THE SEVENTH MATERIAL · HISTORY
Tension the cloth before you coat it.
In 1973 Serge Ferrari founded a company on a single idea, borrowed from prestressed concrete. Fifty years later, that idea is still the reason the material lasts.
It begins with someone walking away.
The family had been in textiles since the beginning of the century, and in coated synthetic fabrics since 1956. Serge Ferrari worked there, and became convinced the material was about to change. He left, and spent three years away from the industry taking the question back to the beginning. The answer came from somewhere else entirely. In prestressed concrete, the steel is tensioned before the concrete is poured. Applied to cloth: tension the woven substrate before coating it, and hold that tension while the coating is applied. He founded his own company in 1973. The process was called Précontraint®.
What actually descends from 1973.
Companies claim continuity easily. Here it is a specific, physical property, and it can be traced.
Tensioning the weave before coating does the obvious thing: the cloth stays flat and dimensionally stable. It also does something less obvious. Because the yarns are held under tension, the coating deposits more thickness over their crests than it would on a relaxed fabric of the same total weight. The polyester yarn ends up covered at exactly the points where a conventional coating runs thinnest.
That geometry is why a membrane made this way still holds more than 65% of its tensile strength after thirty years. The idea of 1973 is not a story about the company.
Three decisions followed from it, and they have not changed.
Do better with less. The company calls it less is more. Find performance in the intelligence of the material, not in the quantity of it. Hold the whole system. From yarn to membrane. Design the machines. Stay independent. The first machine came out in 1974, and there have been others since.
The company that lasts will be the one that was useful.
A material conceived as a system cannot be bought from a catalogue.
The Seventh Material is the result of a unique industrial heritage and a fully integrated value chain developed over the long term. For decades, the Group has built, mastered and continuously expanded the expertise required to design, manufacture and advance its materials.
At the heart of this expertise are weaving and coating technologies. The coating lines that produce many of the Group's membranes today were conceived and built by its own teams, extending an industrial culture established in 1973. This level of integration makes it possible to control every stage of the process, optimize material performance and drive continuous improvement.
This know-how is further enriched by the historical expertise of Verseidag in PTFE-coated glass fibre membranes and by a pioneering commitment to circularity. As early as 1998, Serge Ferrari began investing in solutions for the recycling of end-of-life composite membranes. That commitment continues today through ongoing work aimed at making these technologies more accessible, more compact and closer to collection and processing sites.
The Seventh Material therefore rests on four pillars: innovation, industrial mastery, material expertise and circularity.
Taking an intelligent risk.
Précontraint® took months to develop, and the house has always held that a failed initiative is not a fault.
That is also what made it possible to go back and try again: machines designed in-house, independence kept, decisions made close to the work.
It is still going on. The next step is clear: progressively integrating recycled content across all product ranges.