Practical Applications Beyond the Technological Love Stories | GAP, Walmart, Jordache | PI Apparel

Good afternoon, everybody. I hope that you're all alive and awake. We'll try to make this conversation casual and open and try to share a lot of our experiences. There's a very diverse panel here. So before we start, we'll start with a quick introduction of everybody. Go ahead.

Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Ganesh Subramanian, founder and CEO of Stylumia. I've been through the fiber to fabric to garment to brand to offline to online retail over the last 25 years. Hopefully I can empathize with a fair amount of this value chain. I'm currently running an AI organization helping brands and retailers enable, take better informed decisions.

Hello everybody, my name is Ingrid Saura. I am the Director of Technical Design for Kelwood Apparel in California. I have been a proponent for 3D since I first saw it in 2004. I have been very involved with Kelwood in the process from development, now going through to fit and into grading. So 3D is just the future and I see it as a a work way and a sustainable way to produce and design without having to create all these samples until you're ready for your final.

Hi everyone, my name is Bernard Grenier. I'm in digital product creation for Gap Inc. I've been in 3D for more than 7 years and it's always been very exciting to me. It's something that I've always gravitated to. When I was originally hired by Gap Inc., I was hired to bring in new digital workflows and to introduce new 3D authoring tools into teams who had been working with one tool specifically. Uh, we've gone through a very arduous tool selection process, and now my role is shifting. I will be more vendor-facing, uh, standards building and Fabric digitization team leading. So great to be here and great to be part of this panel.

Right. Hello, my name is Roz McNulty. I am, uh, Fashion Innovation Center. I teach clothes 3D on Motif online. My dream has always been to have a VR fashion machine— fashion museum, and I do have one. I have created a VR fashion museum on Oculus. It's not on the store yet, but it exists and it's beautiful. I am a great believer in AR, VR, 3D, and always have been for quite a few years.

Hi, everybody. I'm Carolina Haddad. I lead Walmart's Apparel Digital Innovation 3D Exploration and Strategy. I have been doing this for 7 years at Walmart. I was a designer previously, so to me, this is the next logical step. Something that I don't feel like people embrace enough is that designing in 3D. And so I would say I am the chief 3D cheerleader. Like, I am the hugest 3D nerd. So if anybody have had a conversation with me, you will know that.

So I realized I didn't introduce myself. I'm Shaul Cohen. I'm the executive vice president at Jordache, currently one of the largest denim manufacturing group in the world, and happy to be part of this panel. So we wanted to have this conversation a little bit about what comes after the love story. Each one of us, probably most of the people in the room, are either working for technology company or working working on the fashion end of it, but loving technology and appreciating and understanding it. We wanted to talk a little bit about what's going to be beyond the love story that we have, but I think it's only fair that we start with a little bit of what made us fall in love with technology. And we'll try to go each and every one, and what made you fall in love with the technology, one specific one?

Yeah, my love story has been I moved from fiber to retail. The only thing always hooked me is about understanding consumer. So I'll just tell you one love story where in my last stint in a large online retailer, we built a fashion brand which was built around consumer insights. It was not expert into brand, consumer into proposition. Nobody believed that this is going to work within an organization which is a fashion organization. We said we'll do an experiment. So we built a small team of driving this and fast forward, this brand outperformed the rest of the brands in the portfolio by a factor of 100% on 3 key metrics: revenue velocity, inventory turns, and profitability. So that was a journey with lots of ups and downs, no belief to belief, waiting for data to prove, oh, that's something, you know, pulls me into future.

For me, when I first saw— I would— when I first saw 3D, I had been working in patterns, and being able to sew something up on an avatar without having to cut and sew and see what was going, and then going back and saying, let me just see if I want to fix this or that, it It just amazed me. I fell in love, and I see it as the way to go for the future. And it's just amazing. I love working in 3D.

I'm going to use one of Carolina's phrases. She talked about being a 3D nerd. I, too, am a 3D nerd. And I remember the moment that it happened. We were looking into 3D technology, and we wanted to compare two tools. And I, who had never worked in 3D technology, I was a technical designer, was tapped to lead one of these teams. So I had to learn fast. And the tool that I was the proponent of at the time was Browzwear. So I learned the tool right before Christmas. I think we started training on December 15th. And the only thing I could think about during my Christmas break, I had 7 days there, was the block library that we had and digitizing it. And I couldn't wait to do it. So I downloaded all the DXF files and I put all our blocks together, much to my boss's joy, when I came back from the Christmas vacation and we had this full digital block library that I had put together. Wow. That's probably where I fell in love with the tool and saw not the end of the road, but at least far around the curve of what this tool could do for me as a technical designer.

Mm-hmm.

Right, I was doing illustration on a Color Graphics computer in 1983 at a clothing seminar or whatever in the London, UK. And at that point, we were trying to show the possibility of different airline uniforms before manufacture. Yes, Gerber was around then. But at the same time, it didn't, the industry didn't catch up to where I could enter it in a reasonable way till CLO 3D. And at that point, I just, studied and studied and studied and still do. And of course then you can take it even further. Again, you can create avatars for museum, which means you can see the whole side of it. I want to be able to do the digital try-on for a museum. There's just so much possibility of making clothing real, which is what you can do in 3D.

I would say I fell in love with 3D more from the point of view when I first came to Walmart, the sheer scale of what we developed or what our suppliers were developing. I mean, we would receive boxes and boxes of samples and sometimes the stuff would be so bad, it just didn't sample right, the designs didn't work, and just the ability to eliminate the ugly is huge. It doesn't mean we're going to move away from samples completely, but the ability to say, okay, you know what, do I need to move forward with a sample with this? No, it's really bad. That was a huge thing for me to be able to iterate designs and say, I want to try this or I want to try this. That is enormous and it's just like a freedom in a way that we've never had before. I think that was for me the selling point.

I think for me there was, first I fell out of love with people and was looking for something to replace people, not need to talk to people. But then the more I dug into technology, I realized that it's not going to work. I'm still going to have people around, so I'm sorry. But then I realized that also it fed to my lack of patience, instant gratification. Before, you wanted to do something, you had to wait for so long, and 5 minutes is too long. And now with 3D, that I can go and just change something and look at it immediately, it's there's such a gratitude to where we are in our lifetime to see things that are happening so quickly. Fast forward where we are today, post-COVID, if it is post-COVID, with everything in the world taking so long, I appreciate more the quickness of what the technology can offer us. So we talk a little bit about our falling in love and out of love, but I want to talk about but what will be the next thing that will make you fall in love? You are all experts in your field, experts in 3D. What are you looking for to have next? And this is really critical because we conquered the goal that we had. What is coming next? And this is where I think you'll hear a lot of various opinions.

Yeah, I see a lot of 3D happening here, which is very good. But I just want to, you know, zoom out and let's just see the world of fashion today. 1 out of 2 products even today made in this world does not meet consumer demand. 1/3 of products made, 50 billion products go to landfill every year. So we have a huge problem of— 3DS helped us and other technologies are helping us removing wastage in the early design process, which is sampling of very good. But if you just look at it, a lot of products we made even with all of these technologies still do not meet the demand. So I think we— I see future where you can predict before it happens. Therefore, we eliminate wastage. Recycle is one. Can we eliminate? Can we completely avoid wastage? Which is to say, take a 3D image, shoot and predict. What is the probability of success? Will my consumer buy it? Will it not— will they not buy it? If you can come to a stage with a higher degree of accuracy— I don't think nobody is going to get it right, but the question is, using all of digitization with intelligence, I think we will save not only economically and save a lot of sustainability problems in this industry. So I see intelligence as a core pillar of automation, right? Intelligence plus automation will lead us to a place far better than where we are today.

For me, I see 3D moving forward not only into being able to cut and to look at it, sew it in the— in the— and view it on the avatar. I also see it as being something where soon, which is something like what 3D Look and the others have, where a consumer will have their own avatar and be able to have some clothing designed for their specific body shape. And I see that going forward.

Yeah. You look around the room, it's filled with people who all are in love and enamored with 3D technology. It's why we're all here. Some of us have been coming to PI for a long period of time, all excited and in love with 3D technology. But what excites me is a pivot, a pivot that's about to happen, a point where we're all in love with the implementation of 3D technology. That's very different than being in love with 3D technology, being in love with every step of that implementation, whether you're a fabric digitization team, a tech design team, you're a designer, you're a merchant. You're a vendor. There are all those different aspects about it. And I happen to be working for a company right now who's moving forward at a fairly progressive pace. I work with all 4 brands at Gap Inc. And what excites me most about it is watching that implementation happen at each and every one of those brands.

Yes, here, here. Right, I believe strongly, although I work in 3 3D apparel, believe strongly in the concept of AR apparel as well. For that matter, even volumetric. But the ability to actually see something in the room, to me, is an amazing future. But you still have to possibly construct that in 3D or scan that in 3D. But those are my favorites.

You know, actually, I find this to be the hardest question. Like, we had talked about different questions beforehand, and this is one that I don't really know how I feel. I think maybe I'm thinking smaller and a little bit closer. My goal or my dream is 3D that's simpler, easier to make, not such a drawn-out process, not so difficult for teams to work with. I think that's the kind of thing that really starts to move something forward. So I feel like that's my little goal, my close-up goal. Hopefully that's not so difficult to do. Hopefully, I guess.

I can totally relate to that. I think for me, it was— it's what I want to see is that being able to use it to speed up our supply chain completely. So we spoke about earlier in an earlier panel, it helps decision-making. It helps designing more accurate. It helps reduce samples. It helps— to the environment, but how do we help our manufacturers do their job better? And I think there is still, there is an untapped potential there of taking 3D and communicating better tech pack, communicating better to the factories to help them develop better, price better, execute a lot better and faster. I think that's an untapped potential, and this is for me the next level thing. We are talking about this, and you see the differences in the variation that we have in the opinion here. And while we are talking, I thought about it, there is a lot— we passed the phase of dating. When we are dating with 3D, there is the excitement, there is wow, there is like the butterflies and the flowers and and the stars in the air. But then when you're in the relationship, there is a lot of hard work that needs to come, comes to play. And then, and you see that each one will take a very different path on what they're gonna do to keep it going and to keep the excitement and to keep growing. But there is no, there are no shortcuts. And each and every one of us, and we had previously previous conversation, we spoke about— let's be honest with ourselves and with everybody here. We had our failures, we had our heartbreaks, we had our misery along the way. And I wanted— because I don't want a picture that is all rosy, especially for somebody who's just a newcomer, to think that it's all easy and wow, and we change the world overnight. It takes time, and there are a lot of failures along the way. And I thought it would be only fair to share a little bit of our failures.

I'll be boring and in the same space again using— I used to run 12 private brands in a large retailer and we wanted to make a transformation of creating this whole data-driven, consumer-driven approach to implementing that. And it was a big failure. It was a running vehicle. We want to make a big transformation. In a running vehicle and people are so busy to adopt something very, very new into a current way of working, right? And I will share how we went about learning from this, right? Sometimes what happens is if you're in the same stream of working and running your business and if you really want to do a new way of thing, what we really need is one, bandwidth of thinking about that new problem and freedom to make mistakes, freedom to make experiments, right? And that's something that we learned later and we actually created a very small team of 6-member team. And not only 6-member team, I think what we also did was we took people who are not from the mainstream. We wanted to create an innovation. See, I'm generalizing this because whenever you're doing something very new, you bring in also some outside-in mindset. It actually worked for us. We actually brought out of 6 people, 5 people from non-fashion to actually build a fashion brand. It actually made a very big case study, a global case study where how can you think about fashion from an outside-in perspective. For whenever you're doing something new, maybe start small and give that team a lot of freedom. To fail, right? But when you're running a mainstream business, when we initially experimented, they did not have room to fail because they have quarter-on-quarter results. They'll have to meet all their targets. That did not work. So that's my biggest failure and also the learning from that failure.

For me, it was being very excited, having the software, and having a designer say, but I still like to see my sample. I still want to touch and feel that thing. It's been, I would say, over the past year and a half, 2 years that we've been heavily involved in the 3D. I did see a turnaround from that now where the design concepts are being done within 3D and fabric. Now fabric is a bit of a fail thing too because there's not a lot of fabrics that you can pull in 3D, and then you have to input, you know, you either get a fabric kit if you're with CLO, or you use Avizu, or you have to use some other software. And to your CEOs and to your upper, that's a cost. So they look at it as, is this really gonna be profitable? And you're like, yes it will, we're building a library, and the library has to be built, and it's all in little steps. But yeah, that's definitely a big thing for Phil. And I see now the designers are communicating with our 3D artists saying, okay, we just looked at this from the first pattern that was given and we wanna make this change, this change. And the girl can say, I can do it in the pattern, I can do it in the 3D. 3D. Let me know which way you want to go, or we'll do it in the 3D and you follow up. Send it again. Here we go. Okay, send. So something that would have taken 2 to 3 days now takes an afternoon. And that's, that's a savings right there. They're slowly starting to see it, but it's, it's been a challenge. And one of the other fails that I see happening is software's not really talking to each other. We have something that we get input from another software and it doesn't drape the same as it would in that other software, so we have to make changes again to it. And we try not to because it's supposed to be the same fabric. So that's, that's the issue. Right.

Biggest failures and heartbreaks. Wow. One springs to the top. I'm really glad you asked this asked this question because, you know, much like Ganesh said, you know, there's nothing wrong with the failure. You want to embrace that failure because with that failure comes learnings. So mine came at a point in my previous employer life where I was tasked with traveling all over the world to onboard our vendors. None of our vendors were in 3D, so we were stepping into whole new territory by trying to onboard all of our vendors. So I went around the globe twice, business class, which was good for Delta SkyMiles. But I met a lot of factory owners and vendors and pattern makers. And I can tell you that 95% of them were on board and ready to go. Had I had dongles in my pocket, I could have sold licenses to all of those places. And they would have bought them. Vendors see it first. Factories see it first. They get the benefit. So it was a big win. I came back to the US, and within 8 months, 80% of our product line was digital. We were receiving them. It doesn't mean that all of the teams were working with those digital samples. There's change management that had to work with that. But it was very exciting to get to that pinnacle that 80% of our product line was coming in digitally from vendors who had just gotten on board with 3D. It was amazing. A week after they sent me out on this world tour, the company decided they were filing for Chapter 11. Oh, so there are things that happened in that time. Um, as I was traveling around the world, I kept getting texts. The teams were being trimmed down monthly. More people are getting trimmed down monthly. When I got back, people assumed that because we were implementing 3D technology, that was the reason that we were cutting teams. It wasn't the case. We had to convince people that that's not the reason why there are people getting let go. Chapter 11 is a whole different story to read about. So we got to a point that was very comfortable. All the teams were starting to work with those digital samples. We were using them for line adoption. It was really a magical thing. And then all of a sudden they decided that they were letting go of more people. And I was one of those people. It broke my heart that 3D technology had come so close to creating a success story for this company. But in the time of Chapter 11, they found backers. And where I made the mistake was as soon as I got back from this grand world tour where I ate absolutely everything they put in front of me. Um, I got back from this world tour, I took off my marketing hat, I didn't feel like I needed to sell it internally anymore. And that's the thing, you always have to keep selling it. There's always somebody else within that business on another team at another level or another executive who's making all kinds of decisions and some of them cost cutting. You have to keep selling that technology no matter how how successful you are. So that was my biggest misstep, my biggest heartbreak, and I hope that by sharing it, you don't take off that marketing hat.

Interesting. Okay, my biggest heartbreak, lots of them, but one that I think is really worth pointing out is an AR company came to me for a student to do patterns 'cause they were going to do an AR shop with component pieces so that this tailor could have all his different shirt collars, cuffs, etc., in a 3D component that would go to AR. And there was no proper planning for this whole project, and there was no proper budget for this whole project. And then it got to the point that they were coming at me to get those designs perfected. And there's a difference between a digital pattern and a digital sample, and it just was so chaotic. I mean, it was something that should have been planned properly. And again, you've got to watch out for the AR/VR people that start thinking this is the industry to be part of, but they have no experience in apparel. And I mean, you just have to run away.

It's hard to say what's my— I wouldn't say it's my biggest failure, but it's one that stands out to me because at a time where it should have been a success. So during COVID you know, we've got the lockdowns, samples aren't coming in. This is at a point where you think teams that had resisted change would have been embracing this. Here's a chance to really show your product. You're still developing for Walmart, but, you know, we don't need the physical samples. So some physical samples were trickling in. And it was at a point where I'm watching a virtual walkthrough with our leadership and our product development teams. And so somebody holds up a sample and they're like, okay, well, the sample's not quite right. But, you know, and they're explaining what's wrong. The fabric was wrong, the trim was wrong. Literally everything was wrong with it. But they're holding this up like this is the sample that is, you know, you're going to buy off of. And then they have the 3D and they're showing a printout of the 3D, not even like, you know, it's a printout piece of paper. Of the 3D and the 3D was wrong. And they're like, well, yeah, the 3D's wrong. Well, why is the 3D wrong? There's literally not a single reason why that 3D should be wrong. You had plenty of time to work on it. So it was almost this mentality of like the 3D was throwaway, that you'd rather show this horrible physical sample that is actually putting you on the back foot because now you're showing leadership something that is incorrect. But you could be showing at the very least correct 3D sample that look good. And so it was just this feeling of, wow, I thought we had come so far. And that just really showed me— it was literally just like took the wind out of my sails that we still aren't at a point yet that people understand that it doesn't take long. You should at the very least always have that correct 3D. But it's not a huge failure. To me, any time we do anything, even if it's something that comes back, it's negative, I'm still ecstatic. Step further than I was, you know, a week before. It's just that I just at a point where I think we're at a turning point, and then it's just that little bit of like, oh, you know, we could be doing this so much better and so much like just it should be easier, but it's not. And that's change management, so which we'll get back in a second.

But, um, for me it's always very hard to admit failure. And even though the list in my head is very, very long, and, and we did use used all the failures for learning, and learning. But I think one big failure— so I'm fortunate to be in a decision-making position, so I feel that there is a failure for not recognizing what it can do earlier. And I was lucky enough to have people around me, somebody around me here specifically, that really pushed us to, to make that, that decision. And the regret that we have for not starting it earlier is still somewhat in the air. And I think the second failure that is very close to what Bernard was saying is that even being a decision maker, there is all the time you need to keep on marketing it. Because if you don't, if you stop this marketing, the users are getting discouraged. The rollout is slow. Slowing down. The potential of it is diminishing. So yes, I agree 100% that do not fail on keeping that marketing and pushing the envelope, continuously pushing the envelope and make it bigger. Bernard, you spoke in our previous conversation about change management. So, and we are running out of time that we want to leave for some Q&A. Change management, we all agree, is very, very critical. Just go for a couple of tips that helped you, because I think you did a very unusual run around the world making change really one step at a time, one country at a time. We want some tips on how to do things better.

I think if you're talking about change management, you're talking about a contract. You're talking about a contract between between leadership and the teams who have to execute 3D technology, a contract between the vendors who are working with the teams who have to execute 3D technology. What's in that contract of change management? You want to give somebody a bigger, faster, better tool to work with. But the part of the contract that's important— what are you taking off their plates? What work are you exchanging for the 3D work that you're going to be asking them to learn to change the way they work and to share with all of the other people who are changing at the same time. That contract's very important. I think it's the primary thing to change management, offering your team time to do the work by taking something away. The other piece that I'd like to mention about that is listening. All of the teams work the way they work. We know how they all work. We have this shiny new tool and you want them to use this shiny new tool and to change the way they work. Instead of presenting the tool to them as a place that they have to reach into, why not ask them to define how they'd like to work in that 3D tool? As soon as you give ownership to the people who are working on those teams and let them define how they're going to work, that's where your success rate is higher. That's where people will jump in. That's where people will offer you ideas of how they think this tool can work for them. Those are probably the two most.

I think we have a couple of minutes for Q&A unless somebody wants to add.

Misconceptions about 3D is that a lot of people think it's just one person who can start from the pattern and run it right through to the rendering. and it's not the way it should be. I see it as running through a company where there's a person who's technically inputting the fabric and the fabric properties into the software. There's another person who's building the pattern and just checking the drape. And then it needs to go to somebody else who's got the Photoshop experience and to do the rendering and give it the lifelike and the print and all, that's where it's not just one person. And I think that's where a lot of companies fail because they think it should be one person to run the whole gamut. And I see it as breaking it down. It needs to be something that runs throughout the company from design to production.

OK, we'd be happy to take some questions.

Yeah. No questions?

Hi, I'm a UX and UI designer. How much do you utilize UX and UI designers to kind of build your products out and make them better, or do you not do that?

I think it's a point to think about. At least for me, nothing. I don't know about—

I know that you mentioned that you listen to people. How— what's the way you implement that? Um, well, you have to educate people on the tool. They need to know the capabilities. Give them a menu, give them approaches into the tool that they can step into, and then let them define the tools. When it talks about, you know, when you talk about working with, with people like yourself, um, we're stepping into this brand implementation right now. There will be room for contractors, and there is a lot of discussion about bringing contractors in who can influence teams to working a different way. So we have talked about it. It's not something we haven't considered.

Yeah, but yeah, I just want to add to that. I think it's a great question. Uh, finally, it's going to be technology-human interface. I think if the, if the interface and getting the job done, they're getting easier and easier, it'll work, and we have seen it, you know, whenever you are trying to adopt something, if it helps them with minimum friction of getting that job done, answering that business question, it's not about throwing features, it's about solving that problem. From that perspective, I think UX has a huge role to play.

Hi. I just wanted to ask, when you've taken your 3D designs all the way through to, say, your digital website for selling, How—

I'm assuming not, but you probably don't replace just your standard photography with your 3D.

How do you leapfrog and how have you, if you're in that position, changed the user experience to really benefit in a more positive way, whether it's conversion, whatever that may be?

So you're not just replacing one-to-one, but you're actually leapfrogging into something better.

I can answer. Okay, if that's the case, I would talk about 3D Look. I am really pleased in working with them for a couple of years, how it's worked in terms of sizing. So, one has the ability to scan, as my students do, their own body or somebody else's, bring it in and dress it for real. And they do have a new application out for shopping. And certain stores can upload their customers or do a scan of your customer and try it on. And I'm not a 3D Look salesperson, so I can't tell you more than that, but you can take a look at it on site. But it is the beginning of what is happening, is the scanning. The hardest part about scanning is people do not like the shape of their real body, and they have to get past that mind block. But if you can do that, you can get a flattering piece of fashion, and that is an essential part of 3D fashion.

So I think there are two elements to the question. One is, how can you present better for e-com? And there is a lot of— 3D is part of it, to create a hyper-realistic garment and try to get a hyper-realistic photo imposing on a mannequin, on an avatar. Or a model. Those are one element, but I think the biggest element is sizing, and that is the industry's biggest mystery still. And I think a big part of it, because nobody's really honest about their sizes, they don't really want to be scanned. It's a— and it goes to a lot of privacy issues, but it's the biggest— it's the probably the $10 billion question to figure out how to get people to try on virtually and that try-on will be true to reality. When we get there, we will have probably a separate PI for that.

Yeah, definitely.

One last question. All right. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you.

Thank you.