You won't find anything trend-setting about his khaki cargo pants and white, long-sleeve T-shirt. His office in an industrial warehouse area off South Saunders Street is hardly chic.

But Stewart, who owns the textile dyeing and finishing company Tumbling Colors, likely is more a part of what's coming down the runways at New York Fashion Week than most people watching the shows at Bryant Park this week.

Stewart's contribution: Turning those flowy silk dresses into that brilliant shade of poppy, stone washing a cotton shirt for the perfect weathered look or softening designer denim so that it's irresistible to touch.

What he does is simple, he says. It's all about science.

"Our job is to make others look good," Stewart says. "We're the techno nerds."

But the end result is some of the most talked about stuff from the runways.

He and employees worked overtime last week using the latest dyeing technology to get fabrics just the right colors for the latest fall fashions designed by some of the most celebrated names in the business. Stewart's not willing to share them on the record, mostly because so many of them are competitors.

But the list is one any textile manufacturer would covet. It includes some of the most sought-after designers at Fashion Week and the most popular national retail chains and department stores at the mall. Sprinkled in the mix are a few up-and-coming designers, including menswear designer Loden Dager (which recently blogged for the New York Times about a visit to see Stewart) and Raleigh jean designer Victor Lytvinenko, who with Sarah Yarborough, makes Verses denim.

Tumbling Colors isn't the place designers and retailers come to when they're ready to dye fabric for 10,000 dresses or stone wash denim for 100,000 pairs of jeans. Its specialty is the small batch, either one shirt dyed kelly green in a small chemistry lab beaker or up to 200 T-shirts dyed royal blue in a large dyeing machine. Stewart provides designers with enough dyed fabric to dazzle for the runway show, then bigger mills take over the job of dyeing the big orders.

Tumbling Colors also will stonewash fabric (with stones brought in from Turkey), soften it, bleach it -- anything the designer wants in time for the big show.

It's a job Stewart says he takes personally. "I get really irritated when things don't go right for the customer."

That's part of the reason designers and retailers seek out Tumbling Colors, which in eight years in business, has never advertised. Stewart is known for his expert color matching ability; Lytvinenko says Stewart can look at any color and create an exact match within three hours, with no variations.

"The reason he's still in business is that he's the best in America, if not the world," Lytvinenko says. "At this point, he's not in it for the money. He's in it because it's what he loves."

Quick work

That other reason Stewart is a favorite? His turnaround time is almost unheard of in an industry that can take up to 18 months to get a product to market.

One celebrity designer had fabric flown down to be dyed just days before a Fashion Week show, Stewart says. It was sent out Monday in time for it to arrive for the Tuesday fashion show. By Wednesday, the garment was on the front page of the New York Times.

Stewart started the business after putting in more than 25 years in the corporate textile industry. He grew up in textiles in Concord, where his dad worked as a dyer at Concord Mills. He's a 1977 graduate of N.C. State's College of Textiles, where he is pursuing a doctorate in textiles.

He started noticing a shift happening in the industry with more companies moving toward contract manufacturing. So he created a business that was part of that movement.

Tumbling Colors has become so big that Stewart is moving the 5,000 square-foot operation, which employs 10 full-time and part-time employees, a few blocks away to an 18,000-square-foot warehouse on Bloodworth Street in Southeast Raleigh. The new place has additional space for more dyeing and washing machines, as well as added room to train the dozens of N.C. State students who regularly cycle through the company as interns.

"Anyone can dye stuff and do what they do," Lytvinenko says. "But no one is doing it as well as he does. He does exactly what the customer wants."

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