About Glen Raven

Glen Raven is a family-owned textile company founded in North Carolina in 1880. What began as a cotton mill has evolved into a global leader in performance fabrics, with operations in the United States, France,and China. The company manufactures Sunbrella®, Dickson®, and GlenGuard® brand performance fabrics for applications including awnings, marine covers, indoorand outdoor upholstery, flame-retardant protective apparel, and solar protection.

Glen Raven’s R&D team sits at the heart of the company’s innovation efforts, responsible for evaluating raw materials, creating new products and related patents, and scaling new programs with confidence.

The Challenge

For an R&D team tasked with developing the next generation of performance fabrics, staying at the forefront of innovation requires more than laboratory expertise. It requires deep, continuous awareness of what’s happening across the broader technology and competitive landscape,from new raw materials entering the market to emerging patent activity fromglobal competitors.

Glen Raven’s R&D team needed a way to keep pace with the speed and complexity of that landscape. Conducting thorough patent searches,monitoring competitive technology advancements, and producing reliable market research reports all demanded significant time and resources. The challenge was compounded by the breadth of Glen Raven’s portfolio: with products spanning marine, shade, upholstery, and protective apparel, the team needed to track innovation across multiple technical domains simultaneously.

Traditional research methods, including manual patent database searches, fragmented market intelligence, and time-consuming report generation, were straining the team’s capacity. What they needed was a resource that could accelerate the research process, consolidate information from disparate sources, and deliver concise, reliable outputs without compromising confidentiality.

The Solution

Glen Raven turned to Cypris to address these challenges. The platform provided the team with a confidential, firewall-protected resource tofind the information they needed, whether they were conducting self-directed searches through the Cypris portal or engaging Cypris Research Analysts when time constraints demanded it.

That combination of self-serve capability and expert-assisted research proved to be a game-changer. As the Glen Raven R&D team described it, Cypris offers “a tremendously flexible and powerful combination of resources that speeds up the end product of producing concise, reliable reports on new topics.”

Cypris became embedded in two critical areas of Glen Raven’s R&D operations:

Patent Strategy and Technology Competency. Cypris expanded Glen Raven’s ability to gain visibility into relevant patent and technology developments and support informed innovation decisions. For a company that actively creates andprotects intellectual property, this kind of structured, ongoing patent intelligence is essential to maintaining a competitive edge.

Market Research and Competitive Intelligence. Cypris also strengthened Glen Raven’s market research capabilities through its Research Briefs and Custom Reports. These tools allowed the team to pinpoint exactly the answers they needed from publicly available information, distilling complex, scattered data into actionable insights that could inform product development and strategic decisions.

Beyond the core capabilities, the Glen Raven team also noted Cypris’s commitment to continuous improvement. The platform has been aggressivein adding new functionality, with frequent advancements to strengthen the customer interface, speed, and simplicity of the experience.

The Impact

The results have been felt across Glen Raven’s R&D function. The team now operates with greater discipline and visibility across the competitive patent and technology landscape. They can track what competitors are filing, identify emerging technical trends, and spot opportunities or risks earlier than before.

Their market research capabilities have deepened as well. Where deep-dive research projects once required significant manual effort, the team can now produce comprehensive analyses faster and with greater confidencein the underlying data.

Perhaps most importantly, the partnership has built trust. Glen Raven views Cypris not just as a software vendor, but as an extension of their own technical team. That kind of confidence, in both the platform’s capabilities and the people behind it, has allowed the R&D team to move faster and focus their energy where it matters most: developing the next breakthrough in performance fabrics.

For a company that has been innovating for over a century,that’s exactly the kind of partner you want in your corner.

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Sunbrella®, Dickson®, and GlenGuard® are the property of Glen Raven, Inc or its affiliates.

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About Brooks Running

Brooks Running is a Seattle-based performance running company and subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. Founded in 1914, Brooks has spent over a century focused on creating high-performance running footwear, apparel, and gear. The company takes a runner-first approach to everything it does, grounding its product development in biomechanics research and a deep commitment to understanding how runners move. Brooks products are available in more than 60 countries worldwide.

The Challenge

Innovation in footwear is not just about keeping up with what is new. It is about knowing where to look and deciding what matters.

For the Footwear Innovation team at Brooks Running, the work centers on exploring, prototyping, and testing new ideas and technologies that could shape future product platforms. The team studies emerging materials, construction methods, and systems to understand how they might meaningfully improve the runner experience. They are guided by biomechanics and driven by curiosity, often pulling inspiration from industries well beyond running.

But with that breadth comes a real challenge: deciding where to focus. New materials, technologies, and ideas surface constantly, and it is not always clear which ones will have real impact for runners. A lot of the team's work comes down to looking ahead, understanding where runners' needs might be several years out, and making educated guesses about which technologies could be relevant in the future.

The information they need to make those decisions exists, but it is scattered. Research papers, supplier updates, media, and developments from adjacent industries all hold pieces of the picture, but stitching them together requires significant manual effort. That process is not only time-consuming but can affect how well the team synthesizes everything into a clear, actionable view.

As a small team working in early-stage exploration, the challenge was never a shortage of ideas. It was building enough context to focus resources where they matter most, without losing the flexibility to experiment, learn, and pivot as new information comes in.

The Solution

The team set out to improve how they gather and digest external information early in the innovation process. Rather than relying on one-off searches or fragmented inputs, they wanted a more efficient way to build context across materials, technologies, and external industries before committing resources to deeper exploration.

Cypris has complemented their existing workflow by offering specialized agents that help the team efficiently understand what is happening across a given space. They use these tools alongside their exploration and developmental process to organize information and reach a clearer starting point faster.

The agents have reduces the time spent searching and stitching information together, helping the team focus earlier and with more confidence while still leaving room to adapt as new inputs emerge.

The Impact

The most significant change has been clarity and confidence early in the process. With better visibility into what is happening across technologies and industries, the team can start discussions more easily and make more informed decisions about where deeper exploration is warranted.

Better organization and access to information has also helped the team move faster. By getting aligned more quickly, they spend less time gathering and more time doing what they do best: prototyping and learning.

Looking ahead, this improved approach brings more focus to the team's innovation work. It allows them to spend more time in the areas that matter most while still staying flexible as they learn and discover new information. For a team whose job is to look around corners and find what is next for runners, that kind of clarity is a meaningful advantage.

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