CEO Q&A
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Smartex is Engaging AI in Quality Control, Creating a Convergence of Technology, Mathematics and Production in the Modern Textile Factory By Caryn Smith
n a presentation at ITMA Milan 2023, Gilberto Loureiro, CEO and founder of Smartex, laid out a vision of possibilities for the modern textile factory. Legacy manual methods for quality control and production plague the industry with inefficiencies and waste. But, what if some of that manual labor and machinery was modified by technology? In an industry still relying on old school production methods, Smartex’s CEO presented a case for such a change, and it was compelling. Smartex technology empowers textile factories and brands towards a more efficient, sustainable future – decreasing textile waste, saving natural resources, troubleshooting quality control, and minimizing financial impacts surrounding customer complaints. Smartex offers three technology products: CORE, FACT and LOOP. CORE addresses production line quality control, inspecting every inch of fabric with precision and speed using artificial intelligence and machine learning. FACT is a real-time production tool where managers gain full control and visibility of textile operations. This is achieved through pre-determined metrics employed from production to inspection, which is accessible from a mobile or desktop device. LOOP works to resolve customers’ problems with tagging of textile rolls with QR codes during production to allow historical data to be accessed months later from the actual production time frame. The company has gained support of well-known technology investors and is recognized by the European Union for its efforts. International Fiber Journal caught
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10 IFJ ISSUE 1 2024
Q+A IN THIS ISSUE:
GILBERTO LOUREIRO CEO and Founder, Smartex
up with Loureiro to see where the company is today, and how Smartex can revolutionize textile production. International Fiber Journal: What made you aware of the problem Smartex aims to solve? Gilberto Loureiro: We are at the intersection of technology, physics, computer science and mathematics with textiles, and these places don’t overlap too often. Because of that, there are not many startups or technologies in this industry. In my family, everyone works in textile and fashion industry factories. When I was a teenager, I worked with my family in their employer’s factory for extra money,
and I hated it. My job was fabric inspection on the production line – an exhausting, manual job. Looking back, it was fantastic to work in knitting mills, the garment manufacturers, and dye houses to see the whole process. I realized, well, this industry is massive; it moves billions and billions of items, and largely affects many lives. There are so many inefficiencies in quality, such as fabric inspection, internally and externally, which causes disruption and disagreements between suppliers and customers, and it is all still mainly documented with pen and paper. I saw that this was stressful and inefficient. With no desire to follow my family into textile work, I was very lucky to go to college – the first one in my family – to studying physics and finance. It was here I met co-founders Antonio Rocha, CTO and Head of Product and Paulo Ribeiro, VP of Engineering. Antonio was the electronics hardware guy and Paulo was the computer science guy. As we discussed my frustrations with the textile industry, ideas to bring technology to it became “aha” moments for us to pursue the idea to connect the tech and textile worlds. We looked at cameras, UV lights and infrared lights – technologies that we were studying in physics – to potentially apply to textile machines. That was how our ideas evolved. We decided early on to only address the quality control issues – detecting defects that could stop machines and production, including ways to avoid waste. Today, we are always stumbling into larger problems to solve. For instance, the traceability issue and the digital product
