LINENS - About Zorlu Group

Zorluteks Textile

With its giant curtain and home textile production facilities, its marketing clout, and its world-famous labels, Zorluteks Textile is one of the world’s leading home textiles concern.

Production activities

Weaving & knitting

The story of Zorluteks Textile has its roots in humble beginnings as a manufacturer of knits in the 1980s. The level of product quality that was achieved however and growing demand from customers nourished rapid growth and fueled investment in new machinery, capacity, and personnel. At the same time, the company’s weaving and knitting machinery was modernized with new, state-of-the-art electronic equipment and this advanced technology had a further impact on production quality. In a factory with 60,000 m² of enclosed space, the company today carries out primary knitting, weaving, and warp production with a machine park of 409 units consisting of:

• 51 Raschel warp Jacquard knitting machines
• 224 Sulzer (Dobby-Eccentric) machines
• 60 Dornier Dobby and 54 Somet Jacquard machines
• 6 Dorner Jacquard weaving machines
• 8 warp-knitting machines
• 1 sample warp-knitting machine
• 1 hooking and 4 transfer machines.

Curtains

The curtain production plant, whose foundations were laid in 1982, has 60,000 m² of enclosed space and a modern machine park with which it manufactures for the domestic market as well as for the markets of other countries. Consisting of two main sections–embroidering and finishing–the plant exports 35% of its output to different parts of the world such as the USA, EU, Japan, and Russia. The remainder is produced for such leading Turkish labels as TAÇ and Linens. The company employs an in-house R&D and product development team of 15 people that comes up with an average of 15 new patterns a week and its archives contain more than 40,000 Jacquard-knit and more than 10,000 Jacquard-weave and Dobby patterns. Such efforts contribute greatly to a highly diversified product line and make it possible for the company’s goods to address the widely different tastes and preferences of its domestic and international customers. The company has a total annual production capacity of 200 million m² of curtain fabric and can turn out 6 million sets of curtains a year. In 2005 ten new collections were prepared and in 2006 another twelve were added. The goal is to increase this number to fifteen new collections a year.

In the embroidering plant, knitted fabrics and buckram are embroidered using advanced technology. This plant’s annual production capacity consists of 4,100,000 meters of embroidered, 300,000 meters of guipure, and 1,700,000 meters of guipure appliqué curtains. In addition to these activities, the plant also produces lace for garments and upholsteries as well as tablecloths and quilted bed covers. As a result of revisions made in the embroidering machines, spangled tulle for use in curtain-making has been added to the company’s product line.

The finishing plant, whose annual production capacity is 65 million meters of fabric a year, puts embroidered, plain and jacquard-weave, and raschel-knit gray goods through various production processes such as washing, fixing, dyeing, trimming, crushing, pleating, and printing in order to bring them into compliance with customers’ orders. The goods processed by this unit are systematically monitored and tested both by the company’s own process control team and by an independent laboratory in order to ensure that they satisfy customers’ requirements. Only those that pass this rigorous testing are shipped.

Since the day it was founded, Zorluteks’ curtain production facilities have been mindful of customers, the environment, laws and regulations, and occupational health and safety in the conduct of all production activities. Among the certificates that the company has held from the outset are German Textile Research Eco-Tex and Russian Gosstandart certifications. The company also holds ISO 9001-2000 Quality Management System, ISO 14001 Environmental Management System, and OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health & Safety Assessment Series certificates as well.

Home textiles

Zorluteks’ home textile production facilities became operational in 1997 and consist of three factories: weaving & knitting, finishing, and sewing. The company is Europe’s biggest integrated manufacturer of cotton home textiles. In home textile production facilities with a total of 108,000 m² of enclosed space, the company manufactures 96 million meters a year of a wide range of home textile products such as comforters, piqués, pillowcases, bedsheets, fitted sheets, tablecloths, bedspreads, cotton curtain fabrics, and towels on state-of-the-art looms and machinery.

In its weaving section, the company employs 256 Dornier and 137 Picanol Omni jacquard, dobby, and eccentric air-jet looms to weave fabrics in 280, 340, and 400 cm widths. In the knitting section, the factory’s 17 Monarch round knitting machines together have a production capacity of 9 tons of supreme fabric a day.

In its finishing section, the company dyes, prints, and finishes 320,000 meters of cloth a day and also employs a mercerization process in its best-quality satin and percale fabrics to achieve the highest possible degree of luster and dimensional stability. The plant contains 3 pad patch dyeing machines for woven fabrics and 9 dyeing machines for knitted fabrics. In both knitted and woven fabrics, sanforizing is used to achieve non-shrink characteristics that satisfy world-recognized standards.

The company’s own in-house test laboratory performs complete physical and color-fastness testing on all of its production processes. A conditioning room that was added to the laboratory in 2006 for the conduct of physical testing is currently undergoing accreditation.

Zorluteks was the first in Turkey to manufacture Modal, Lyocell, and bamboo fabrics from natural fibers and offer them to customers. The company is also one of only a very few producers able to print in 20 colors on rotary presses (5) and in 16 colors on flat-printing presses (4), in 320 cm widths in both cases. In addition to reactive, pigment, abrasion, and matte-white printing for cotton fabrics and pigment printing for polyester-cotton blends, disperse-printed microfiber and polyester products as well as devore (etched) printed curtains and pigment, glitter-printed voile curtains are manufactured by Zorluteks, which is also a world leader in the use of photographic printing systems, one of the most important technological developments in the industry in recent years. This new system makes it possible to reproduce any photograph on cloth in reactive and pigment dyes using trichromatic or hexachromatic techniques in whatever dimensions may be desired with zero degradation in quality. Thanks to the use of digital printing technology, samples can be produced in as little as a day’s time while high-quality reactive, pigment, and matte-white printed samples can be printed using classical printing methods. With the addition of a classical-method panel printing machine that was brought on stream in 2006, the sample panel printing production capacity was doubled.

70% of production is exported while the remaining 30% is delivered to the home market. Making use of advanced technology to produce environment-friendly and high-quality products, the company is careful to maintain quality and protect the environment in all its activities. All waste resulting from production activities is sorted according to its nature and either recycled or else turned over to licensed firms for disposal in such a way as not to harm the environment. Environment-friendly natural gas is used as the company’s energy source while the steam that is needed is produced in a cogeneration unit. In 2005 the company once again demonstrated the importance it gives to the environment by increasing the operating capacity of its biological and chemical treatment plants. A “Water Consumption and Waste Treatment Plant Rehabilitation Project” is being carried out to deal with the water resource consumption that is so vitally important to textile manufacturing concerns everywhere in the world. The goals of this project are to minimize water consumption while also developing other recycling alternatives.

The importance that Zorluteks home textile production facilities give to quality and the environment has been recognized by the certifications that they have been awarded. The company was first awarded ISO 9002 Quality Management System certification by RWTUV of Germany in 1999 and it received its ISO 14001 Environmental Management System certificate in 2001. When these certifications came up for renewal, the company was audited by the Turkish Standards Institute, which awarded it ISO 9001-2000 Quality Management System certification in 2001 and ISO 14001 Environmental Management System certification in 2006. Home textiles manufactured by Zorluteks are also entitled to display the Eco-Tex STD-100 label indicating that they contain no chemicals that are detrimental to human health.

Recent additions to Zorluteks’s lineup are bio-cotton products, in which only organic production and manufacturing processes and methods are used at every stage from cotton in the field to finished textiles for the home, and fabrics are made from Modal, Lyocell, bamboo, and Tencel and from blends of these. Zorlu Linen’s biofabric production was awarded international manufacturer certification by Skal International in 2003. The company is the only manufacturer of 100% organic textile products in Turkey today.

With its production capacity, production quality, modern machine park, building design, landscaping, biological and chemical treatment plants, and superior working conditions, Zorluteks home textile production facilities are regarded as the most modern in the world today.

Marketing and sales

Under the coordination of its İstanbul-based headquarters, Zorluteks Textile markets and distributes textile products both in its home market and in those of CIS and other countries around the world.

Holding the home textile licenses to dozens of famous cartoon and other characters in many countries, Zorluteks controls an important share of the licensed products market as well. The company manufactures comforter sets and curtains decorated with characters ranging from Barbie to Spider Man and from NBA teams to Disney characters and it markets them in many different countries.

Another important mission of Zorluteks Textile is to further develop the market position of the TAÇ label, the leader of the Turkish home textiles sector, and to ensure that its manufacturing activities are able to keep abreast of market developments and respond to changing consumer tastes. According to a study conducted by Millward Brown in 2007, the TAÇ name has achieved a brand recognition level of 100%.

Zorluteks Textile conducts its activities through two companies that operate on a regional basis:

Zorlu Home Textiles (Trabzon)

This company is responsible for marketing the Zorlu Textiles Group’s products in the Black Sea region and neighboring CIS countries.

Zorlu Textile Marketing (Denizli)

This company is responsible for selling and distributing Zorlu Textiles Group products in Turkey’s Aegean region.