Halden Works Sweden: Odor-Free Tennis Dresses Built on Copper Ion Filament

Halden Works is a Sweden-based activewear label whose tennis dresses programme sells directly to consumers and through selected retail partners. The team asked us to rebuild the fabric from scratch because a scented finish masked the smell for two washes and then stopped working. The target was a permanent mechanism rather than a fragrance.

Halden Works: odour-control swatch set for the tennis dresses programme

The challenge

The smell built up at the built-in short and the chest band, where sweat sits longest during a session. The previous fabric was a standard synthetic knit with no odour strategy, so bacteria broke the sweat down on the fabric and the smell became permanent after a few weeks. A retailer review that questioned the wording of the claim made the problem urgent: the brand needed a fix before the next bulk booking, not a new supplier search.

The fabric solution

We built the programme around Copper Ion Filament on a polyamide knit base. The mechanism matters: copper damages bacterial cell walls and also improves thermal transfer away from the skin. Keeping the base at bonded knit with inner shorts and 210 GSM meant the hand, the stretch and the cover stayed exactly where the design team wanted them, because odour control changed the chemistry and the construction rather than the silhouette.

Wear trial and fit approval of the polyamide knit fabric

Development and implementation

• Week 1: brief agreed, sweat zone mapped, target set as bacterial reduction above 98% with improved thermal diffusion by AATCC 100.
• Week 2–3: laboratory knits produced and tested; add-on level adjusted until the target was met with margin.
• Week 4–5: wear trial on finished tennis dresses, assessed after eight hours of wear.
• Pre-production: wash durability confirmed at 40 home washes, care wording written as avoid bleach and dry away from direct heat.
• Bulk: fixed recipe, consolidated dye lots, AATCC 100 repeated on every lot.

Specification delivered

Results

The compliance team cleared the fabric for all three sales regions, and one fabric could now serve the whole range instead of three. The odour value was re-measured on bulk fabric rather than on the approval sample, so the result reflects what customers actually received. The programme is now on its third repeat with the same recipe.

“Their team explained the mechanism in one sentence, and the bulk fabric behaved like the sample.” — Halden Works Product Team

Inline inspection and packing before the tennis dresses shipment

Key takeaway

The brand's real problem was a claim it could not support. Once testing was tied to a named standard and repeated per lot, the same fabric could be defended to retailers and to customers. For Halden Works, that turned a recurring complaint into a feature the brand could sell.