Fashion Made Smarter - End-to-end Digital Workflow | Bonprix | PI Apparel

Good afternoon, a very warm welcome from us as well as on the behalf of Bonprix. We would like to invite you today to join our journey through the 3D product development and 3D processes. And our vision is for an end-to-end workflow with zero waste and a maximum benefit for our customers in terms of size consistency and fitting consistency, materials product quality overall. But let's have a quick introduction to Bonprix and ourselves. Bonprix belongs to the Otto Group, and Bonprix is one of the highest turnover companies within the group. And to the group, the group includes about 120 companies in over 30 countries with approximately 41,000 employees and a turnover rate from €16.2 billion in the financial year of '22/'23. On the right-hand side, you have a quick short overview of the other companies belonging to the Otto Group, for example, Hermès, Lascana, or Otto itself, and About You, which you might know as an online fashion platform. Some facts about Bonprix. Bonprix was founded in 1986 as a catalog-based mail-order business, and it's an international successful fashion company right now, and number 4 of the online fashion shops in Germany, with more than 16 million active customers in more than 25 countries. And with an annual turnover from €1.76 billion. Bonprix is exclusive, sells its own brand, but not only fashion. It's also in accessories and home and living products. 2,900 employees are working worldwide for Bonprix. And now some facts about me. I'm Solbey. I started working at Bonprix in '21 as a 2D and 3D developer in a great team, a great virtual product team together with Torben and other colleagues. We pushed the transformation and the 3D product development. And since last year, I'm leading the 3D team in our department. And before I started at Bontprix, I studied economics and studied pattern making as well, worked for different designers, several of them, as well as a 3D artist and as a lecturer in the university, at a university in Hamburg for 3D modeling and digital pattern making. And with that, I would like to hand over to Tom.

Thank you very much. Do I need to go somewhere else? And leading the lingerie, underwear, and swimwear team there in, in our department for technical productive Product Development since last October, and the 4 years before I was leading the woven quality development team, technical product development team. And, and that's a big difference to Solveig and her background in textiles. Before that, I was doing 11 years of IT projects in our company, so nothing to do with the textile itself at all. But yeah, we found together in this department, and we are now driving the digitalization of the department, and this is where we want to I would like to take you and tell you a little bit about our journey on the way to the 3D product development. And as you know, you always have to make the first step. And our first step was starting out on a small, tiny island, the virtual product island, in a way that we asked our suppliers to send us the CAD patterns, 2D patterns, that we would then render in 3D and fit in 3D and make comments on them. So the goal was there to eliminate samples, physical samples. And this worked. But we were not very confident that this is the way to go forward, the big thing that would bring Born Free to the next level. So we left Virtual Product Island and set sails towards the big sea of trial and error. So we were unsure where it ends. We wanted to have new workflows. We wanted to go somewhere else. I need to make a little sidestep here also to 3D Vendor Collection, because if I'm talking about workflows, we do have two different workflows. And I want to just briefly introduce them here on how we work with our suppliers. So we have the 3D Vendor Collection, which is when a supplier has their own creative assortment and they present it to us. And now they can do it in 3D. Previously, they were traveling with like 3 bags and coming to Hamburg and presenting the assortment, and now they can do it in 3D. But we make some regulations on that because we want to be sure that they can also do fitting in 3D. So they need to comply with our rules. And yeah, we document this in a short exam that we do with them. So they need to show us that they are capable of doing the 3D fitting and also using our software where we enter our data in the end. And the bigger part, and this is going to be today's topic, is the Bonprix collection workflow. In which the style idea comes from our product manager. And many of your companies, those might be the designers, but we have a slightly different setup. And for us, it's the product management that comes up with the creative style idea. They hand it over to us, to the digital product creation team. And in the end, the supplier gets the production-ready tech pack with all the needed information that we want to show or give to them. And to give you an idea of the ratio, so about 75% of the assortment is done in the Bonprix collection and only 25% in the vendor collection. And this is why for today we don't want to look into the 3D vendor collection, but we want to see what happened after the sea of trial and error, where we tried a lot and we had In one year, we only made 50 products in 3D at that time, but we learned a lot. So I heard yesterday about chaos in the times and making sure that you have the standards ready and all these things. And we looked at the processes. We looked at the job profiles that we would probably need for the future. And we came to a conclusion, and we did have a new path. And this path led us to the lighthouse of growth, where in the next year after this one year of trial and error, We already made over 600 products in 3D. And of course, this is not where we stopped. So for this collection year, which ends in April, we already are arriving at Cape scalability with about 1,050 styles made in 3D for this collection year. And yes, yet again, this is not the end of the journey. So this is where we're going to take off for the next collection year. Starting in May, and we want to double our numbers and come to over 2,000 styles done in the digital way. And so I had told it in the beginning, so we want to have an end-to-end workflow, and we don't want to have waste in the middle, in the way of the workflow. So we have the style idea. We come to the styling approval in 3D from product management and technical product development. We come to the fitting approval, also in 3D, and the free-for-production approval so that the supplier can start their production based on our 3D and 2D files. We also, of course, want to look into CGI or photography to, in the end, come to the webshop and show our styles to the customers. All of this should be done without waste, and waste in this case does not just mean the number of physical samples that gets reduced. But it's equally important to not waste time or invested manpower into the product. So each result of each step should be reusable in one of the next steps. The file that I used for styling approval will get improved to be ready for fitting approval. The fitting approval style hopefully gets used later on in the rendering and in the content production. So what's the future going to bring for this year? Probably we have two big topics that we focus on. And I guess I have to explain the left one a little bit because it looks strange. It's actually a soft body avatar showing where the compression comes in from a bra. It's from the back. So I didn't want to show her from the front because she's a little bit shy. And so this looks a little bit strange. But this is how the soft body avatars currently look like. And the second and also very big part is the content production. And we will get to this a little bit later. But now we're having a look at the workflow.

Yes. Thank you, Tom. Let's have a deeper look into the operational process now. And as Tom already said, all starts with the creative idea from our creative department, which is the product management. And with the help of AI, They get style ideas, and after this style idea is developed, a refinement has to take place sometimes. And then after that, the product management can brief the style into our direction, which is the technical product development department and digital innovation, of course. We do the pattern making, we do the simulation in 3D software, and we do the fitting as well. And after this file is created, this 3D file, our vision is to take this file further more for other processes such as CGI images, videos, all you can think about, and maybe as well for virtual try-ons and size recommendations in the webshop. Just to give you a little bit in a few insights into our AI, we have a great AI team. @bonprix, which developed recently this app, this fashion creation app. And just for you to have an example, it's via text prompt, an ivory knitted dress with V-neck in a plain version and made out of cotton. And these are the results we could get if we brief this way, or the product manager brief this way. And of course, he can redefine it and make short arms out of it, a crew neck instead of a V-neck, etc. And now, coming to our part of the whole process, the technical part, we are getting the idea from the product management. They briefed us via internal collaboration tool, and with the tool we get the information about the style which has to be created. And we got informations via pictures, for example, as well as about with attributes like fit classes, colors, style details, everything you need for a real description of the style. And then it's in the responsibility of the 3D technician, which by the way is not just working in Hamburg, also in at Bonprix Poland and worldwide at Otto International. We are international team right now with about 40 colleagues, and it's in the responsibility then of the technician to choose the right standard pattern out of our library. And if it's not possible and no standard pattern is fitting, then he chooses from another style which is already checked by the experts in our department. And by the way, we are or 25% of our digital scope is already done in 3D, created in 3D. Our primary focus is on the fitting, as already said, and the in-house pattern making. Bringing back the experiences and the skills, enhancing our team, makes the product better in the end because we can guarantee the size fitting as well as the fit classes and an overall better product. And 70% of our already developed products didn't need any physical samples. After the 3D technician chose the right pattern, for example a standard pattern, he goes into our 3D software, which is ASSIST right now. And modifies the pattern pieces until they look good enough to create the AST style. And then he exported the pattern pieces to our 3D software, which is Browzwear. And in Browzwear, he has to arrange the pattern pieces on the avatar. We are working with the Alvernon avatar, which is over there dressed in one of our— actually in two of our garments, in one of our outfits, which is realized in 3D. And what is really crucial at this point is this, that the avatar in the digital way has the same size and fitting like the physical ones we are using for many, many years. And on the other hand, a very crucial part of the fitting is the digital fabric. We do have great colleagues in the fabric management who are digitizing our fabrics with the fabric analyzer from Browzwear. And adding the texture via the VZoo scanner and bringing them together into a U3M file, which you can apply on the pattern pieces. And at this point, we are able to fit and do a reliable fit. And you can see here on the right-hand side our fitting tools in Browzwear. It's the tension map and the pressure map. The pressure map gives us an indicator of how much the fabric has impact on the avatar, which you can here see on the shoulder, for example. And the tension maps gives us an idea where the fabric is stretched, for example. After the fitting and the overall approval from the product management, the grading can be done. In the CAD software again, because it's more reliable and much better than the 3D softwares are right now in grading. But we have to do the fitting as well in 3D again, so we bring the graded pattern pieces back to the 3D software, and with the help of the 3D review window, we can compare the sizes with each other, and we are aiming for having more or less the same impact on the same regions of the body. Yes, after that we give every detail on the pattern pieces as well as the tech pack to the supplier, and the style is ready for production. Now I give back to Torben.

Yes, so why an ATM, you might ask? Why do we think here, and what's up with the money? And the thing is, if you want to withdraw money from an ATM You first have to make a deposit somewhere and put money in there. And it's the same with 3D product development. So if you want to have any gain out of it, you first actually have to make some investments, and they are significant. And that's not only— we come to that in the next slide— about hardware and software, but it's also about the people. So you have to heavily also invest in the human capital in some way and bring your people, your employees, to the level where they need to be for this new journey of product development. And I'm going to go over that briefly because afterwards you will see some, again, nice slides from Solveig about the garments. But still, we wanted to show you a little bit about our tech stack, what we are using. So Solveig already said that we're going to look into a lot of tools for the fabric creation. And basically, you can set 3 different parts of the 3D product development tech-wise in our opinion. So the first one is the preparation on how you actually prepare all the assets that you then later on need to do the 3D fitting and the 3D development. So, um, Sowei already said we have the fabric analyzer from Browser in-house. We have the Visu scanner with the CAD on color unit to get even better color results. And we also— and this was especially needed for denims— We have a lightbox so that you can actually better compare the physical sample with the scanned sample. And the second part in, in these three ways of needing software is the creation part, where we use V-Stitcher from Browserware for the main part. We have CAD Assist for the 2D development. Product Space is the collaboration tool that Solveig mentioned to exchange comments also between the product manager and the technical product developer. The Alvanon forms, be it in physical or be it in the virtual way. And we work together with Featuring Limited. It's another Otto Group company sitting in Asia. And they are doing a lot of research and development for us. And specifically, because we had the soft body avatar earlier, they are working with the Vital Mechanics plugin or solution. And together with them, we are developing the soft body avatar and the fitting for lingerie and swimwear. And then the third part, we are not there yet to completely use it, but this would be the display. So how do you get it into the world of your customers? And we already did some trials with Ventana for 3D assets. We are playing around with Trapdoor Stage also for the 2D images. And for marketing purposes, where you need a way more enhanced picture that really can be having a wow effect, we work with Marvelous Designer Blender, and DaVinci.

Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Now a little bit more about the content production. As Tom already said, we tried a little bit back and forth and tried several softwares just to have an idea what comes out of our 3D files we already produced in the technical product development and how good they are and what maybe has to be improved. This is our webshop window as of now with a flat-laid garment of this hoodie. And you can see on the left-hand side, on the right-hand side, photographed on the model. And yeah, this is something we could change maybe in the future. And this is what it would look like if we have our 3D product in the webshop window instead of a real photographed garment. And This, yeah, you could use instead of or in addition to the analog photography, as well as for classic advertising, of course, as well as for social media, AR, size recommendation, virtual fit maybe, and others. This is a testing we made recently with Trapdoor Stage. We asked them for a plugin to play around with it. And get out a better rendering of a better quality and with better light settings, etc. And we are quite satisfied with the results of these renderings. And what's easy is to have these different views with different angles from one— of one garment in a dynamic pose. It's really hard to make it while you shoot a physical sample, for example. Here we tested on human avatar. And to be honest, it's a little bit spooky. But yeah, it was just for testing and get to know what we have to have in mind and what we have to consider for the future. And maybe there are some providers among you who had better solutions. And we are open for any ideas. This is a trial we had with Ventana last year. Ventana is a platform for uploading GLB files and implementing them into your webshop to have the possibility to use a 3D viewer and get, yeah, closer to the garment and have a better idea of the garment and the style you see, and for the customer, for a better description. And yeah, you can zoom in and zoom out and look how the workmanship is, etc. And if you want to try, you can scan this QR code and then you have the same hoodie with you than we are wearing right now. And there's also the possibility to switch to AR, so you can implement the hoodie via the 3D viewer into our surrounding here. Next, and this is what we are really, really proud of, is our first digital-driven campaign. We had the chance to prove that it's possible with our files from our department, go into the merchandise part, go into the marketing part, and having these results. The campaign is launched already this month, and we are really proud to see those results. I think they are fantastic. And it's good proof that this might work together. On the one hand, you have the physical photos, and on the other hand, you have the 3D animated video, for example, for social media, as well as for the bus stops on the screens. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening.

OK, so yeah, we can go on with the Q&A. We would have had a little implementation of where you can find us on LinkedIn, but you can also go by the names. So Solveig Keikavuusi is written as it's pronounced, so it should be easy to find her. Easy to find me. Yeah, just you know where we are. You've got us on the speakers in the PI app. So how is DPC disrupting the traditional critical path? This depends on what you actually mean with the critical path. For us, it was like, okay, we do DPC and we can halve the time to market. Like, we cut out everything. And at the moment, we learned that this is not what it does. So because you still have production and you still have the need to transport the goods to your house. So it really can speed up the first part of designing and can give product management or designers more time to adapt to whatever the market currently needs. But it's not completely revamping the time to market. And say, if you stay with your current way of working, it doesn't mean that you can now do it in 30 days. Then you would have to really change your whole way of working. Thank you. Great presentation. Yeah. So we have 5 minutes. So we try to go quick so that you can actually ask questions if you want to. So yeah.

Actually, we work with a 3D artist in this case because it's, of course, not scalable yet. So we have the support from a freelancer. And yeah, the 3D file is from us, and the rest did the 3D artist. Good questions. Yeah. There are so many dependencies in a huge company like Bonprix. So we can't exactly answer this question. But we are working on it in project groups. And it's a very crucial topic we have in mind. And we get many inspirations the last days from all of you. And yeah, ask us next year.

Okay, maybe then I can take the next one. Do you create all the digital materials in your own digital department, or do you get it from the material suppliers? So at the moment, we still do it in-house. So, as Solveig said, we have a fabric team. We have a dedicated team that works on the digitizing of the fabrics. They also take care of the physical fabrics and everything. So they are not doing the digital part, not only doing the digital part, but we want to really have it from the suppliers. But at the moment, at least our suppliers are not yet there to give us the digital material information.

Okay, next question maybe is for me. The technical pattern, what do you exactly mean with a technical pattern? Is it the pattern pieces for the garment, which we create in 2D in the CAD system, or is it a pattern like texture pattern graphically? CAD. CAD? Yeah. We don't— yeah, we do not modify the pattern pieces from an image. We just get the idea of the new style from an image, plus the description, and we have a huge expertise in pattern making in-house. So our pattern makers are able to translate from the picture and the description into pattern pieces.

Okay, should I do what would you do differently if you did start today? I think we would probably try to give more freedom to the 3D people at the beginning. So we did this all within the department. The people working with 3D were also working in the old process. And so there was always a time crunch between the daily business and how to bring the 3D up to the front. So probably, if we would have to— or had the chance to do it again, we would try to get the chance to have more freedom for the 3D people in the beginning to start with the standardization, creating the patterns, and so on, and not always being sidetracked by the daily business.

Physical samples. I showed a slide where I, or we, as a 3D technician checked on the avatar in the 3D simulation system, Browzwear. And after the style approval from the product management has been made, we can go for sampling. Only if we do have a huge size range, we have to provide the other sizes in 3D and check them as well. And then everything goes to the supplier, and we try to avoid the physical sampling, of course, because we see the 3D fitting and it worked quite well, especially in combination with our standards. So we try to avoid the physical sampling then.

All right, then underwear and swimwear is in the question. So I'm going to take this. Do these 3D fitting of underwear and swimwear work well? I don't know. We are just in the process of starting with it. But it's definitely better than 1 year ago when there was really rare soft body avatars available. So there are a lot of players on the market now that think about, OK, how could we work on soft body avatars with different ways of doing it? So we are currently looking into the Vital Mechanics part with featuring. And we're also working with Browzwear on their soft body avatar that they launched last year to gain some confidence in seeing, OK, what do we see on the soft body avatar versus what do we see on the model? And my personal feeling is that for the briefs, it would be quickly possible. If you go from a standardized set of briefs and you know the fitting, then you can also do the 3D fitting. Bras is a different thing.

Do you implement this process to footwear products? Not yet.

All right. So then, Monika, do we have time for another one, or should we—

No.

OK. So yeah, I guess we get these questions, and we can, I don't know, maybe answer them in a written way on the PI website or something like that.

Just contact us. Otherwise, via LinkedIn or via our email you have.

Thank you very much.