Milan Design Week 2022
CIRCULAR MATERIAL TRENDSETTING

The Milan Furniture Fair, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, has celebrated its 60th anniversary from June 07 to 12. Brain of Materials is participating. We ask our CEO Dr. Hans-Peter Schlegelmilch, what he actually expects from the fair.

BOM: Dr. Schlegelmilch, your still young company is represented at the Milan Furniture Fair for the first time. What do you expect from it?

HPS: We were represented with Brain-of-Materials in downtown Milan - the Certosa Initiative. There we presented the results of our own material developments. But we also took exhibits from our material partners, who enrich our Brain-of-Materials material network.

However, the objective was: all exhibits had to contribute to the topic of "sustainability" and in particular to "circular material management and process control". We wanted to get in touch with players in the furniture industry, in the home textiles sector and in the mobility industry - i.e. automotive, aviation, railways, etc. 

For your information. We are not directly with a booth on the Salone Del Mobile on the actual fairground Fiera Milano represented. Rather the Milan furniture fair is in the meantime part of the Milan Design Week. This means that the whole of Milan is, as it were, a furniture fair. This is a development of the last few years.

BOM: The motto of this year's fair is sustainability. You have already explained a few things to us about this. What specifically will you be exhibiting or demonstrating there, or will you be showing a new development?

HPS: We have put the "seating furniture" in the foreground! Namely, it's about the aspect of showing which materials are now - here and now - already ready for use. Of course, we have highlighted the mixed fiber yarn that we have developed for the first time together with complementary partners in a German-Dutch consortium under our leadership since 2019 from post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste for demanding requirements in the furniture and automotive industries. We have informed in the meantime yes again and again. "Fibers Unsorted" was the development name! At the time of this year's Salone Del Mobile, we are launching a yarn suitable for series production, namely Wyron truecycled in a variation of characteristic colorways, finenesses and blends. With a home textile collection created with Wyron truecycled, we show various options in softline/soft trim and open the designers' imaginations. But also with Breathair from Indorama Mobility Group we show how seating comfort can be achieved with alternative materials as structural materials, which equally meet the requirements regarding lightweight construction, seating climate and circularity.

BOM: How does that fit together, you develop your own materials, at the same time you offer other companies a platform to present themselves there? Why do you bring your competitors into your company, so to speak?

HPS: Well, the core business model of Brain of Materials is a data-driven one. As a digital infrastructure platform, we support supply chains based on the division of labor, for example, in all forms of material and product release processes. We solve the problem of freeing qualified people on the side of OEMs as well as material and semi-finished product manufacturers from time-consuming repetitive tasks - often reduced to clerical activities. This results in useful additional offers: e.g. for those who are looking for materials and products with certain properties. In this way we support technical procurement, and in parallel we also develop sales and marketing functions and benefits for the suppliers of materials, semi-finished products and products. To a large extent, our own material development projects are the sandbox for us to learn from that the players in the supply chains work together. To give examples: in digital color release but also how to provide the digital carbon footprint and energy consumption on our material platform. That would be much more difficult if we didn't have our own material projects.

BOM: Thank you very much for the interview, Dr. Schlegelmilch. And don't forget, we'll be back in two weeks. A review of the furniture trade show. After all, our readers want to know everything.

The next interview will appear in around two weeks. The interview was conducted by Gertrud Müller.