enabled to create conversations between buyers and sellers and thus be able to better define the needs 

The Special week: free shipment of samples of warehouse fabrics, yarns, and textile accessories. In addition to free registration in the group, which is maintained over time, the Special Week offers also at no cost (up to the available budget and within the TEX-MED ALLIANCES project countries) the opportunity to show, see and touch samples of products displayed in the digital showcase.

Launched this summer, the TEX-MED ALLIANCES - Leftovers Platform Facebook group currently has 230 members, with as many companies interested in selling or buying ready-made fabrics, yarns, and textile accessories that are available in stock. In the explanatory note within the group itself, admissible locations for the selling companies are indicated, while the buyers can be from anywhere in the world.  

"It is a question well known to those who work in the world of textiles, a sector whose collections have an increasingly shorter duration - explains Susanna Leonelli, Project Coordinator of TEX-MED ALLIANCES -. Sometimes fabrics, yarns, and other products of excellent quality end up in textile company warehouses and remain unsold, for whatever reason, in the reference period of the collection to which they belong; these products leave the ordinary promotional and commercial channels of companies and therefore struggle to find buyers. The collapse of commercial transactions during the pandemic accentuated these dynamics. These stocks are firstly a potential environmental problem because they happen to eventually become waste, but what also occurs is a missed opportunity on the economic level. In fact, there is a potential market for these stocks, it is only a question of putting supply in touch with demand for this particular commodity. TEX-MED ALLIANCES - Leftovers Platform Facebook group intends to respond to this need."

Sustainability, as well as innovation and internationalization, are among the multiple purposes of the TEX-MED ALLIANCES project, funded by the European Union under ‘ENI CBC MED’ program and launched in 2019. The Italian partner of the project, Confindustria Toscana Nord, is the coordinator of activities on the subject of a circular economy, including the Facebook group dedicated to stocks.

"The interest in good quality textile products, stocked and therefore immediately available at a good price, is anything but irrelevant," says Mònica Olmos, operations manager of TEXFOR, the project leader. We saw this during 2014-2015, when our association, partner of the European project TEX-MED Clusters, the precursor of TEX-MED ALLIANCES, put local textile companies in contact with buyers from other countries. This was a positive experience, unfortunately, the pandemic has prevented us from repeating the same format: encouraging visits and face-to-face contact. Hence the idea of digitalizing in a simple and immediate way the products in stock that companies offer to buyers from all over the world". The advantage of this new virtual space is that the initiative will not only take place during the special stock week from 27 September to 3 October but can also be continued throughout the Project thanks to the Facebook Platform.