Business News from Sri Lanka: Coats, the world’s leading industrial thread company, is launching Coats Digital. The integrated technology business brings together all its software solutions under a new single brand which describes and aligns with the offering to its customers across the apparel and footwear industries.
Coats Digital provides in-depth industry expertise combined with the practical application of the latest technology, including Big Data and AI, delivering market-leading software solutions. It will build on the advantages associated with the Coats brand of trust, expertise, credibility and its global footprint. A key aspect of Coats’ growth strategy is to build an innovative software solutions business for its customers.
The benefit for Coats’ customers will be a one-stop shop approach and an unrivaled suite of best in class, and progressively integrated solutions, which will also adopt the new Coats Digital branding. The series of acquisitions it has made in this space of GSD, FastReact and ThreadSol have been highly successful. Now is the time to simplify the house of multiple software brands through a coordinated market expansion of a portfolio of products to support customers in the face of unprecedented industry pressures.
The business will be led by Keith Fenner who has been appointed as Managing Director, Coats Digital. Keith joins Coats from Microsoft where he was Group Director for Business Applications, Middle East and Africa. He was responsible for revenue and performance linked to new customer acquisition and new product penetration for this leading global software company. Keith has over 20 years’ experience across the global technology sector including working at listed tech companies like Sage and Computer Associates (now CA Technologies). He also has a strong track record of driving rapid commercial growth and integrating multiple businesses.
Keith Fenner, Managing Director, Coats Digital, said: ‘This is the beginning of an exciting new age for our software solutions offering. Coats Digital provides a clear and distinct focus and establishes that while Coats continues to be an industrial manufacturing company we are also innovating technologies of tomorrow to improve how the fashion industry develops, costs, sources and manufactures products sustainably into the future.’
The launch of Coats Digital includes a creative new logo with two units: graphic and text. The graphic is inspired by a detail of the Coats chain which is given a digitized feel and can also be interpreted as the initials CD. The strapline is ‘transform with intelligence’. The logo is blue to retain the connection with the Coats logo.
The geographic footprint of Coats Digital covers more than 65 countries. It has global customer relationships with over 5,000 retailers, bands, sourcing business, and manufacturers. Coats is the world’s leading industrial thread company. At home in some 50 countries, Coats has a workforce of 18,000 people across six continents. Revenues in 2018 were US$1.4bn.
