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Electronics giant Flex sees wearables becoming a vital part of the company’s success in the future, says CEO Mike McNamara.

A major player in the electronics world and currently one of the largest electronics manufacturers on the planet — with 200,000 employees working across 30 countries in the realm of design, manufacturing, distribution, and aftermarket services – McNamara says says he’s sees wearables moving beyond the small slice of company production where it currently sits.

Wearables, a range of personal electronic devices including smart watches, pedometers, heart rate monitors, smart clothing, and more – only makes up about 1% of Flex’s current business.

That’s a relatively small piece of a $25 billion-per-year pie, but one that McNamara believes is set to become a much bigger part of the long-term electronics industry.

In a recent interview with the South China Morning Post, McNamara said: “There is just so many different use cases for wearables that I think it will continue to grow.”

In case you’re wondering why you haven’t heard much about the Flex brand, it’s because Flex produces components and products for companies that then sell them to consumers.

For example, FitBit is a popular wearable item around the world. Flex would be the company that produces the electronics that go into FitBit’s devices.

“We work very, very hard for wearable technology,” he said. “We try to work on the underlying core process technologies that enables wearables to happen.”

The wearables business is booming. Over 110 million devices are expected to ship in 2016 which is a projected 38% increase from the previous year. That’s about one new device for every three people living in the United States.

In 2020, market experts expect that number to increase to $237 million.

One of the primary reasons for McNamara’s optimism is the potential for new and interesting applications for wearable technology. We are already seeing professional sports organizations talking to wearable manufacturers about adding wearable technology to their player’s uniform in order to better track and evaluate performance during the game.

Hospitals and other health care facilities are also looking to wearables as a step forward in patient care.

With all this in mind, we can be certain that McNamara isn’t the only CEO placing a bet on the wearables market.

For those deafened by the silence of their wardrobe, a new technology partnership will enableconnected clothes to keep you regularly updated with news from your t-shirt drawer.

As reported by Quartz, London-based Internet of Things (IoT) startup Evrythng forged a deal with clothes-maker Avery Dennison to connect 10 billion pieces of clothing to the internet. The value of the deal was not released.

Smart labels will be attached by Avery Dennison to clothing during its manufacturing process, with the first web-enabled products hitting stores by the summer. Data produced by each unique article of clothing will feed into Evrythng’s platform for analysis.

Unique clothing identifiers could allow consumers to verify the ethical origin of materials in clothes, determine product availability or let aging shoes advise the customer how to recycle that type of footwear. The data could also enable brands to use the platform to enhance loyalty programs.

“The internet of things is still at the margins in the way it hits consumers’ lives; now you have billions of everyday objects with identities in the cloud,” said Evrythng co-founder Andy Hobsbawm.

Avery Dennison makes products for such brands as Hugo Boss, Nike and Under Armor, though the companies would not say which particular brands have signed up for the initiative. However, Avery Dennison suggests that sportswear companies will likely be early adopters of IoT enabled clothes, especially considering firms like Nike are already making smart sneakers.

“We’re noticing sports brands engaging consumers with technology more and more,” says Avery Dennison vice president Deon Stander.

Clothing labels have been providing digital information for years through such means as bar codes and QR codes, but that information is on broader classes of products. Meanwhile Evrythng says its technology allows a new IoT approach where each unique piece of clothing produces granular data that can be better mined for actionable information.

Privacy and security issues remain a key concern as more objects and articles of clothing become connected to the internet and produce streams of data. Evrythng says they will incorporate privacy safeguards into its clothing label project that will allow customers to set the level of information they are sharing.

“The more information accessed on the web the better, but like everything else on the internet, there also has to be individual judgement calls about what’s appropriate. Not everyone wants to share everything, and that’s fine,” Hobsbawm says.