QUALITY & DURABILITY

WE EMBRACE QUALITY IN EVERTHING WE MAKE

Every piece of personal protective equipment that ROOTS produces has to meet the strict European standards and regulations that have been put in place. Needless to say ROOTS not only meets these norms and standards, but exceeds them.

For us a high quality product means a safe one, we're talking about personal protective equipment after all. For flame retardant workwear a very good indication of safety is how it performs in a simulation of an actual catastrophe, a flash fire. We do this through manikin testing. The manikin test is an optional test within the EN11612 standard for limited heat and flame spread. During this test a garment is mounted onto a manikin and exposed to a 4 second flash fire. The sensors mounted onto the manikin will then determine the degree of burn wounds over the body and give out what is called a 'body burn prediction'. This gives a total percentage of burns which is in direct relation to the chance of survivability. A regular FR coverall that gives a 30% body burn prediction is drastically worse than a ROOTS coverall that predicts 4.4% of burns across the body.
ROOTS takes this optional manikin test extremely serious! Every single one of our FR garments is tested independently through BTTG (British Textile Technology Group) and we provide all of our existing and potential customers with our test results.

We take the results of these tests with us when we develop our new fabrics, we always strive for improvement and the lowest possible burn outcome. At ROOTS we are very proud of the high quality fabrics that we have created over the years. The evolution of these fabrics can be dated back to the start of ROOTs in 2004, back when we decided that the average fabric simply wasn't good enough and that we would just do it ourselves. From the start back then until now we have been in complete control of our own fabric production. When producing our garments we make sure to get the best possible ingredients and composition that we can to ensure that our garments can perform to their maximum potential.

After we have developed a fabric that we consider to be of the highest quality we send it out for testing. ROOTS has partnered with SGS (Société Générale de Surveillance) to carry out tests on our fabrics. SGS are world leader in the field of fabric inspection, testing and certification. The certified quality control of SGS is an invaluable asset which we use to support us in creating the safest, best performing garments available.

Once all the stages of development and testing of the fabrics for the creation of the garment are done and we believe that we have a ROOTS worthy product we give the green light for production. Once a ROOTS garment is off to their it's wearer we still want to keep track of it, that is where our world class product traceability system comes in. Every new batch of fabric gets a unique 'cosort' number. This number is then placed within the seam of every garment. This means that if anything were to occur to the product we are able to trace the origins all the way back to the start.

PRODUCT TRACEABILITY

During our fabric production process, we have implemented a world class quality control system. After every produced batch, all ROOTS fabrics are tested in our laboratory for critical values such as tear strength, tensile strength, flame retardant properties, formaldehyde content and shrinkage. This is then identified by a unique number, which we call Cosort. This number is placed within the seam of every garment that we manufacture.

OWN FABRIC DEVELOPMENTS

As ROOTS we pride ourselves on our high quality fabrics that we have been able to create over the years. The development of these fabric can be dated back all the way back to the forming of ROOTS in 2004. When ROOTS was formed in 2004, we were highly dissatisfied with the state of all the ‘average’ Flame Retardant (FR) fabric on offer in the market. The poor quality, poor performance and poor comfort associated with most fabrics drove us to producing our very own Flame Retardant fabrics and under our own control.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FR WORKWEAR

It's easy to forget the huge importance of wearing FR workwear, the average worker puts on his coverall and goes about his day until he can get out of them again without really thinking about it. That's why it's good to remember one's self of what a flame retardant garment really is, not just a piece of workwear that has to check the EN ISO 11612 box and that's that, but the last line of defence in the event of a fire emergency.

IT HAS TO BE TESTED