Global Textile News & CAD Insights

For the past several months, one request kept landing in Pointcarre's inbox with a regularity that was hard to ignore. Stadium operators asked whether a club crest could be tufted into the pitch instead of repainted every season. Playground manufacturers asked whether a multi-color safety surface could be designed in an afternoon instead of a week. Landscapers asked whether a synthetic lawn could look convincing enough to sit next to a real one without anybody noticing the difference. For Freddy Brault, CEO of Pointcarre, the pattern was too consistent to leave unanswered. There is a strong demand for this, and it keeps growing, Freddy Brault says. We had already built the module that carpet manufacturers rely on, tufting machine by tufting machine. Grass is a different fiber, but the machine, the logic and the workflow are the ones we had already mastered.

That module is Tuft, developed with tufting machine manufacturers CMC, Tuftco and Modra to bring Pointcarre's Broadloom carpet customers a genuine alternative once the industry's dominant software disappeared. Two years later, the same engine that calculates needle bar movement, gauge and stitch length for a hotel corridor carpet turns out to calculate exactly the same things for a football pitch, a putting green or a residential lawn. We didn't have to reinvent anything, Freddy Brault explains. We had to listen to a new industry and adapt the fiber.

One module, a new fiber

Pointcarre's new artificial turf software runs on the same logic as Broadloom: draw the pattern, choose the yarn, preview the result, send the file to the machine. What changes from one market to the next is the fiber itself. Football turf calls for a monofilament cut pile with a spine profile for vertical memory, a 40 to 60 mm pile height and a Dtex as high as 16,000 to survive heavy daily traffic. Tennis and golf turf need something shorter and denser, 10 to 20 mm, fibrillated or texturized monofilament built for a predictable ball roll rather than resilience under a boot. Playground surfacing asks for a cut pile with a texturized thatch layer, usually paired with a shock pad, to meet impact absorption standards. Landscape grass blends a straight cut pile with a curled thatch base for the multi-tone, uneven look of a real lawn. Every one of those specifications lives inside the same document, Freddy Brault notes. A designer can assign cut pile, loop pile or a mix of both zone by zone, exactly the way Pointcarre already handles pile construction on a Broadloom carpet.

Logos tufted, not glued

The detail Freddy Brault keeps coming back to is branding. Historically, a club emblem or a sponsor's graphic on a synthetic pitch was cut from separate pieces of turf and glued into place, a process that leaves weak seams and fades unevenly over time. Pointcarre tufts the logo directly into the roll instead, with pixel-accurate color mapping and no cutting or gluing involved. Once the pattern is woven into the backing with colored fibers, it doesn't need repainting, ever, Freddy Brault says. It reduces chemical use, and the branding stays sharp for the life of the field. The software also calculates exact cut plans and yarn consumption per square meter automatically, cutting waste of what remains an expensive polymer yarn, and exports the finished design straight into a machine command file, needle bar movement, gauge and stitch length included, so nothing needs to be re-programmed by hand on the production floor. Direct compatibility with CMC, Tuftco, Modra and Vandewiele covers the same machines Pointcarre already supports for carpet.

Why stadiums, schools and cities are switching

Ask Freddy Brault why the demand is accelerating and he doesn't start with the software. He starts with the field itself. Natural grass wears out under heavy use and bad weather, he says. It needs mowing, fertilizing, aerating and constant watering, and none of that disappears just because a season is busy. Synthetic turf removes that entire maintenance cycle, and the savings show up directly in labor, fuel, equipment and water bills. It also holds up to conditions that would leave a natural pitch unplayable: heavy rain, intense daily foot traffic and continuous sun exposure, without mud pits, bare patches or uneven ground forming underneath. Because the surface doesn't need rest between uses, a single synthetic pitch can host matches back to back, which lets a facility rent out the space and host more events on the same footprint.

The performance argument runs alongside the economic one. A synthetic surface plays the same way in every corner of the field, smooth, uniform and predictable in ball roll and bounce, something a worn natural pitch struggles to guarantee by the end of a season. Modern infill systems and shock pads absorb impact forces on joints and muscles, lowering the risk of the severe impact injuries and abrasions that come with falls, and an engineered sub-base drains water fast enough that a field stays playable immediately after a heavy downpour instead of forcing a cancellation. Then there is the environmental side, which Freddy Brault treats as inseparable from the economic one. In arid climates or during a drought, a synthetic field saves millions of liters of water a year compared with an irrigated natural one, and it needs no pesticide, herbicide or synthetic fertilizer at all, which means no chemical runoff into the groundwater underneath it. Put together, those are not marginal gains, Freddy Brault says. That is the whole reason cities, schools and stadium operators keep asking us for this.

Fiber, color and the finished lawn

Every blade of turf combines a resin, a color and a cross-section shape, and all three are editable directly in the fiber library Pointcarre already shares with Broadloom. YarnMaker, the tool carpet designers use to build a custom yarn from scratch, now builds a blade of grass with the same ease, and blending several colored monofilaments in a single tuft is what makes a landscape lawn look natural instead of uniform, or lets a football pitch match a club's exact color scheme. The Pantone Textile Library, ColorWall CSI and the Archroma Color Atlas, already included with Pointcarre at no extra cost for every other module, come along with it.

Planning the installation, not just the design

Designing the roll is only half the job, Freddy Brault points out. Someone still has to plan how it gets cut, which way the pile leans so the finished surface reads as one lawn, where the seams fall, and how the layout wraps around a flower bed, a pool edge or a tree. Pointcarre's Tiling module handles that planning digitally: the installer draws the areas directly on a photo or a plan of the site, matches the perspective, works out pile direction and seam placement, and gets the exact surface area and piece count before a single roll is cut. That part of the workflow already existed for carpet tiles, Freddy Brault says. Turf installation needed it just as much.

What comes next

Pointcarre's artificial turf software is live today, built on the same Tuft engine, the same file format and the same team of designers already serving Broadloom customers. Two years ago we built Tuft because carpet manufacturers had nowhere else to turn, Freddy Brault reflects. Today, the request is coming from a different industry, stadiums, playgrounds, landscapers, but the answer is the same one we already had: listen to the people using the field every day, and build the tool around what they actually need. Full technical specifications for football, tennis and golf, playground and landscape turf are detailed on Pointcarre's artificial turf page, alongside the machine compatibility and export formats supported from day one.