FASHION MADE: Transitioning from physical to digital with Pixelpool

Yeah, what's amazing to me as well is I, when I give demos at the booth, I show them this system that we built where you can select a bunch of products and hit a button and you get an automated merchandise store render back. And when I show this to clients, I always tell them, like, I was a project manager at Pixelpool, like, a couple of years ago, and I would manage these high-volume projects where we would create these renders, like, hundreds of these renders with different store setups in different sizes and different assortments. And it would take, like, weeks to create something like that. And now you have an image like that in a couple of seconds.

Yeah.

So, that really blows my mind, like.

We've seen this funnily enough, the same kind of time that Py Apparel has been running, since about 2013, right? Um, we've seen huge changes in the fashion industry in that time, I'm sure. And as you've said, Pixelpool in that time as well has seen huge changes. Yeah, I mean, where do you think we can get to in another 6 years?

Yeah, I think, um, what I'm seeing right now is that brands are becoming so much more aware of the power of 3D. I think just A year ago when I visited PI in Milan here, it was already gaining traction a lot, but I would have the conversation about 3D a lot more where I still had to convince people like, hey, it's much more sustainable. You can save on your sampling costs, save on shipping costs. I basically had to go over all the obvious reasons why 3D virtual samples were a good idea. And I've really noticed that I don't have to have that conversation anymore. People have realized it. Brands come up to me and they say, well, we have 3D samples, what can we do with them? And that's really where I wanted to be a year ago already, because we were doing all these, these cool things already. But none of the brands really had 3D assets yet, or they still had to be convinced of the fact that they had to start investing in it. And now I can really see that brands are one step further and they're struggling to scale it and to build pipelines. But at the same time, luckily, they're already exploring what's out there and how they can use those samples once they have a good foundation. So I think that's, for me personally, that's the biggest change, like having a slightly different conversation in a year's time. So that's—

Yeah, yeah. It's quite a mindset shift, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we see a lot is that we can present all these cool things and I hear sometimes like brands, they appoint people to handle innovation and to start looking strategically for options. So there's a core group of people that are completely convinced that this needs to happen, but it still needs to move up in the boardroom in some cases, and we try to help with that as well. We help them and we partner up with some of those people and we say, well, can we do a cool pilot or a project that you can present in the boardroom so that in order to convince the whole organization to start moving in that direction?

Absolutely, because that core group of people is never the board members.

No, no, it's usually— well, usually it isn't. Yeah, we have some examples where it's the case, but it's becoming easier and easier to move to that boardroom level, I think, because there's just in general more awareness. And I think events like PI really, really help with that as well.

Definitely, definitely. I mean, we'd love to get, you know, all levels of the— you might call the value chain— to come to this kind of event because it's really important when you're dealing with cultural change and digital transformation is used way too much as a term, but to get that you do need champions throughout the organization.

Yeah, and I think not only in different levels of seniority, but also horizontally, like in different departments. And that's something I've really learned as well is that I used to have a lot of contact with VM people, so in the merchandising department, that's where we would do these still renders for. And then we started moving into having more contact with salespeople. But then designers were also getting involved, assortment planners were getting involved. And we really felt like it's really powerful if there's people from different departments having that conversation together, because then you can really leverage this investment that you need to make in order to set up this 3D pipeline. If I were a board member and I saw that there's people from all departments asking for the same thing, that would be a really powerful message, much more than just one person saying like, hey, I need this for my department. I think this integration across departments is really valuable, and brands are starting to pick up on that, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. It's not like an IT tool anymore.

No, no, yeah.

IT is like throughout everywhere now, which is good.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's funny because when we talk to procurement at brands sometimes, sometimes you talk to people that normally they buy like ERP systems or PLM systems. And when we show them this 3D app, they're like, I don't know what to think about this. What kind of app is this? Who uses this? And then we're like, yeah, we want as many people as possible to use this. Like this new platform that we're building, Detail, one of our philosophies is that we want to have like a fixed price for a brand to use this in their organization, but then everyone should be able to at least have access to it in order also to facilitate this horizontal adoption. We really think that that's key in order to to move the industry forward.

Tell me a little bit about Detail, because I saw it advertised downstairs.

Yeah, yeah, so I told you about these interactive applications that we started to build. In many cases they were still like proprietary and one-off applications that we built for brands, and we really wanted to take that to a wider audience, to multiple brands. In order to do that, it needs to be ready to scale, right? It needs to be easy to implement in an enterprise environment. And that's why we figured that we needed not only just a 3D application, but we needed to have this platform floating above it where the data, the product data, sales data, ERP data is being combined with the 3D asset data so that whatever app we build in 3D has access to the same bits of data. And when it's updated, it all flows back to all of these 3D different 3D apps. That's been a problem we had in the past where if product data was being updated throughout the season, we would have a hard time keeping up with all of those changes. That's why we really feel that we need to have this web-based backbone where all of this data lives, which can also be hosted privately in the clouds of the brands themselves. But there needs to be a central hub where all of this information lives and where our 3D applications can source that information from in order to guarantee that it's always up to date and that everyone is working with the same data. So that's kind of been the trigger for us to not only do 3D development but also start to move more into the more platform/web development part of things.

It's quite hard to, with all those different tools and departments and partners all working together, It's a brilliant vision, but there are challenges along the way with these sorts of things. For you, can you enlighten us as to what some of those challenges might be?

Yeah, I think, for instance, the 3D assets themselves for the products, right? That's a challenge we see with every single brand that talks to us. There's always a balance at a brand, like they might have a partial coverage of their collection with 3D assets, and they use one of the asset production software platforms that we see also here. And we're familiar with all of them, and they ask us, well, is there a direct integration already with Detail? And for us, it's not really about which piece of software created the asset. It's more about how it comes out of it, right? So you can generate a PDF file from all kinds of different pieces of software. In the end, the PDF file is a PDF file, and multiple other pieces of software know what to do with a PDF file. And I really hope that soon we'll be at a stage with 3D assets, and I know there's a lot of really good partners out here also that are working towards that, where we have kind of a standardized format and we can just say, well, if you give us that format, then we'll be able to work with that. We're getting there, but we're not quite there yet. So in many cases, it's a process of consulting with them and connecting directly with their 3D designers and just tell them like, send us your Browzwear files, send us your CLO files, and we'll take a look at them and we'll advise you on how you can export them so that you can use them in VR and AR and not just in our platform but like in all kinds of digital 3D platforms. And I think that's going well. It's a difficult, complex process, but we get great help from the software providers themselves. They're being really good with talking to us, asking us what we need, what they can change in their roadmap so that they can support the brands brands better, and at the same time brands are talking to us and then going back to their software providers and saying, hey, we need to be able to export products that are fit to be used in Detail, can you help us? So it's like a three-way conversation we're having with brands and with software providers, and it's going to take some time, but the intent is there and everyone is excited about it. So yeah, it's a good thing to see.

We definitely see that these kind of events, you know, the atmosphere is so collaborative. Well, certainly from my experience, I would say that the fashion industry is way more collaborative than the automotive industry where you started out. That competition there is fierce, whereas here I think people have a genuine desire to move the industry forward together.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's funny that a lot of 3D innovations, people give examples that are coming from the automotive industry, like having 3D configurators and all that stuff that originated for the most part also in the aviation and the automotive industry. So we look at them a lot for inspiration. And we were all saying like just a year ago, oh, the fashion industry is so conservative and it's so hard to put everything into motion. But I think that's starting to change. Or maybe my view is a bit like biased because I'm attending all of these events and get excited by it. But I really think it's changing. I really think there's more awareness. And now that everyone knows, okay, there's a lot of work to do, they actually put the effort in and hire the people that are needed to do it.

So yeah, I think it's benefiting from having such a fierce spotlight on the industry at the moment from a global scale. Yes, you know, consumers and, and all people all around the world really are giving the fashion industry quite a lot of stick for how polluting it is, you know.

Rightly so, yeah.

You know, very inefficient ways of working, very old ways of working in terms of manufacturing processes. But also that is a massive opportunity. And I think people like you are probably, you know, jumping on the back of that and really providing a lot of value.

Yeah, yeah, like I was saying, like a year ago I would still have these conversations trying to convince people what the benefits would be to do virtual sampling instead of physical sampling, or at least replace a part of the sampling process with virtual samples. And sustainability is obviously a huge part of that. It's not just the production of the sample itself and how many prototypes usually are needed to get to final approval. It's mind-blowing sometimes to hear how much like physical garments are shipped around the world.

Never sewed.

Exactly, exactly. It's not just the virtual sampling process alone. It's also about being able to iterate so quickly that you're able to respond to market changes and actually put products on the market that you have much more confidence about, that it will actually match with the consumers more. So if you are able to shorten your time to market considerably, you're able to react way quicker to what's happening, and then I think that will result in better sales and less waste.

Yeah.

So I think it's like very practical, like less physical samples equals less pollution. It's also a bit more abstract and a bit more idealistic, like respond quicker, make sure that if you put something on the market you really thought long and hard about it, and you actually did a good analysis about what's needed. And if you can do that quickly, I think that that's a big benefit, a big goal to go for.

Joost, I just want to thank you for coming and talking to us today.

Yeah, no problem. Yeah, thank you very much.

Cheers.

Thank you.