In recent years, with the vigorous development of the “she economy” and the rise of online sales, China’s women’s underwear track is undergoing unprecedented changes and has attracted more and more attention from capital. According to iiMedia Research, Neihui, Oxygen, Inman, Qingwei, and Ubras have all received financing. According to incomplete statistics, in 2018 alone, the investment and financing of China’s underwear industry exceeded 200 million yuan. Since 2010, the consumer demand for underwear in China has continued to grow: in 2010, the demand for underwear in my country was only 6.1 billion pieces. By 2019, China’s underwear consumption demand will reach 16.77 billion pieces, with an average annual compound growth rate of 11.9%. At present, there are nearly 10,000 domestic underwear manufacturers, and there are more than 3,000 women’s underwear brands, but more than 90% of the brands have a sales scale of less than 100 million yuan, and few brands exceed 1 billion yuan. For this reason, since entering the track, various brands have continued to add “gimmicks” to their products – now almost all underwear brands that can be called famous brands are promoting “sense of technology”.
Whether it is the super-elastic memory alloy bra base that I admired in the early days, or the “super-magic skinny” of Tingmei’s “eight-sided elastic” fabric, or the more popular Ubras “no trace and no steel ring”, the detachable patented water drop coaster, or Banana’s Stressfree non-inductive technology and ZeroTouch non-inductive support technology are emphasizing the “sense of technology” of underwear. As an important part of women’s underwear, the focus of the material and function of the chest pad is also undergoing a series of changes with the market. Today, the author will take you to understand the foam materials in the women’s underwear chest pad market one by one.
Common chest pad materials include foam, memory foam, silicone foam, latex, and 3D upright cotton.
sponge
When it comes to sponges, the first thing that comes to our mind is a bath sponge for bathing or a cleaning sponge for washing dishes. These are soft to the touch, with tiny holes all over the surface, and the items are slightly intimidating. Not only is it highly absorbent, but no matter how “abused” it is, it will return to its original state as soon as it is released, and it has good plasticity. But you know what? Sponges are actually an animal, a very primitive multicellular animal. Their bodies have no fixed shape and have many small holes in their walls. They are classified as porous animals. There are many kinds, tens of thousands. Most of them grow in the waters of the Mediterranean, Gulf of Mexico and Bahamas.
Later, due to the development of material science and the application of polymer materials, we can now easily buy cheap sponge products, mainly synthetic sponges with porous honeycomb structures made of foamed plastic polymers.
There are many types of synthetic sponges, but in a narrow sense, people are accustomed to equating “sponges” with ordinary polyurethane soft foams, which are made up of polyisocyanates and polyols mixed with water, catalysts and stabilizers. This flexible foam material has good oxidation resistance and solvent resistance, and is often used in textiles, clothing composite linings, underwear manufacturing, etc., but due to the poor hydrolysis resistance of polyester itself, the service life of the foam in this case will not not long. Hot and humid environment. , the yellowing phenomenon will appear after a period of time.
From the perspective of additives in sponge production, the reasons for sponge yellowing are as follows:
During the foaming/processing process, the sponge turns yellow due to thermal oxidation aging caused by high temperature;
Gas fumigation and yellowing due to exposure to nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the air;
Yellowing due to exposure of the sponge to UV light.
In order to solve the yellowing problem of flexible polyurethane foam, many sponge manufacturers, especially some high-end sponge manufacturers, try to improve the anti-yellowing performance of sponges by adding antioxidants and light stabilizers, but the effect is not obvious. .In addition, in addition to being prone to yellowing and mildew, the underwear lining is made of sponge, which has insufficient water permeability and air permeability, and has a weak perspiration effect, which is easy to breed bacteria.
Post time: Aug-15-2022