Fashion companies upset the design routine to focus on speed, trends

NEW YORK-Prototypes? Past. The Betabrand fashion company saw that mesh was a hot style in sneakers and wanted to quickly jump on the trend for dress shoes. He put a survey on his website asking buyers what style they liked, and based on what had a shoe to sell online in a week.

What web buyers saw was a 3D rendering – no real shoes existed yet. Creating a traditional prototype, tweaking the design and making a sample would have taken six to nine months, and the company might have missed the interest in knitting.

"The web's attention is short," said Chris Lindland, CEO of Betabrand. . "So if you can develop and create in a short period of time, you can be a real product development machine."

Customers looking at the shoe online could look at the cuckoo detail or check how the soleplate was put in place. would be from photos of a real product. They do not get the actual shoes instantly – they have to wait a few months. But the use of digital technology in design and sales means that fashionable trends still affect people much faster than under the old system. "

" Retailers and brands that adopt it will be the winners of the future. , Managing Director of AlixPartners Consulting Group. "It's reversing the business model."

It's a big cultural change for clothing manufacturers. For decades, the process has allowed designers to draw ideas on paper, approve a design, and hand over sketches to a factory that has created prototypes. Designers and product developers have made adjustments and sent prototypes back and forth. Once a final version was approved, it was sent to the factory to be copied for mbad production. Getting something from the design at a store could take at least a year.

Now some companies have sketch designers on high resolution tablets with software that can send 3D renderings of clothing with specifications directly to the factories, better technology makes the images. look real and the pressure to get new products from buyers is intensifying rapidly. The goal is to reduce to six months or less the time it takes to get to the store shelves.

Even the chains like H & M, which once fixed the speed by flying in small frequent batches, realize that it is not fast enough. H & M, which has seen its sales slow, is starting to digitize some areas of its manufacturing process.

For clothing manufacturers and retailers, change means that design decisions can move closer to fashion. That means less guessing, so the stores are not stuck with piles of unsold clothes that need updating.

3D technology is used in only 2% of the supply networks, says Spencer Fung, CEO of the Li & Fung Group, which consults more than 8,000 retailers, including Betabrand and 15,000 suppliers worldwide. But he thinks it will change as retailers begin to prioritize speed and save money.

"You can create an entire collection before you even cut a garment," said Whitney Cathcart, CEO of the consulting firm Cathcart Technologies. "This reduces waste, reduces delays, makes decisions in real time, the whole process becomes more efficient."

Fung imagines a scenario where a social media post with a celebrity in a red dress gets 500,000 "I like." An alert is sent to a retailer to indicate that this article is trending. Digital sample of a similar dress is on his website.A factory can start producing the dress in a few days.

"Consumers see it and they want it now," says LIM's Michael Londrigan in New York "How are you bringing it to the market so you do not miss those dollars?"

Nicki Rector of the Sonoma Valley region of California bought a pair of Western-style Betabrand boots in the summer Last based on 3D rendering.

"It sounded real," said Rector, who looked at the images of the heel and soles.He did not worry about buying a digital image, thinking that if you buy online, you can not really know how Something will go on until you put it on your feet. She said that knowing that she was designed from the comments of customers also helped to make patience

Betabrand sold 40,000 pairs of shoes at $ 128 last year, all to from digital renderings, and plans to add 15 to 20 projects In a research and development center of Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, designers use programs that give the appearance of a finished garment and let them make changes like adding pockets quickly, rather than requiring a new prototype. Once defined, they can send a file to the factory for mbad production. Using digital samples can shorten design time to a week or less of an eight-week period, Levi says.

Few companies sell directly to buyers digital renders like Betabrand, and instead show them to shop buyers or factories rather than using traditional samples.

Xcel Brands uses them for its own brand of women's tops and for the Judith Ripka jewelry line of the company. The company, which also makes garments for Isaac Mizrahi and Halston, will begin using them for other brands throughout the year. CEO Robert D & Loren hopes to start putting 3D samples on his website next year.

Tommy Hilfiger has an interactive touch table where buyers can see each item in the collection and create custom orders. And Deckers Brands, the Ugg boot manufacturer, uses digital renderings of the clbadic boot in 10 colors, eliminating the need for 10 prototypes for in-store buyers. This helps reduce costs and increase speed.

The use of digital designs also means that the exact specifications of Levi's different design finishes can be downloaded to a machine that uses lasers to scrape jeans. No need to teach employees how to execute the vision of a designer; in a minute and a half, the lasers gave the jeans the exact appearance of clothes that carried pumice stones from 20 minutes to half an hour.

"Thirty years ago, jeans were only available in three shades: rinsing, fading and bleaching," said Bart Sights, head of Levi's Eureka Lab. "Our company now designs 1,000 finishes per season." Such a long delay "pushes production and creation too far". Levi's latest technology alleviates this problem, he says.