38 http://www.popularmechanics.co.za _ AUGUST 2017
brand ambassador and tester for K-Way. In that, he’s been joined
by the likes of “skyrunner” Lucky Miya and adventurer Kingsley
Holgate.
On the Fish River, Calitz was trying out the latest prototype (“I
think it’s the third or fourth version”) of the company’s Race Shell.
“With the new fabric, they have to
rework the seams, the stretch patterns.
The new product is incredible, it’s so light.
Because trail running is so stop-start ori-
ented and you have to carry everything
over a mountain, you don’t want some-
thing that feels heavy and cumbersome.
You want something that is relatively
snug and does not allow moisture to
come in from the outside, but you want
sweat to be released. You don’t want to
overheat. And 99 per cent of the time
when you are running in a jacket you are
wearing a pack, so the pack must work
with the jacket. What you wear under the
pack is going to be more compressed. If you have air vents on the
back of the neck and the shoulders, they are going to be covered.
What K-Way has done, very cleverly, is put vents in the armpits
for example, where you get hot.”
It’s been a long road from utilitarian workwear and foul weather
gear to extreme sport and outdoor apparel for a company whose roots
lie in uniforms. The brand name is said to derive from the habit
original boss-man Philip Krawitz – “Mr K” – had of asking advice
and then deciding to do things his own way, after all: the “K-Way”.
Twenty years ago, as part of the Cape Union Mart group, the
brand went head-on with imported brands and started producing
its own range of practical yet fashionable outdoor and active wear.
With the once-mighty local clothing indus-
try on the decline, it seemed like the worst
time to invest in the business. But new
management and an approach that drew
its inspiration from the motor industry’s
lean manufacture, continuous improvement
and just-in-time mantras, breathed new life
into the brand. At the same time, Depart-
ment of Trade and Industry programmes for
the clothing and textile industry provided
funding for state-of-the-art machinery.
Current conventional methods include
stitching together coated or laminated
waterproof fabric and sealing the sewn
seams with special machinery. These melt
the polyurethane or PVC adhesive tape applied to the seams, ren-
dering them waterproof.
“One of the things we are doing at the moment is looking for new
ways of putting fabric together without necessarily sewing seams,”
says general manager Bobby Fairlamb. “I brought an ultrasonic
sewing machine into the design centre. Now they can do seams with
a reinforcing element on the outside and it gives you a beautifully“We’ve got a lab that we’ve just
recently set up, costing close to a
million rand, where we’ve got
equipment like tensile strength
testing, colour fastness testing,
wash testing and waterproof
testing,” Fairlamb explains.
Right, above: Outdoor
merchandise manager Ryan
Weideman, centre, goes into
the tech of the company’s
prototype extreme-weather
jacket along with, left, general
manager Bobby Fairlamb and
design manager Jolyon Pike.
Below: CAD has become an
important tool in ensuring
accurate manufacture of
lie-flat and no-sew seams.
Opposite page: In-house
testing measures rip-stop
failure and water penetration.
Far right: Innovative manu-
facturing processes have
helped upskill the workforce,
now numbering around 240.