DESIGN TALKS: TABITHA MARDLE, AN INDIAN ADVENTURE
Design Talks: Tabitha Mardle, An Indian Adventure
Tabitha Mardle is an English designer now working in India. Her adventure began just over a year ago when she applied for a position as a designer in Mumbai, India, where she now lives full-time. Seizing an incredible opportunity to experience life on another continent and one full of passion, creativity and colour. Tabitha is living the dream…Young, energetic and talented she is at the beginning of her career and we look forward to watching her creativity flourish.
I first met Tabitha, shortly after she graduated from University a couple of years ago. A talented artist and designer her work is impressive and her artistic skill undoubted. Originally she considered a career as an artist, and who knows she may well take that path at some point in the future. But today she’s enjoying all that the rich culture of India has to offer whilst learning her trade as a commercial print designer.
As a source for Textiles India has a rich history, dating back several centuries it supplies the world with both Fashion and Home Furnishings products to a value of $40 billion in textile exports. The Indian Textile industry employs approximately 40 million workers, with another 60 million indirectly. As a country steeped in textile history, the close linkage between agriculture (for raw materials such as cotton) and its ancient culture and traditions for textiles make India unique compared with other countries that manufacture Textiles across the globe.
With an internal market size of over $108 billion and growing, the Textile industry is the second largest employer after agriculture. Recently welcoming European brands to the marketplace such as Marks and Spencer, Next and Guess. Projected growth is expected to reach $220 billion by 2021, and as such unsurprisingly, the textile sector has attracted over $1.85 billion in foreign investment.
All the above offering Tabitha a unique opportunity to learn valuable design and production skills in a thriving sector of the countries economy.
One of those key skills is creating products suitable for multiple markets worldwide. This requires both an inherent, instinctive eye for global trends and an in depth skill to predict the markets bestsellers. Beyond that following a design from creation through the manufacturing process, to deliver a product to the clients wishes requires an understanding of the production process at all points, and is a critical skillset for all designers.
Across the world tastes vary by both design style and colour and if a product is to be successful it must be designed to a commercial brief. Whilst working in India for clients in America, the UK, Europe, Australia and the Middle East, Tabitha’s creative skills allow her to create unique designs, researched and focused on target markets. To do so, she hand paints her designs and then scans them utilising both Photoshop and Illustrator to create the digitised artwork for production.
Being close to production, she then samples her patterns and approves colours etc with the local mills. Saving time and resources.
Digital technology is utilized throughout the process, alongside conventional technology. Generating products in an efficient and sustainable format wherever possible.
Culturally the adventure for Tabitha continues, taking her free time to travel and explore India’s unique beauty and rich textile heritage. For the future her own designs remain close to her heart, and eventually she intends to develop her own collections. With numerous online platforms now available for millennial designers to sell their products, Tabitha intends to build her own brand, whilst utilizing digital print to sell products printed on demand for clients worldwide. We wish her well…
As a gifted designer, Tabitha will go far. Having learned her trade in India, all of those essential production skills offer a myriad of opportunities for the future.
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Colour Is Too Important to Leave to Chance
Print will always be the part of the garment people see first.
But the sum of all parts — the fabric, the trims, the fasteners, the finish — is what determines whether a design actually delivers on its promise. Brands that continue to treat colour as a single creative decision, rather than a coordinated technical discipline spanning their entire supply chain, will keep paying for it in re-dips, delays, and disappointed design teams.
A Century of Textiles, and an Ever-changing World
Few companies can trace their roots back more than a century and still count themselves among their industry's innovators. Texia, headquartered in Monistrol de Montserrat, Spain, is one of them.
But the story of Texia is not simply one of longevity.
It is a story of continual reinvention. As the textile industry has grown more global and competitive, Texia has repeatedly reshaped its business, investing in technology, developing its own brands, and placing sustainability at the centre of its mission. In doing so, it offers a compelling example of how a heritage manufacturer can lead rather than follow through a period of profound industry change. Image Credit: Texia
What are we craving Ultimately?
The instinct to slow down while simultaneously optimising every measurable aspect of life isn't a passing curiosity. It's a structural response to a world that feels increasingly unstable, and it's reshaping what people expect from their homes, hotels, workplaces and healthcare environments alike.
For the design and manufacturing sectors, this means rethinking both product and process.
The Structual Shift is Real and its Already Here
Volumes are moving east, where digital production is accelerating rapidly. Consumer behaviour has shifted.
Demand is now driven by personalisation, shorter buying cycles, and an expectation of near-instant responsiveness. Regulatory pressure is intensifying, with supply chain transparency now a legal and commercial fact in many markets. And margins? They are under sustained, structural pressure.
This is not a temporary disruption. It is a fundamental reordering of how textile manufacturing must operate.
The Challenge: Standing Firm as the Industry Shifts
The wallpaper landscape has changed dramatically. Digital printing has lowered the barrier to entry, spawning countless direct-to-consumer brands and pushing much of the market towards faster, cheaper production.
At the same time, manufacturing in the UK has grown steadily harder - rising minimum wage, national insurance, energy and substrate costs all bear down on margins. Surface Print have embraced all of these challenges - and stand resolutely prepared for the future.
From Helsinki's printing mill to Paris's Le Marais, discover how Marimekko is scaling a design-led brand with purpose, craft, and bold innovation.
But what makes Marimekko's story compelling is not just its aesthetic legacy?
The word "toxic" carries weight. It conjures danger, harm, and things best avoided.
“Yet in the textile industry - Where between 3,000 and 10,000 chemicals move through the supply chain, a reflexive fear of the term is one of our biggest obstacles to progress.”
This article distils the key takeaways and what buyers, designers, and brands should be asking right now.
What Is the Digital Product Passport?
At its core, a Digital Product Passport is a digital record attached to a physical product - For a printed textile product, this means the DPP would capture data on the substrate, inks and dyes used, the printing process and technology, chemical compliance, environmental impact (including water and energy use), supply chain traceability, and end-of-life instructions.
The Market Gap that Changed Everything
Future Fashion was founded in 2019, timed deliberately to coincide with a pivotal moment in global textile technology: the commercial launch of the EFI Reggiani BOLT Single-Pass digital printing system.
The founders recognised that single-pass architecture had fundamentally changed what was industrially possible - and that Pakistan's domestic market had yet to catch up.
Print is no longer defined by the inefficiencies that once characterised it…as advances in production processes and technology have significantly improved its environmental performance.
Taran Rai, Corporate Sustainability Manager at Epson explains why?
The story of what happens when young designers access digital technology is still being written.
What once was a theoretical sustainability goal seems to have shifted into an active regulatory reality.
Is the Textile Market Finally Recovering?
After a difficult few years, there are genuine reasons for optimism. Duncan was candid about the challenges: "The market for textiles has been very difficult over the last three years. I'm not going to hide the truth there. But the tide is turning.“
A profound shift is currently reshaping the sector
Changing consumer expectations demand greater design diversity, faster turnaround times, and sustainable manufacturing practices.
To thrive, interior brands must adapt their supply chains, bringing production closer to the end consumer and moving away from bulk manufacturing.
Digital textile printing offers a definitive solution to these operational bottlenecks.
Digital transformation doesn't announce itself.
It accumulates - one innovation at a time - until an entire industry looks back and realises the ground has shifted beneath its feet. That's precisely where textiles stands today.
The conversations happening now about AI, automation, sustainability, and digital product passports are not theoretical. They are shaping decisions being made on factory floors and in boardrooms right now.
“By leveraging advanced digital textile printing, Marylene Madou has successfully merged traditional craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology. Her approach offers a blueprint for how independent designers can scale their brands globally while maintaining a minimal environmental footprint.”
The textile industry is undergoing a vital transformation. As the insights from Techtextil and Texprocess reveal, the path forward relies on a combination of sustainable hardware, intelligent chemistry, and seamless digital workflows.
From Zimmer's industrial-scale energy reductions and Stratasys's on-demand 3D embellishments, to Kornit's single-step technical printing and the unified digital ecosystems of NedGraphics and Optitex, the tools for change are here. To stay competitive, brands and manufacturers must adopt these innovations, moving away from fragmented, wasteful processes towards a truly connected, circular economy.
Friedmans stands as a testament to the power of combining traditional textile knowledge with forward-thinking innovation.
“Operating from their UK headquarters, Friedmans now serves a diverse array of sectors, including swimwear, dance, entertainment, sportswear, interior decor, prosthetics, and even pet apparel. With a strategic supply chain that reliably serves clients worldwide”
The apparel decoration industry is decisively moving away from isolated, analogue production tools toward connected digital manufacturing environments.
"Kornit’s unwavering commitment to transformative technology continues to disrupt the status quo. For business leaders and innovators ready to capture the future of apparel manufacturing, the path forward is clear”
The Urgent Need for Sustainability at Scale
The transformation at Coats provides a vital blueprint for the wider textile and apparel sector. True sustainability cannot be achieved in silos. As Dearing emphasised:
“Cross-industry collaboration is the engine of meaningful change. Brands, machinery suppliers, chemical providers, and fibre producers must act as an interconnected ecosystem”
Today’s customers demand superior product quality, real-time data visibility, and lightning-fast turnaround times.
For large-scale garment decorators, managing these expectations while balancing seasonal demand fluctuations - such as the massive surges seen during Black Friday - presents a monumental challenge.
"Relying on transactional vendor relationships and outdated legacy equipment is no longer sufficient to secure long-term stability and growth.”
Printing method is never a secondary detail. It shapes the entire life cycle of a product, from concept to customer. In today’s fashion industry, where margins are tighter and speed matters more than ever, technical knowledge has become a competitive advantage.
“The future of textile design belongs to professionals who can combine creativity with execution, aesthetics with practicality, and vision with production reality”.
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