How to set up a micro-factory, with Aaron Jackson

I'm sitting here with Aaron Jackson, VP of R&D at Clover Group International Limited. Aaron, hey.

Hey, how you doing?

Yeah, good, thank you. How are you?

Yeah, really good, really good.

Aaron, you're also the CEO of One House.

That's right, yeah. So One House is an R&D center and a think tank out in Taiwan with a We're about a 4.5-story R&D centre from fibre all the way through to garments and software. Oh cool, amazing. So it's very interesting. Last 6 months building it and we've got another 6 months to complete it and the opening is October 9th.

Fantastic, very exciting.

Oh, it's incredible. Yeah, yeah, it's good.

You must get a lot of insight into new stuff going on. What kind of exciting things are going on over at One House at the moment that you can tell me about?

Yeah, for sure. So everything in One House is free to talk about, which is one of the big things we have with One House is being open to everybody, whether it's brands, manufacturers, manufacturers, mill people, print houses, you name it. So one of the biggest things really is working with Katmandu. We bought Katmandu out about 6 months ago, and that's the Connect Colorization, which is a waterless printing or print transfer machine that can work on nylons, polyesters, polypropylene, and merinos. That's our number one big project at the moment, which we're launching October 9th in, in One House. So it's getting interesting. And then a few other projects we're doing is shoes, working in the shoe industry by doing— we're probably one of the first to do a 3D membrane, being able to line and fully line a shoe without having to do any stitching and make it completely waterproof with 15,000 breathability and water repellent. Oh wow, very, very cool. Yeah, so yeah, so with One House we work with the Taiwan Institute and the Taiwan Textiles and any up-and-coming developer and designer that's doing startups, and they come to us and we help them on how do we get the product commercialized, and we do some really good hard investigations on whether they're actually practical ideas or impractical ideas, and if it needs commercialization, who would be the brand partners to work with, who would be the mill partners and the manufacturing partners that could give them the best opportunity for success.

Wow, that must be a really great resource for new companies to come and sort of see whether they actually got a sort of viable product.

Correct. Yeah, that's the whole reason we set it up. It was inspiration we took from seeing PI last year in Milan and working with some of the big brands who have their own internal R&D centres. And what we found was that all the internal stuff stays internal. So with One House, we've decided that we want to be able to put ideas forward to anybody and show the industry. And then if they want exclusives on it, they can take the exclusives. If they don't, then everybody gets to see it. And it's really a place to come together and share ideas. Yeah, yeah, so working with the universities, looking at working with Quantum University in Canada, working with TTI, uh, TITRI in Taiwan, and then potentially looking at a couple of universities in New Zealand and potentially Australia to get students who have these marvelous ideas during their curriculum but don't have an avenue to sell their product. And quite often in the industry, they just die off or go to another part of the industry because their product doesn't actually get to see market. Okay, so we're looking at as being a ground-level entry for them to come over and, hey, you want to try merchandising, you want to try a shop, you want to try executing a product, come on over and we'll open the whole place up. And we've got JUKI 4.0 stitching machinery there. We've got the Connect colourisation to be able to print and colour everything up. We have yarn manufacturing facilities, been able to do core yarn development on site. And then we've got all our brand partners and our mill partners in Taiwan and around the globe that we can give access to if the product is worthy of doing it.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Why did you choose Taiwan as a central location for that? Taiwan's probably one of the most technical textile countries in the world now.

I'm a big fan of nylon and all the properties that nylon brings, and then with New Zealand in my background, we can actually start linking natural fibers with polyester fibers— sorry, nylon fibers and polyester fibers— so we get a nice crossover of natural plus synthetics, which then opens up a whole world of opportunity. Taiwan also, it's a very easy country for people to come to. Most of the manufacturers for raw materials is based out of Taiwan, and also a lot of the garment development centers are in Taiwan as well. So your big brands that are in that part of the world or in the Americas and North America, and predominantly about 60% to 80% of their product actually comes from Taiwan.

Amazing.

As raw material. So hence, it's the best place for us to be able to sit there. And when you're actually producing nylon yarn from, from POY and polymer, it's the best place to go. We can make so many more adjustments to that POY at the time. So instead of having to try and work with the Italian or other parts of the world, we can do everything on site in a very small scale. And then once we've got to scale and we can prove the technology works, then we can go and work with the Italians or work with the Europeans on how we can get it to the European market.

Amazing, amazing. Today you've been speaking at Pipe Arrow, talking a little bit about creating a micro studio. Now this is your work with Clover Group?

Correct, yeah. So this is a joint Clover and One House together. So it's an idea we had a while back with Clover and their GoColor system. So they had their GoColor, which is dyeing bras after they've been made. So dyeing it in garment form, which is revolutionary really for the bra industry. As you know, the bra can take many, many components, and being able to add colour after the fact just opens up so much more opportunity for on-demand manufacturing or micro studios being able to say, hey, a customer wants this particular style, but they want it in this colour. So instead of having to dye up 1,000 yards of fabric to convert into maybe 10,000 bras, Yeah, they can actually have a stock range of bras available and all the designs that are, that are out there that they deem fit, and then they can choose their colour. And you can dye one garment up to 100 garments on one machine, but more importantly, you can dye one size because the bra industry has got the most SKUs in the world. So it's been able to choose that one particular size into that colour. Maybe in one machine you could have 5 different styles. 25 different sizes and dye them all at once in one machine. Whereas it's revolutionary really from that point of view.

Amazing. Amazing. You can see that's a real game changer.

I think so. I think it's huge for the industry, from the bra industry, especially when you start to look at redundancy in stocks. So a lot of people will buy 1,000 yards of fabric to make, I don't know, maybe 1,000 bras and have 500 yards of fabric left over. So the amount of fabric that goes into waste or the amount of fabric that has to be resold or unsold, all adds to the cost of that bra. So by being able to have on-demand manufacturing from that point of view, it's a very interesting opportunity to go forward.

Absolutely, reduce cost and reduce waste.

Reduce cost and waste.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think with the MicroStudio taken to a bigger scope into all garments, you know, from t-shirts to dresses to, you name it, if the MicroStudio could be set up in that same similar way, the amount of reduction in waste, the reduction in water consumption, the reduction in pollutions, or pollutants is going to be huge. Whereas you're moving your stock point, instead of holding stock and garment stock in the warehouses in the US, where you've already paid your shipping, you've already paid your minimum order quantities for colors, it's all built into the cost. If you can hold it in fabric form or in garment form before it's converted, then you've got less waste, you save the shipping cost immediately, which is, you know, it can be anywhere between $0.70 a garment to $1.70, $2 depending on whether you're air freight or not. So there's a lot of pluses and minuses to the on-demand manufacturing methodology.

What are the challenges in that?

A lot of the challenges is how do you colour? So yeah, the design team or the customer may choose 3 or 4 different products in different colours, but if you haven't got the ability to colour on the right substrate, for example, you can colour by transfer printing in a warehouse or in a garment factory, but you're only limited to polyester. A lot of the garments in the sports industry and the bra industry is nylon. So how do you get— and you can't do it, you've really got to hold fabric minimums. So by using GoColor's Clover through GoColor, you've got the opportunity to colour up in garment form in bras, and by using the One House Connect colourisation, you can actually colour your fabric up before you manufacture garments. And the way we work with the Connect colourisation, we can colour nylon, merino, polyesters, and all the blends of those. So with Lycra, without Lycra, with elastane, you name it, we can, we can colour on demand, and we can print exactly to the pattern. So there's no more printing the whole width of the fabric and whole length of the fabric. We can just print the colour pattern pieces that you need.

So what's been the game-changing thing that's allowed you to do that?

Basically, it's a change in technology in the transfer process with Connect Colorisation. So we bought the company about 6 months ago from the US, and we've moved along now where we can actually get it into a position where we can do it on mass demand. So we can do anything from 1 panel to 100,000 yards and in that sort of scope, and we don't need to have any effluent treatment. There's no, there's no use of water, so we can dye a nylon fabric now for about 40ml of water in total, whereas in the past it's been up to about 100 to 200 gallons of water for a, for a basic t-shirt and such. So it's quite a big game changer on that front, and then combining that with what Clover's doing, you've got the option of being able to do a bra either from a fabric point of view or from a piece dyed point of view. And that's really the driving factor of being able to do a micro studio. If you could imagine putting a whole factory in a box, so one container, a 20-foot container or a 40-foot container, and have the colorization, the stitching ability, and the way I've been able to move garments through the system all in a 40-foot container, it's a game changer in the industry. And that's been existing for a while, but it's only been existing for polyesters. Hasn't been existing for nylon blends or knits and wovens or that sort of stuff. So it's a massive game changer for us. And we're looking to, again, launch the One House technology on October 9th, and the GoColor at the moment is in its final development phases to be able to go to market. Okay. So it's both technologies are very, very close to be able to go into this avenue of a micro studio or an on-demand manufacturing.

Exciting times.

It's really, really good.

Yeah, so you were hosting a focus group today, which is sort of a more interactive discussion with other delegates and speakers and sponsors here. What were some of the conversations that you were having in this focus group?

Yeah, so a lot of the conversation was around how do you actually make it work in a complete entirety. So we took it from being able to get a young lady we fictitiously named Sarah, and she was looking to buy a dress online. And we took her really from buying it from her laptop, being able to use her avatar and working with the AI technology and the 3D technology that's currently available with, you know, Optitex and CLO and these sort of guys, and then being able to convert that into a file, into a 2D pattern, and then being able to convert that into a fabric and then put it all the way through into being able to reach her door. I put the challenge out there in 72 hours. Which was quite bold. So it's, it's, that's, that's sort of the provocative opening we had with it. And a lot of the discussion really was around the raw material. How do you get raw material? How do you get variation in raw material ready to be able to do this? And then again, how do you color it? So do you color it in garment form, which is again, Adidas have a really good way of doing it. They, they did the, the Shimazuki, what's it called? They did Shimazuki knitted blazer or a knitted sweater, and that's easy. You can do it with yarn, so you buy the coloured yarn, the customer can go and choose her design or his design, print it off and/or design, knit it off in store, 24 hours later you've got your garment. Shimasegi, fantastic from that point of view. And to be fair, that's been around for 20-odd years. The old grandmother used to have one in her backyard and she would be using the old machine and move it from side to side and lo and behold you have your fully fashioned garment. So nothing really new on that front, but it's moving into that world where the consumer can actually see it be more of a reality. Um, and then you've got, you've got your, uh, Santonis that have got their new seamless machinery, be able to do your socks and be able to do your, your seamless tops. Again, if you can dye the yarn, in theory you can pretty much buy that yarn in stock, have a range of colors, and you can pretty much knit that garment to specification within, you know, 24 hours. You'd have a, have a garment. So that was part of the conversation. The other part was really about how do you get the timelines to be able to make this happen, and do you hold fabric stocks, do you hold garment stocks, also around robotics on being able to cut and sew garments. And the industry at the moment with Gerber and the Lectra guys have been able to cut fabric, so I've been able to use something like the OneHouse Connect colourisation. If we can print the pattern exactly what it was, then the Gerber or Lectra cutters can actually cut out the pattern automatically apply, uh, supply it in a bundle, and then you just hand it to your production line. So then the questions came up about production lines. Again, there are options on being able to do automated sewing, but at the moment it's really limited to t-shirts. And I think maybe now they've got a pair of denim jeans that have been automatically cut and sewn through robotics, which is really, really interesting. I believe the t-shirt's down to about 2 minutes now per t-shirt, which is incredible. I think the industry standard from a garment stitcher is about 2 minutes 70, I think is what we used to produce them in when I was back in Bangladesh. So it's really revolutionizing that part of it. So a lot of the questions are around how do you make that into a micro studio and what are the real benefits of the micro studio and still challenging the consumer. Does the consumer really want that immediate response to her garment or his garment? Do they really want to do customization or is it something that we in the industry are trying to force onto the consumer?

That's an interesting topic.

Yeah. Yeah.

What are your thoughts on that?

I think we're in that latter part where we're forcing the customization onto the consumer and giving them too much choice.

Yeah. Do you think it's because we have new technology that we're excited about that's kind of genuinely exciting for us? And so we think, well, surely you guys want it as well, right?

That's exactly it. I use an analogy or what happened with Sony about, oh, 1980s. Used to be a yellow Walkman. Walkman, probably for the younger guys, don't know what they are. But the old cassette player in a box. So Sony did a big project and they researched numerous consumers and they got feedback regarding a bright yellow Walkman and a black Walkman. And the feedback from the consumer was, "Oh, we love the bright yellow Walkman." So Sony put all their money into a bright yellow Walkman and they found that when they actually came to selling it, they sold more black and maybe 1% or 2% of yellow Walkmans. Wow. So by giving the consumer choice was great and it drove sales higher, but their choice was really coming back to the black as a safer option. I'll take the black. And then those who have the expendable income, I'll take the black and I'll buy the yellow because maybe that yellow will match something else I'm wearing in my jogging days. So I think we're on the verge of something like that where I think it can drive the demand, could drive a lot more sales virtually by having the fact of how you can choose what you want on this. But at the end of the day, you might just choose the safe option, but you have the option to customize.

Yeah, so that's the thing. And also, if, if a certain product has certain design elements that are synonymous with that brand, if you give the consumer too much customization, then they can sort of divert away from what that brand is actually trying to put out there.

That was one of the, one of the things that came up in the conversation was how do you keep the brand DNA. So then designers would have to look at changing things from the way they're currently designed, because the designer will design to what he or she thinks is right for the consumer. What they'd have to look at is, okay, this is what we want for consumer, we want to be able to put these concise options within that choice for the consumer.

Yeah.

So now you're thinking about multiple options within your design that may or may not reflect what you want it to be, but it may drive sales from a consumer point of view because they want this particular lapel, I want this particular clothing or they want this particular accessory that you never thought you'd want to, want to sell.

Yeah, well, I remember when Nike ID first came out, I made probably the most ugly pair of shoes in the world, but I had fun doing it and I still paid the money to, to get them. I mean, I would never wear them out anymore, but it's sort of an interesting concept because consumers also want to play with new technology as we do.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. It's— and again, the shoe analogy came up as well. The one young lady was talking about how they'd experienced this as well. Like, if you have a choice to change a colour or change something, you feel obliged as a consumer to change it. Oh, I have the right to change that colour. Yeah, I'll go and put a flash of pink or a flash of blue on that area. And yet when the shoe arrives, it's gone, oh, that didn't quite work out as I imagined it to work out.

That's why I'm not a shoe designer.

So yeah, there's a bit of, bit of an interest in that as well. Like, how much does the consumer really want to design, or how much freedom do you give the consumer to design into it? And then how much freedom have you got within the the Micro Studio to actually reflect what the consumer wants.

I guess if you've got that bra that you were talking about earlier on, if you can choose the color of it, which is just one color throughout, that seems to me like a good level of customization.

Yeah, me too. I think that's the right way to go. I think baby steps, look at how we can, how we can customize just the basic color and then the ownership then goes basically to the consumer. There's not much can go wrong. You've got the fit right, you've got the styling right. All you're doing is a personal preference on style, on color. If the colours are driven by the brand themselves so that it's from a catalogue of colours, then I think also the consumer's got a feeling of choice, but a constrained choice of colour that they know is going to be acceptable no matter what they're going to get. Rather than having an open, oh, I can change this design feature in the bra, I can change this colour here. Yeah, by controlling where they want to move, I think has got a very good opening to how we, how we start.

Yeah. And do you think, because we've had customisation for a little while now, sort of across various different apparel and footwear brands, do you think that we're getting closer to a point where we've found that balance?

I think we're getting closer, yeah. Yeah.

We're not quite there yet.

We're still not there. I think you'll have your up-and-coming young designers that want to experiment, and rather than experimenting on their own product, they can actually buy something that they can experiment with. I don't think we've really experienced that in the way that it could experience if we open up that. That ability to customize. But I think your average consumer, that's just somebody wants to buy a pair of shoes or wants to buy a shirt for the evening, the night out, to be able to choose color, yeah, simple. But I think if you look at your up-and-coming art students, the guys that, you know, maybe 13, 14 years old that are trying to produce their future career, I think there's an avenue from some startup businesses in that area where you can actually give them freedom to design everything and we'll manufacture it for you and here it goes and you pay a service fee for it, just just to see it.

Yeah, so you were talking earlier on about various different companies as well being part of this sort of ecosystem of moving this part of the industry forward, and it made me think a little bit about how much or how important collaboration is. And I find it quite exciting at events like this and other events that you have all these different companies that you could think are actually competitors, but genuinely they want to work together to move this industry forward because they all see the kind of light, shining light at the end of the tunnel.

That's right, yeah, no, I'm really impressed with the last trip I did to Milan with Pi as well, and we had a really nice group going there looking at the 3D avatars, 3D fabrics, 3D components and trims, which was fantastic, where we looked at it from a group, not as an individual brand. So we're able to look at how do we get to a a raw material database. So how do we get a raw material that can actually have the 3D components that we need, and we build their algorithms as a team, and then we've got one source of truth. So that's where I really think there's a huge opportunity to collaborate. Same with the micro studios. If we can work with the raw material vendors and get the raw materials vendors thinking about how do I produce, how do I prepare the best prepare-for-print fabric or the prepare-for-dye fabric as their key focus, then I think that could also change into the way we move. If you look at the printing side of things, you could put a, a colourisation machine from one house into a factory, rather than having it as a dye plant or in a printing house. So by moving the industry from thinking printing is only done in dye houses or in the print plants, or garment manufacturing is only done in the garment manufacturing space, if we can look at how can we change that with a micro studio. I'm looking at a micro studio as a complete unit. I can sell the whole studio in one box. So from a design software point of view, taking the pretty much from a website all the way through to a 3D pattern, to a 2D pattern, to an actual physical printout into a fabric, and then stitching all in one place within 72 hours. That's my vision for the next 12 months, just to get that out there. But it's going to take collaboration from a number of partners. The other big industry that's been falling behind a little bit is the stitching industry, and being able to robotize or bring robotics into stitching and into industry. Our fabrics seem to be getting better and better and better year after year after year. Our brand awareness and our sustainability is getting better and better, and the sewing machines now have to get up to speed. We went through the revolution of the overlocker, we went through to the single needle, single needle to overlocker, to now the flat seam. What's the next? How can we look at bonding? What's happening in the bonding industry? Can we replace stitching with bonding? And will bonding and sonic stitching allows a much better way of being able to make a micro studio work. So yeah, there's a lot of crossovers between all industries and all parties to look at the future of, you know, is— and again, the first question is, is on-demand manufacturing or mass on-demand manufacturing a viable option for the industry? Yeah, I think on a small scale, I think there's a huge potential. Some of the Italian brands and especially startups, if a startup company— like, if I had a million dollars to spend and I was able to do a startup I'd want to do a micro studio because I'd be able to do everything within that, that one box, you know, 40-foot container with a very small amount of space. I could take orders, I could set myself up on the web now, um, create my Facebook page, create my marketing page, drive my sales, and create my garments and my avatars and everything through the 3D software. If I could send that software straight to a 2D pattern and then send that 2D pattern to a printer that could print on my raw material, and I had a Juki 4.0 sewing system or a Brother sewing system that allows me to have one operator or two operators to make that whole garment, I think I've got a factory in a box that would be bespoke on-demand fashion product, which you could then have a very high retail cost for a truly bespoke garment.

Amazing.

Yeah, that's my—

low barrier.

No, no barriers. Yeah, yeah, it's very, very simple to get into.

Amazing.

Amazing.

I mean, I think that's a really good, good place to end it, to be fair, because that's a great vision and probably quite inspiring for any young 13, 14, 15, or, you know, young designer out there.

Absolutely.

Who thinks, you know, can I really make it? Well, you can.

You can. It's totally possible now. Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah. Nice. Aaron, thanks for coming in and joining us.

Oh, fantastic. It's been great.

Cheers.

Thank you.