As 2025 comes to a close, Europe’s textile and fashion sector is moving beyond “pilot-mode” sustainability and digitalisation. The direction is now clear: produce closer to demand, waste less, and prove impact with data.
This shift isn’t driven by one trend alone. On the market side, brands and consumers expect faster response times, more customisation, and more transparent supply chains. On the policy side, the EU is tightening requirements around textile waste and circularity, making it harder to compete without systems that support reuse, recycling, traceability, and smarter production planning.
For Katty Fashion, a Romanian manufacturer with over two decades of experience, strong digital capabilities (including 3D prototyping), and a practical focus on efficiency and low-waste workflows, 2025 has been a year of turning innovation into real operational tools.
In this end-of-year update, we share progress across the three flagship EU projects where Katty Fashion is actively involved: R3GROUP, RegioGreenTex, and AI REDGIO 5.0.
R3GROUP: Building reconfigurable manufacturing for a volatile market
Fashion manufacturing rarely stands still. Orders change, styles evolve, and supply constraints can appear overnight. That’s why reconfigurability (the ability to adjust production quickly without sacrificing quality or speed) has become a competitive advantage rather than a technical luxury.
R3GROUP is focused on enabling that shift. The project develops approaches and tools that help manufacturers reconfigure processes efficiently, reduce downtime, and stay responsive when production priorities change.
A key milestone this year was the formal spotlight on Katty Fashion as a pilot site, presenting how digital solutions can support faster, smarter changes on the shop floor. The pilot story captures a reality shared by many apparel SMEs: increasing pressure for flexibility, shorter runs, and reliable lead times, all while keeping costs under control.
Throughout 2025, R3GROUP communications also reinforced a wider industry evolution: moving from basic automation toward intelligent manufacturing, systems that support decision-making, adapt to constraints, and help teams act faster with better information.
R3GROUP: Building reconfigurable manufacturing for a volatile market
For fashion and textiles, reconfigurable manufacturing translates into very practical benefits:
- Quicker changeovers when styles, materials, or priorities shift
- Less downtime during line adjustments and planning updates
- More reliable delivery performance, even under volatile demand
- Better use of capacity, without resorting to costly “just-in-case” buffers
The project’s Early Adopter Programme has also been a strong 2025 signal: R3GROUP isn’t only about research; it’s about bringing manufacturers into the loop early so the solutions are shaped by real operational needs.
Looking ahead to 2026: expect continued opportunities for validation, benchmarking, and adoption, especially for companies ready to translate resilience into measurable KPIs such as changeover time, downtime reduction, and planning accuracy.
RegioGreenTex: Making circularity workable, scalable, and measurable
If R3GROUP strengthens the “how” of production, RegioGreenTex focuses on the “what happens next”, the infrastructure and collaboration needed to make textile circularity real.
RegioGreenTex connects 11 textile-intensive regions across eight European countries, including North East Romania, to strengthen interregional innovation and build a recycling ecosystem where textile waste becomes a resource. Its approach is both ambitious and practical: improve regional capabilities, link supply and demand for recycled materials, and give SMEs tools to assess readiness and find partners.
2025 Highlights: from Frameworks to Usable Tools
This year, RegioGreenTex moved decisively toward resources that companies can explore and apply. Standout developments include:
- A Digital Tool to support matchmaking, knowledge sharing, and cross-regional collaboration
- The Waste Wizard, designed to help connect companies that have leftover textiles with organisations that can reuse or recycle them
- A Self-Assessment Tool (SAT) to evaluate circular economy practices across materials, design, production, and transparency and identify next steps
- A shared Textile Taxonomy & Glossary to align terminology and reduce friction when collaborating across regions and disciplines
RegioGreenTex also brought circularity to life through a strong example: the Circular Garment, developed through multi-region collaboration and designed for longevity and recyclability. It’s a practical reminder that circular fashion is not just about “end-of-life”, it starts at design and is enabled by the right partnerships and material choices.
Watch the Circular Garment Documentary to learn more about how Katty Fashion and our partners contribute to the Future of Fashion Manufacturing.
As a year full of work and dedication comes to a close, we are more convinced than ever that circularity is no longer a future ambition. It is becoming a baseline expectation, both commercially and regulatorily. Producers will increasingly need to understand how materials flow, what happens to textile waste, and how to demonstrate improvements over time.
This is where RegioGreenTex delivers real value: it helps SMEs measure where they stand, find the right collaborators, and navigate investment decisions with clearer information and toolkits, available on the Project Website.
AI REDGIO 5.0: Bringing edge AI into manufacturing, starting with quality assurance
The third pillar of Katty Fashion’s 2025 innovation story is AI REDGIO 5.0, a project accelerating adoption of AI at the Edge for Industry 5.0. Its mission is to help regions and SMEs test practical AI applications and move from experimentation to deployment.
Where many AI initiatives stay abstract, AI REDGIO 5.0 is structured around hands-on experiments: pilots, demonstrators, and test-before-invest environments that help companies evaluate feasibility and impact before scaling.
2025 Highlights: a QA-focused pilot at Katty Fashion
For Katty Fashion, the most relevant applications is quality assurance in clothing production, a known bottleneck in many apparel factories. QA is often manual, skill-dependent, and hard to standardise across changing styles and fabrics.
The Katty Fashion pilot explores edge-based defect detection in the QA zone. In practical terms, this involves capturing images under consistent lighting, annotating defect types, and training AI models to recognise issues more reliably. The goal is not to replace human expertise, but to support it, reducing inconsistency, speeding up checks, and creating a stronger feedback loop for continuous improvement.
A wider project milestone: documenting experimentation at scale
AI REDGIO 5.0 also reported a major ecosystem output this year: an Experiments Booklet capturing dozens of experiments across productivity, human-centric innovation, and sustainability. This matters because it turns isolated pilots into shared learning, so SMEs don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Looking ahead to 2026: AI solutions will increasingly connect to broader compliance and circularity needs. As companies face growing requirements to document performance, AI-enabled workflows can help generate reliable, actionable data directly from the production environment.
The takeaway: three projects, one direction for competitive textiles in Europe
Across reconfigurable manufacturing (R3GROUP), circular infrastructure (RegioGreenTex), and AI applications (AI REDGIO 5.0), the message of 2025 is consistent: the future of European textiles will be agile, data-enabled, and circular by design.
If you’re a brand, manufacturer, or ecosystem partner watching these shifts, now is the moment to move from interest to action. The most resilient organisations in 2026 won’t just talk about transformation; they’ll be the ones who can demonstrate it in their operations.
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