Stitching together award success

INTERKNIT is a finalist in the Innovator of the Year category of the MyBusiness Awards.

Being judged on their efforts within the last financial year, Interknit’s application focused on their latest innovative endeavour.

Interknit managing director Andrew Blaszak said his staff have had “incredible success” refining one-time custom jacquard knit garment programming in the downtime of the pandemic period.

“In this year of hardships, it says something about our resilience as a team, and not just our innovations, that we can achieve finalist status in a nationwide award,” he said

“The company’s over 80 years old and we’re still trying to evolve with the times. We used to be doing set processes, and now we’re adapting to incorporate computers and automated systems to try and then make our job easier.

“That’s all part of the continual evolution of knitting.”

He said awards recognition like this is greatly valued by Interknit, which has a small manufacturing team of 13.

“It adds a lot of camaraderie and another feather to our cap to say we’ve been able to get some sort of accolade or achievement on a completely different level.

“Everyone feels quite chuffed that this is what Interknit is doing, and that we’re looking to the future,” Mr Blaszak said.

“We’re trying to evolve and get things done.”

During the height of COVID restrictions, Interknit repurposed their knitting equipment to make fabric facemasks.

As many of their wholesale customers and school uniform buyers cancelled orders, the business qualified for financial support which kept their staff employed and working on their jacquard knit garment programming project.

“This had been a project on the backburner for over 12 months, but with economic uncertainty around our winter 2020 orders, it was something we could develop while we waited to see how the year would pan out,” Mr Blaszak said.

“Jacquard knits are a popular way to translate a multi-coloured design or pattern into knitwear. Small repeating patterns are cost effective and simple to set up using existing technology, but complex designs are subject to intense pixilation when they are imported and require hundreds of man-hours to make them display correctly.

“By using commercially available online programs in an innovative way, we were able to significantly reduce the programming hours required, and bring custom jacquard knits into the realm of small Australian designers.”

MyBusiness Award winners will be announced on Saturday, 5 December.