http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,41550,FF.html
Forget all the futuristic hype about subatomic robots. Nanotechnology is already here, and Burlington CEO George Henderson is using it to save the U.S. textile industry from extinction (and your pants from Beaujolais). Most CEOs ignore cold calls. George Henderson, who runs textile firm Burlington Industries (BRLG), enjoys them, figuring he can quickly sniff out whether a caller is worth his time. That's how David Soane, a chemist and entrepreneur, ended up in Henderson's conference room waving around a peculiar piece of fabric and a squirt bottle full of water. It was October 1998, and Henderson knew that Burlington was headed for trouble: Cheap Asian textile imports were pounding the company. Henderson needed new ways to boost profits. Why not hear what Soane had to say? For his part, Soane wasn't expecting much. His laboratory is in Emeryville, Calif., one of the many high-tech enclaves of the San Francisco area; Burlington's hometown, Greensboro, N.C., was the last place he thought he'd find a backer for the revolutionary technology he believed he had created. But there Soane was, on the fifth floor of a two-building office complex outside Greensboro, seated on one side of a long wood table opposite Henderson. "Show me what you got," Henderson said. Soane pulled out a small swatch of denim and his water bottle and began dousing the fabric. The water beaded up, then rolled off, as if it were mercury. The denim was bone-dry. Henderson was skeptical. He'd seen plenty of fabrics that repel water; none were comfortable enough for everyday clothes. "Let me feel the fabric," he said. The swatch was soft -- indistinguishable, really, from any well-worn pair of jeans. "At that point," Henderson recalls, "I was intrigued. I'd never seen that before." He also had never heard of nanotechnology, the name for the science behind Soane's magic fabric. By the next day, Henderson was a believer in both, and Burlington soon shelled out $3.5 million to buy a 35 percent stake in Soane's two-man startup. Soane began recruiting other chemists as he set out to revolutionize one of the most ordinary products imaginable: a pair of pants. Almost four years later, Burlington's condition, like that of the entire U.S. textile industry, is grim. Mired in almost $1 billion of debt, the company is struggling to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It lost more than $50 million in the latest quarter alone, and it has laid off 11,600 workers -- fully 61 percent of its workforce -- since the beginning of 2000. But Henderson's gamble on Soane's startup, now called Nano-Tex, could end up providing a lifeline to Burlington. Brands such as Eddie Bauer and Lee Jeans are promoting pants that use Nano-Tex's technology. Most important, the venture could help establish an entirely new way of doing business for a U.S. textile firm -- not running expensive mills, but instead licensing its technology to other mill owners, as if it were a software company. Such a strategy, says James K. Weeks, business school dean at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is "the only way the U.S. is going to compete in textiles." Nanotechnology takes its name from the nanometer, one-billionth of a meter, and describes the ability to manipulate individual atoms to create new materials. The field, of course, has received much fanfare since Henderson first heard about it from Soane. The press likes the story because of the science-fiction-like possibilities nanotech offers: tiny robots patrolling our bodies and cleaning our arteries, for example. In reality, though, nanotechnology is already working its way into our lives in far more mundane ways. And unlikely companies such as Burlington are leading the parade. (See "Small Wonders.") Soane's nanopants feel and look like any other pair of khakis, until you examine them under an electron microscope. Deep in the fabric lie billions upon billions of structures that look like whiskers. (Soane calls them nanowhiskers; he won't disclose their exact chemical makeup.) What makes this "nano" is that each whisker is just 10 nanometers long; a single grain of sand, by contrast, measures 100,000 nanometers. The result is fabric so dense that liquids can hardly penetrate it. "It's one of those things that, until people try it, they have a hard time believing it works," says Kathy Collins, the head of marketing for Lee Jeans. Longer Article on site. xponent Pants Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
