SIMPLIFY A PROCESS.SAVE A BUSINESS.The fashion landscape has changed drastically in the last decade. Many developments

in retail and consumer behaviour are driving the new directions of fashion. The millennials of today are more informed and tech savvy. They are the ones who

are driving new patterns of buying. Their preferences are very different, not driven by brands but by value, for which they are ready to pay a fair price. They are also very impatient and look for instant gratification. Though no one can really predict the future, some believe that the period between 2017 to 2020 will forever change the apparel business around the world.

For the last five years, many big-box retailers, chains, and brands have either been losing ground or are stagnant with their growth. Thirty-seven out of thirty-nine retailers lost sales and share prices for three years in a row. Hundreds of stores are closing, and thousands of jobs are lost weekly. Yet there are two “thousand-pound gorillas” in the room who are still growing: Amazon and Walmart. In fact, Amazon plans to hire another 100,000 employees in 2017. Both have earned the reputation of being value providers, while Amazon is constantly pushing the envelope by delivering faster and faster. To put it bluntly: those who think they can survive among these giants without changing what they’re doing are going to be those who fade the fastest.

The biggest challenge for brands today is to reduce the total product cycle time from initial design concept to delivery to the consumer. The last remaining opportunity they have is to tackle the product development and approval time, as that process counts for at least sixty-

five percent of the total lead time (and can sometimes reach as much as seventy-five percent). This means that a 120-day lead time typically involves over 85 days in product development and approvals.

One part of the world that really understands how to do fashion fast is California. In the “Golden State,” companies develop between 1,000 and 2,000 new styles every four weeks. These companies set the design trends throughout the fashion industry, and they also work very differently than the rest of the industry. Whereas the norm in most “high-tech” product development cycles includes big teams of people with tech packs and cumbersome product management systems, California companies simplify the process by using the most “old-school” methods there are: face-to-face communication and organized assets. Not only do these cut down on operations costs, but they also help designers avoid miscommunication, which saves time. None of these fast fashion companies could survive if their product development time and cost was as high as it is for the typical importer.

The trouble with tech packsTo reduce the amount of time and resources that a globalized product development process uses, many international brands, retailers, and vendors have adopted 3D sample-making. It’s true that it’s faster to send a digital sample over the internet, rather than send a physical sample by FedEx. But designers still need to

see multiple sample iterations of a style before they sign off with an approval. A back-and-forth process, whether it happens in 80 days or 8 days, is still an inefficient process. But not many people are looking at the real problem here: tech packs.

Typically, a fashion designer describes what he/she wants to a technical designer, who creates a flat sketch of the garment, and adds it to a tech pack with all the information about that design, so that it can be sent to a vendor to make the accompanying pattern. But no one checks to see if the technical designer really understood what the fashion designer wanted in the first place. When the vendor receives this book, or tech pack, it’s not just the pattern-maker who reviews and interprets the design, but rather a whole team of managers and merchandisers must come to a consensus that the first sample sent to the fashion designer is a true representation of the illustration in the tech pack. Sometimes this process requires two or three internal iterations in itself, before a sample is considered good enough to send for approval.

Even still, when the first sample arrives, the first six words from the fashion designer’s mouth are (according to ninety-seven percent of 317 designers interviewed over a period of eighteen months), “This is not what I wanted!” The real design process actually starts at this point, because the designer now has a reference garment to which they can request changes. But to get here, already between twelve and fourteen working days have been wasted.

What can be done to make sure that the first sample that a designer sees is actually the garment they envisioned? One California designer, Joie Rucker, says that in her experience,

whether designing for Guess, Levi’s, or her own name-sake brand, Joie, “a sew-by is the most direct way of communicating with any of my suppliers. It eliminates the need for page, upon page, upon book of tech packs.” A sew-by is a kind of sample garment that a designer sends as a reference (perhaps with comments attached) to a vendor, rather than a flat sketch and pages of technical information. Rucker continues, “No matter how long or detailed your tech pack is, people just don’t have the time in their day to read a book on one garment, let alone many books on many garments.”

Since the dawn of the tech pack, the sew-by has become a less popular tool, largely in part because the fashion designers of today don’t have the pattern-making skills required to make such a thing. The designers of today, largely, are focused on the “look” of a garment versus the construction. Options to express their vision may end at sketching, or working with a technical designer to communicate their vision, which as has been demonstrated, usually doesn’t work.

In New York City, the salary for a technical designer, averages around $60,000 a year, and a fashion designer averages nearly $10,000 more than that. Brands, buyers, and retailers are willing to pay for talent, but how much of that talent goes to waste because of miscommunication with the vendor who will produce the finalized design? But let’s not blame the designer, let’s give them better tools to work with.

What seems to work best in communicating a design idea is a reference garment (whether it’s an initial sew-by, or the first sample iteration from a tech pack), asset organization, and face-to-face collaboration. This seems to work well in California, where companies are vertically integrated and issues can be addressed on the same day. But what about the rest of the industry? How does a designer in New York who has no pattern-making skills send a reference garment? How can they communicate with a pattern-maker who lives in a time-zone twelve hours ahead of them?

Welcome to your new design roomIn a path breaking move, Tukatech offers premium technology solution subscriptions starting as low as $29 a month. A breadth of design and development applications integrates into a “New Design Room,” where all players (fashion designers, print designers, pattern-makers, and sample-makers) have special digital tools designed with their unique requirements in mind.

For decades, TUKAcad systems for pattern-making, grading, and marker-making have given manufacturers power in process engineering and efficiency. More recently, the TUKA3D application for virtual sample-making has helped reduce the amount of time and number of iterations required to approve a sample for production. The “new kid on the block,” TUKAcloud, has given vendors and designers more mobility in the sample approval process with visual data-hosting, simple communication, and flexible collaboration on the web. Finally, the design and development circle is completed with TUKA3D Designer Edition (patent pending), an up-and-coming visualization application that gives designers the independence to show their concepts virtually, without the need to ever touch a pattern.

A digital process with analog flairAt the heart of Tukatech’s innovative process-engineering is the ability to re-use digital assets. Many vendors and brands have already begun developing virtual samples in TUKA3D*, and even sharing and collaborating about the styles on TUKAcloud*. But the designers who come up with new ideas as often as they must do not have a digital tool that really meets them where they are, so other than taking advantage of the easy communication platform in TUKAcloud*, they don’t really get to reap the benefits of digital product development. That is, until TUKA3D Designer Edition*.

In TUKA3D Designer Edition (DE), existing virtual samples are brought into the Garment Builder* module, where already-simulated style components can be swapped, added, or deleted to “snap” together a new silhouette. This becomes a digital sew-by, without the designer even looking at a pattern.

Next, the print designer can use this digital sew-by as a blank canvas in the Print Visualizer* module, in which they can preview their own developments. A process that is typica even sharing and collaborating about the styles on TUKAcloud*. But the designers who come up with new ideas as often as they must do not have a digital tool that really meets them where they are, so other than taking advantage of the easy communication platform in TUKAcloud*, they don’t really get to reap the benefits of digital product development. That

is, until TUKA3D Designer Edition*.

In TUKA3D Designer Edition (DE), existing virtual samples are brought into the Garment Builder* module, where already-simulated style

components can be swapped, added, or deleted to “snap” together a new silhouette. This becomes a digital sew-by, without the designer even looking at a pattern.

Next, the print designer can use this digital sew-by as a blank canvas in the Print Visualizer* module, in which they can preview their own developments. A process that is typically done lly done on flat illustrations becomes more powerful (and more accurate) on a to-scale 3D object.

Now, the designer can send this digital sew-by to the vendor with the speed of a digital file, and the realness of a physical sample.

Where the process really gets interesting is what happens when the pattern-maker on the other side receives this digital sew-by. Because the original 3D sample was draped from an actual pattern, the corresponding pattern pieces remain in the background. So, a designer working with the 3D styles doesn’t need to see the pattern, but since the data is still attached,

“People just don’t have �me in their day to read a book on one garment.”

Joie Rucker, Founder, Calvin Rucker

“From visual, to pa�ern, to sample executed, we can have

a 40 minute design cycle.”Dov Charney, Founder, Los Angeles Apparel

TUKA3D Designer Edition, Garment Builder TUKA3D Designer Edition, Print Visualizer

TUKATECH

www.tukatech.com

Founded in 1995, Tukatech, Inc. is the apparel industry's leading provider of fashion technology solutions, with teams of apparel industry expert engineers worldwide. Tukatech o�ers powerful software and hardware for every process from the pattern-room to the cutting-�oor.

it’s available for the pattern-maker to use when they receive the digital sew-by. At this point, all they need to do is audit the pattern and prepare it for production processes.

From here, those who are already established on TUKA3D and TUKAcloud continue their process as they have, but the first 3D sample iteration is a lot closer (if not exact) to what the designer wanted. Dov Charney, founder of Los Angeles Apparel (and former CEO of American Apparel), says TUKA3D DE will allow him to go “from visual, to pattern, to sample executed in a forty-minute design cycle.”

What does this mean for me?Komar Brands (a New Jersey-based company who licenses and designs sleepwear) has already implemented TUKA3D and TUKAcloud for product development of brands like Ellen Tracy and Carole Hochman. Compared to their previous manual pattern-making process, Production Manager James Harris says they have already “cut out a number of prototype samples. We go straight to market, saving at least a month of development time.” Most companies would be satisfied with those results, but Komar is looking beyond and to the future of their business. Harris explains, “You’re not just paying for the people anymore, you’re also paying for the software. So how do we utilize these assets even further? TUKA3D DE is a perfect solution to bring this process full-circle.”

For those who are skeptical about the impact of a full-circle design process, Harris admits, “A lot of people are going to be frustrated with this process because it’s going to be new. But we’re getting back to the original process of sewing something and sending it off, except we’re doing it digitally. That’s what is most exciting.”

Ram Sareen, Head Coach & Founder of Tukatech predicts that “2017 and 2018 will define who will survive in the apparel business.” With the retail sector shifting to a consumer-driven market, agility is the name of the game for brands and vendors. To keep up “requires a shift in the thinking process across the entire supply chain.” Technology will play a major role in who stays and who doesn’t. No one knows exactly what the new fashion industry will look like, but it’s certainly evident that those who resist adopting technology will not survive much longer.

If there is anything to be learned from the fashion industry, it’s that history always repeats itself. However, in this case, we’re not talking about jean cuts and skirt lengths. What TUKA3D DE does is allow designers to work the same way they did 30 years ago (with a sew-by) but in a digital environment. Sometimes the biggest paradigm shifts are not so far forward thinking: they utilize the wisdom of the past and adapt it for the future.

*patent pending product

"We're ge�ng back to the original process of sewing something and sending it off.”

James Harris, Production Manager, Komar Brands