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"People have been misled"
SGB: How do your garments work compared to other wicking systems out there?
Professor Lambertz: People have been misled for the last 35 years. Everybody was writing that it's important to keep your skin dry. This is an absolutely incorrect theory. Everybody is announcing they will keep the skin dry; this has been announced and advertised for the last 35 years.
We do our research on the kind of solutions that nature developed. We see that clothing is an interface between the human body and the environment. The target is that we want to keep you performing under all conditions, if you take only our sports gear. When we started to research that, we found that keeping the skin dry was misleading - our body regulation system needs the sweat badly. Put a little spit on your finger and put it on your forehead, you feel immediately how the forehead gets cool. Wipe the spit off, and it doesn't cool any more.
Last year a colleague of mine scientifically proved that you need up to 97 percent of your energy to regulate your body temperature, not for the muscles. That is a very, very important thing.
It has been scientifically proven that the undergear and all the other stuff we are doing, helps the body to regulate temperature. How do we do this? If you test the running gear or the bike gear, there is something we call the Bionic Sphere system. We collect the sweat - it is too precious to just throw away! You really need it, so we collect the sweat. The natural way of cooling is maintained. Then we collect the excessive sweat in our Bionic Sphere system and bring it back to the skin, cooling the athlete.
In our shirt - the Fennec, we named this after the Desert Fox - we have got a heat pipe system which takes the sweat from the surface back to the skin, like a revolving system.
I did some studies into the Desert Fox, wondering how this animal can survive in this harsh environment. It has developed a special fur that reflects the heatwaves, and it has big ears to cool the blood down. I started to develop a new yarn to help the body keep at 37 degrees Centigrade, which is the optimum performance temperature for the body. If you run in summer, you have the heat from the street, from the walls and from the sun. The technology is reflecting these heatwaves, and keeps this heat away and is also distributing the sweat all over the body, to keep the evaporative cooling system auto-running.
SGB: How did the concept come to you, as you're not a textile engineer?
PL: Shall I be honest? I was sitting at my house in the garden. I had a bottle of wine, and I was bored after the X-Socks had been so successful worldwide. I took a shirt, made by a very well-known company, and there was writing on the packing. 'These strategically-placed vents take the excessive heat out of the body's core...' What is this? It is full of bullshit. It is just a different look of the knitting, and they call this a 'strategically-placed vent which takes the excessive heat out of the body's core'. That is impossible.
So I went through this. I am a scientist, not a textile engineer. I have nothing to do with textiles. I started to develop a new measurement; I took one of my girls, and put her in a suit - I made all these little squares on the suit. When she moved, the squares were disturbed, so I could see where the tension goes. I started to develop this. I had to develop a new yarn that would not take the moisture away quickly, and the three-dimensional knitting. I started developing the underwear by looking at what the other people had done.
That is how it started, by seeing which arguments help people sell products - there is no need to bullshit, really. If you are a scientist, you start to laugh...
If you are a runner and you realise how that works, it is completely different. There is no better ultimate truth than your own experience - that is our motto. People wear it, they realise how it works.
