ITMA 2019: Three Questions about ITMA to Sebastian Mayer, Stefan Brändle and Giovanni Maltese

“Innovating the World of Textiles” is the motto of this year’s ITMA, which will take place in Barcelona from 20 to 26 June. The international textile and garment industry exhibition has been held since 1951 and is the industry highlight every four years. Reason enough to ask what makes it so special.

In respect of digitization, corporate development and service we hear from Sebastian Mayer, member of the Management, from Stefan Brändle, in overall charge of networks, and from Giovanni Maltese, Head of Electronic Engineering, about their personal ITMA experiences.

1. Which was the first ITMA you attended, for Mayer & Cie. or for another company?

Stefan Brändle: My first ITMA was in 1999 in Paris. Back then I couldn´t imagine, what would await me. I was highly impressed by the technologies, that are necessary to produce a t-shirt for example.
Giovanni Maltese: My first ITMA for Mayer & Cie. was 1995 in Milan. Back then I was still very inexperienced and correspondingly nervous as to whether I would be able to cope with it all…
Sebastian Mayer: My first memory of an ITMA was of Paris in 1999, when I was still a child and just visiting. The first ITMA in which I took part was Munich in 2007. As a student at the TU in Munich I had a vacation job at the Mayer & Cie. stand. Back then the work was already very IT-oriented.

2. What does the ITMA mean for you personally?

Giovanni Maltese: Firstly, a great deal of stress, but then satisfaction and an opportunity to gain further experience and make many new contacts. Each trade fair is a continuous development for me, in both technical and human terms.
Sebastian Mayer: For me personally it is a milestone in our major innovation cycles. We have been working for years on a number of projects with ITMA as our target deadline and I am really pleased to be able to present the results to the industry experts.
Stefan Brändle: Time and again I find it really interesting to see how current IT topics are presented and developed at the ITMA. It is impressive to see from customer relationships how companies make use of digitization to gain competitive advantages. Every four years you realise here that development cycles are growing ever shorter. Four years ago cloud computing was still almost unheard of in textiles. In 2019 it is simply indispensable.

3. What was your personal ITMA highlight?

Sebastian Mayer: It was at my first ITMA in Munich in 2007. Mayer & Cie. held an evening event for sales representatives – as it does every year. It was there that I realised for the first time how closely the entire team, be it MCT in-house or sales representatives, collaborate. That was not just business as usual and it impressed me enormously.
Stefan Brändle: Hard to say. There have been IT and network computing highlights in textiles every four years. Highlights are for me, due to my position, whenever I see that standard IT technologies have made their way into textiles and are further developed. In 1999 we exhibited for the first time ordering spare parts on the Internet. In 2003 we showcased machine data monitoring via an online Internet connection with a knitting company in Egypt. This year we are featuring several IT solutions that improve our customers’ productivity. For me it will be a highlight to see how our customers take up these innovations and what feedback we receive in order to optimise the solutions for them.
Giovanni Maltese: I personally am excited by the challenge and the need to improvise in order to reach the objective – and to do so in both technical and human terms. It is simply great when everything works without the slightest problem, but the highlight is to see the satisfaction of our customers and sales representatives.