Rockland Mills Puts Its Prints on Blackouts with DeNA
August 1, 2008
BALTIMORE, Maryland – Rockland Mills, leading manufacturer of blackout fabrics, has announced its newly launched DeNA program. DeNA, short for Digital Encoding Analysis, refers to an identifying chemical makeup that Rockland now embeds into its products for brand protection purposes.
By encoding a specific "genetic" makeup into Rockland products, the company protects its brand against fraudulent companies who falsely use the Rockland name to sell their goods. "We have a digital spectrometer in our South Carolina plant," said Stanley Fradin, president at Rockland. "When a product is subjected to this spectrometer, it will read the chemical makeup. I'm in awe of the simplicity of this – it comes to my mind 'Why didn't we think of this 20 years ago?'"
"One of the problems we've experienced with our blackout goods was how to differentiate them from other goods around the world," said Fradin. "From appearance standpoints they look pretty much the same, but many of those other blackouts will degrade and malfunction over time – things our products have been developed not to do. Our product has been specifically engineered to include all of these features which include long product life and complete rejection of UV rays so there is no deterioration from light exposure."
DeNA will not only protect Rockland from facing illegitimate charges of faulty product, but Fradin says that it will give customers peace of mind. Rockland offers free product testing to all of its customers. Now if they want to know the exact genetic makeup of their products, they can send Rockland Mills a sample and Rockland will generate a full report for them. This will allow them to pursue legal action if they are provided with a product that misrepresents itself and better abide by environmental laws.
"It's a measure of protection for the users to the wholesalers to the manufacturers so that nobody's playing games with the end product itself," said Fradin. "For instance, there has been a recent rash of formaldehyde-laden goods coming into the country. We've run independent tests for ourselves and certain customers. In fact, we just tested an item from Pakistan of blackout lining that was 1,300 parts per million of formaldehyde. The permissible amount in the U.S. is 1,000 parts per million otherwise you have to label it toxic."
DeNA was developed during the fourth quarter of 2007 and will be launched as a marketing campaign in 2008. "Our newer ads which are coming out for the Boutique Hotel Show will mention DeNA and the hotel magazines preempting the show will all mention it, and of course we're going to make a lot of noise about it at Decosit," he said. "It's another service that Rockland does above and beyond the call."
By encoding a specific "genetic" makeup into Rockland products, the company protects its brand against fraudulent companies who falsely use the Rockland name to sell their goods. "We have a digital spectrometer in our South Carolina plant," said Stanley Fradin, president at Rockland. "When a product is subjected to this spectrometer, it will read the chemical makeup. I'm in awe of the simplicity of this – it comes to my mind 'Why didn't we think of this 20 years ago?'"
"One of the problems we've experienced with our blackout goods was how to differentiate them from other goods around the world," said Fradin. "From appearance standpoints they look pretty much the same, but many of those other blackouts will degrade and malfunction over time – things our products have been developed not to do. Our product has been specifically engineered to include all of these features which include long product life and complete rejection of UV rays so there is no deterioration from light exposure."
DeNA will not only protect Rockland from facing illegitimate charges of faulty product, but Fradin says that it will give customers peace of mind. Rockland offers free product testing to all of its customers. Now if they want to know the exact genetic makeup of their products, they can send Rockland Mills a sample and Rockland will generate a full report for them. This will allow them to pursue legal action if they are provided with a product that misrepresents itself and better abide by environmental laws.
"It's a measure of protection for the users to the wholesalers to the manufacturers so that nobody's playing games with the end product itself," said Fradin. "For instance, there has been a recent rash of formaldehyde-laden goods coming into the country. We've run independent tests for ourselves and certain customers. In fact, we just tested an item from Pakistan of blackout lining that was 1,300 parts per million of formaldehyde. The permissible amount in the U.S. is 1,000 parts per million otherwise you have to label it toxic."
DeNA was developed during the fourth quarter of 2007 and will be launched as a marketing campaign in 2008. "Our newer ads which are coming out for the Boutique Hotel Show will mention DeNA and the hotel magazines preempting the show will all mention it, and of course we're going to make a lot of noise about it at Decosit," he said. "It's another service that Rockland does above and beyond the call."
