#005: Old Dog, New Tricks: What Fruit of the Loom is Doing to Innovate for the Future with Brad Cooper, Sr. Director of Product Engineering & Innovation at Fruit of the Loom Inc.

In this week's episode of The IoClothes Podcast, we speak with Brad Cooper, Senior Director of Product Engineering & Innovation at Fruit of the Loom Inc. We caught up with Brad earlier this past fall at the IFAI conference in New Orleans. We spoke with him about some of the cool things happening at Fruit of the Loom Inc, innovating in a large company and the challenges of building unorthodox teams that are needed to be competitive in today's world.

Show Notes:

• The making of textiles and garments may at first glance seem simple, but are rather complex in nature to produce. When considering integrating electronics, it steps up the level of difficulty quite a bit.
• When considering integrating technology into garment being close to the body is a requirement for some applications. It's important to thoroughly consider things like safety, privacy, reliability, as well as function during development.
• FOTL, under the Russel Athletics brand, has been integrating sensors in to protective equipment and garment to monitor athletes' health (CarbonTek™ Shoulder Pads).
• Bringing disruptive technology concepts is "messy". Being able to navigate, communicate and execute is difficult. The key is relationship building and being open to solving problems in different ways.
• To start, CarbonTek™ is serving to help inform design and development of better quality products for Russel Athletics. The vision is to offer real-time insights to coaching and training staff to keep athletes performance at their highest-level.
• The biggest challenges as we tackle the e-textiles: safety, standards, privacy with data generated from the devices and the true value that you're offering the end-user.
• Crystal Ball Question: 3 years out we won't be talking about how to collect data, we'll be most interested in what we can do with the data. What is the value of the data and who gets access to it.

For more information on Fruit of the Loom Inc and what some of their brands like Fruit of the Loom, Spalding, Russell Athletic and many others are doing, check out their website at www.fotlinc.com.

Support for this episode is brought to you by SKIIN. The world's most advanced textile computing platform. For more information, check out https://www.skiin.com, and reserve your set today!

For more on the podcast and the rapidly growing community we're building at IoClothes, check us out at www.ioclothes.com.

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Copyright © 2017-2018 IoClothes Consulting LLC. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is for general information purposes only. In no event will we be liable for any loss or damage derived from the information provided.