The digital materials evolution in footwear and beyond with Chris Hillyer, Director of Innovation...

Hello and welcome to another episode of Fashion Made. I have the pleasure to be joined by Chris Hillier, the Director of Innovation at Deckers Brands.

Hi.

Hey, Chris. Yeah, good, thank you. How are you?

I'm doing well, thank you.

Excellent. We're coming to you live from Hong Kong. Well, live for us, but not for you. Chris, you're big in the shoe game now, but it hasn't always been like that, has it?

Yeah, I mean, Uh, it really— I was— I went to industrial design school. I went to a school in California called, uh, ArtCenter.

Okay.

And I just loved building things and it really, you know, footwear was just another thing that I, that I was curious about building. Um, I'd always been a runner and, and, you know, fairly outdoorsy. So I loved, you know, I loved looking at shoes and, and whatnot. And it definitely inspired me as far as my career path. But I don't know, I think originally I, I didn't set out to be a shoe designer when I went to design school. I ended up there and stayed there for my entire career, so—

Really?

Obviously I loved it. Yeah. There's, I mean, shoes are fun. What I like to say about the footwear industry is it's fast-paced, so you're always doing something new. There's all sorts of, like, every technology that's coming out, someone's trying to apply it to shoes in some way, which is always exciting. There's a wide variety of types of shoes, whether you're trying to solve a performance problem for an ultra-marathon runner, or, you know, just looking good to go out, or trying to be comfortable around the home. So, I mean, there's so many different types of footwear. So any material that you can think of has probably been integrated into a shoe at some point.

Yeah.

So you have this vast tapestry of materials that are available to you to explore with, or, you know, obviously if there's a technology or something, you can always, you know, imagine how that might be applied to a product in footwear, so.

Okay.

I love that.

Do you get all of that variety within Deckers brands?

Yeah, actually. I mean, Deckers has UGG, which is obviously premium, you know, comfort and fashion.

Yeah.

Comfort maybe is selling it short, but the shoes are incredibly comfortable. Yeah. But for sure a fashion brand, all the way to HOKA ONE ONE, which is an amazing running shoe brand, which has completely, you know, changed the running shoe industry.

Really? Yeah. How so?

So HOKA introduced, really the concept of having an oversized platform of comfort and cushioning into running. So it was a time where our industry was all about minimalism and people were wearing barefoot shoes or even running sometimes barefoot. And it was inspired by, you know, there was a famous book called Born to Run, which inspired all these people to start running as we naturally did without footwear. And, you know, there's a tremendous fallout from that. I mean, there were people getting injuries. I mean, obviously we haven't been running barefoot for many generations. Hoka came into the scene at the same time with more cushioning than anyone has ever put into a running shoe. And so people were laughing at it. It was, I mean, they looked absolutely crazy, but—

Yeah, is it clumpy?

Oh, they were huge. I mean, they were ridiculous looking. In fact, I remember the first time that I tested them, and it was quite early in the process, and I waited until it got nearly dark. I mean, I was embarrassed to wear them, But the reality was they worked, and that's something that— I mean, to take an industry like running shoes that's been around for, you know, decades and decades and to reinvent it was— I mean, it was so inspiring. And even, you know, our VP of Innovation, Jean-Luc Dailhard, was one of the founders of Hoka. And I mean, he's, he's a crazy French guy that, you know, came up with a totally different way of addressing running footwear, and now it's I mean, you're seeing it in every brand across the industry, is cushioning is the number one thing to talk about.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, it makes a huge difference. I mean, if you've gone for, and we're talking about people that have never run a marathon before, or their doctors have told them, you know, don't run anymore 'cause it's too hard on your knees or whatnot, and Hoka is a solution to that.

Amazing.

Which is, I mean, it's really reinvigorating the running industry, and it branches, You know, it's funny, when it started, it was adopted by these people running for 24, 48-hour races, right? 100 miles around Mont Blanc or in the Alps. I mean, these crazy races that most people obviously don't aspire to do. So it was a solution for that. And then all of a sudden, it started popping up on the roadside. So people doing marathons or something that is quite a bit longer than what most people do for a run. They're like, okay. I'll wear a Hoka for that because, you know, I'm going to be running for 4 hours and it hurts.

Yeah.

So I want to wear a different, a different product that's going to make it hurt less. There's nothing quite like having a product that makes things hurt less. That, that creates believers.

Okay.

And it worked.

Yeah.

And, and so they looked ridiculous, and, and now over, you know, 5 years, they actually look quite cool. Um, and even the trends, you look at all the footwear trends right now, it's these huge you know, midsoles on trainers and whatnot. I mean, you're seeing so much of it, and Hoka is literally kind of, kind of created it.

Yeah, that's amazing.

But it's from functionality. So we have— I mean, we had athletes in the Olympics wearing Hokas. So I mean, it branches all the way from, you know, these ultramarathons all the way to people running the fastest mile, you know, in the world.

And so is it just running, or is one of your jobs to look at what other sports it might be applied to?

Absolutely. So it's, it's always been, uh, very well positioned in the outdoor side because of these ultramarathons. They were definitely trail runners, so it transitioned really nicely into having outdoor footwear, people hiking or trekking. We've done some sandals, some recovery product, as well as some casual product. I mean, just people that are inspired by having this additional comfort. And if you go to a trade show, very often now, especially an outdoor sports trade show, there's a lot of people at trade shows wearing Hokas because— Really? They're standing on their feet all day.

Yeah, yeah, so that's cool.

I mean, we have doctors, you know, prescribing them to people. So it's, it's quite a movement. It's been really fun to watch.

I bet. And it's great when that function then inspires the form as well. And I guess over the last 5 years, did you say? Yeah, maybe some material innovation might have happened as well.

And start putting twice as much foam underneath your feet, and you know, the foam becomes quite a center of attention. So yeah, you need to innovate different materials which are giving you different properties that we haven't, you know, explored yet.

So do you work with material science scientists as well, or do you— how does that side of things work?

Yeah, I'm definitely not from a science background, so it's not necessarily that I'm working with scientists. I, I— we work with, uh, partners, you know, obviously a lot of materials partners that are developing new polymers and new ways of making cushioning solutions. So we'll have you know, relationships with those companies. But ultimately, we have a goal, whether it's reducing weight— because Hokas are also extremely lightweight, okay? So you have this amazing cushioning and protection, but it's also quite light. Um, so we're always trying to reduce the weight, we're trying to improve the durability, um, you know, produce more responsiveness or more return of energy, or at least that dynamic feel. So there's a lot of different things that we explore to try to find, and sometimes that's mixing two different foams So maybe you might have a different density or a different type of foam in the forefoot than you do the heel. So there's— it's wide open what, what kind of things you can do when you're doing something different.

Yeah, that's great, because does it then influence the other brands as well? Some of the work that you're doing over in Hoka, does that, you know, then influence maybe an Argo or TiVo or something like that?

Absolutely. So there's direct influence, right? There's, there's people saying, oh, you know, Hoka has this amazing technology, I just wore a pair and I want to, you know, take some of that philosophy and implement it into our brand. So the other brands are for sure, you know, being inspired by that. But the other thing is you start developing this amazing portfolio of materials, yeah, that you've developed with Hoka because it's a performance brand, and you start using those materials on UGG, and all of a sudden you might have a, you know, a fashion shoe for men that is also extremely light and comfortable because of the technology that you've developed with Hoka. So that's what I love about these brands and how different they are and how they all kind of— they're all crazy and quirky. Like you look at Teva or Sanuk or, you know, UGG or Hoka, they're all quite unique and quite, you know, quite interesting in their own right. Yeah, they have so much personality. In fact, you know, Deckers as a corporation is such a unique situation just because we have these brands that are, that are quite frankly, you know, Pretty unique. And that makes them super fun.

Do you have to split it like Mondays Deckers, Mondays UGG, Tuesdays?

I mean, we have an innovation team, so I spend most of my time specifically with Sanuk, so I'll work on projects with them, but a couple years ago I was managing product for Hoka during a transition, so it's like we bounce around, but the beauty of having a dynamic team is if someone has an idea, or if I have an idea for an UGG, there's nothing holding me back from saying, "Oh, I'm going to go develop something that might work for UGG." Like, there's no, there's no silos or barriers keeping us, you know, you know, there's no guardrails in place to prevent us from working on a project.

Okay. And when you look at the footwear industry as a whole, do you see more and more innovation happening in the product design and development, or is it now in the manufacturing, or is it really just in the stories that they're trying to sell and the branding of things?

Well, that's a, that's a loaded question. I think you're seeing it, you're seeing it everywhere, you know, at this point. I mean, just with the emergence of, or at least the appetite that the consumer has for 3D printing and just how exciting that technology is, um, and we're seeing that emerge so quickly and yet nobody's really able to offer a reason why it's better. It's just cool. Yeah. And so that, you know, does that turn into a PR story? It's like, absolutely. But is it also Eventually going to be the, you know, highest performance solution? Absolutely, right? So it's like people are investing today in it, and eventually it will become amazing. Today it's a fun PR story and quite expensive and difficult to do. Yeah, but it's, it's laying the groundwork for what, you know, this amazing future that we're gonna have with footwear. Yeah, but the other side of it is, you know, people's fashions, you know, change. We don't all want to make shoes that are coming out of a machine that look like they're made from space. And, you know, we're going to shift. So someday people are going to want, you know, only going to want shoes that look like they're handmade in Portugal, which is perfectly fine. And you have to adapt to that as well. Yes.

Do you find it an agile industry? Do you think it's able to do that? Absolutely.

Yeah. It's changing so quick. And the thing is, we can build anything. I mean, that's what's so fun about shoes is like whether it squirts, you know, squirts out of a, out of a machine as an injection molded foam part that literally is worn without any other components attached to it. Or if it's handmade by, you know, an artisan, it's like they're still shoes. And so we have this amazing ability to do all of it.

Well, it's definitely not going anywhere, is it?

No, shoes are going to be around. But, you know, and people are talking so much about, you know, the factories of the future and where they're going to be and how they're going to operate. Um, but the, the big issue with that is with all this automation, it makes it quite a bit less agile.

Okay.

One of the most amazing things is that because we have so many humans involved in the process, which obviously is one of the challenges as well, is they can, you know, they can change on a dime and make something very different the next day.

Yeah.

And you set up, you start setting up mass production and factories, it's more difficult for those machines to change every day. Yeah. And that's where 3D printing comes in, right? So it's like you could have your foot scanned and you can 3D print literally every single midsole differently.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, that's something that people don't grasp with this whole thing that Adidas has done, is they're printing all of the midsoles exactly the same.

Yeah.

And yet the reality is eventually that's going to be something that's completely customized. We're going to get midsoles printed, you know, every brand will have midsoles printed for you. Yeah.

So when is this—

the printer doesn't care.

When is this going to happen? Because we've been seeing this for years, you know, this sort of potential— yeah, huge thing in the industry where you go get your foot scanned, and you know, that's super customization.

Yeah, I think one of the hardest things, and what I like to challenge our team with, is say you go do that, say you get your foot scanned and you get this midsole that's been printed specifically for you, and it, you know, it, it notices that you roll a little bit on the left foot and pronate and, and etc., etc., and you have a certain weight and gait and, you know, preference and everything else, but then if you try the shoes on and they don't you know, they don't change your life.

Yeah.

And you've just dropped $300 on them. Are you gonna do it again? How many times are you gonna keep doing that? You know, so it's like there is an immense, you know, expectation from the consumer that this actually offers some performance. And, you know, and it's more than just say, oh, these feel good. You know, there's a lot of things that just feel good. And so, right, that's why it's such a PR buzz, because it's cool. Yeah. But eventually, you know, are you gonna buy your third pair unless, you You know, by the time it comes to your third pair, are they still going to be really cool or are you just going to be like, oh yeah, those are the 3D printed ones? Yeah.

So that's—

we need— that's why the innovation side, we have to keep pushing this and have to keep innovating and eventually make something that actually functions better, right?

Yeah.

So I think that's, you know, when you, when you talk about airplanes or something like that, this generative design of this, these lattice structures and meshes and whatnot, they reduce, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of weight on an aircraft, right? That's a functional reason why they invest in this technology. In shoes, we just do it because it's cool. But eventually, you know, we'll have a reason to do it. And I think that, you know, maybe to finish off that question, what the world needs is someone to develop the algorithms, and I know brands are, you know, well on their way to developing these algorithms to say, "All right, David, you walk this way, this is the solution that you need." out of a midsole platform. So, but the, you know, the proof is in the pudding. If it doesn't— if you try it on, if you go through all that effort, you get your foot scan and someone makes this custom shoe and you've paid all this money and it doesn't make it any better, sure, then it's disappointment.

Sure. And the design of the shoe, it counts as well. I mean, how many of us have bought a pair of shoes and thought, you know, a couple of weeks later, actually, that's— I don't know really what I was thinking when I bought those. And that could be a costly mistake when you put all the effort into the That's consumer goods.

I mean, frankly, it's like, that's the way it is. And, and just like I said, it's like our, you know, we're, we're a serendipitous lot. I mean, our whims will change with the wind as far as what we think is cool and what we want to wear the next day. So, you know, it's like, it might be, you know, this sporty fashion today, but for sure that's not going to be here forever. So when it pivots, then where do people go?

Yeah, well, new materials, I guess. And maybe that's a good segue.

There's always an, there's always an appetite for something new and fresh that's solves a problem.

Yeah, right.

If you can make something that is more breathable or more durable or lighter, you know, there's always an appetite for that. So, so we never, we never discredit, you know, that on the performance side, but it's everything else. It's like, you know, at the end of the day, you know, how many millions of Chuck Taylors are still purchased today? It's a shoe that was every bit as bad as it was in 19, you know, '48 or whatever, you know, it's like So I think that the reality is, you know, this, this human doesn't really care so much sometimes about necessarily comfort or performance. They're happy wearing something that was designed decades and decades ago and worn by their parents.

Yeah.

So from that end, it's like, are we working way too hard to make something better if everyone is perfectly content wearing a Converse? It's like, I mean, and I love Converse. I think they're super cool shoes. So it's nothing against Converse. It's just the fact that You know, we're willing to wear damn near anything.

Yeah. Well, I've seen how, you know, Birkenstocks, I think sales have gone up really lately. And I think their CEO came out and said, you know, this just happens every— it does every now and then, you know, the cycle goes around again and people just like Birkenstocks.

It does. And it's part, you know, and it's part of our mission to, you know, to be ready when it does and to, you know, to be, you know, to be agile enough to be able to see that trend and respond to it or to, you know, to help propagate it or help all those things. It's what, you know, it's what we're doing.

You can't fight it. I mean, that's just what—

it's wonderful, honestly. I mean, I wore Birkenstocks. I was laughed at when I was 13 years old for wearing Birkenstocks. I had these narrow feet and nothing else fit me, and you know, someone suggested Birkenstocks. So I was the kid with Birkenstocks years and years ago.

You got that photo now, you can show it off.

Exactly. And now, now it's this trend again, and it's great. I mean, what's wrong with that? They're quality products, they're wonderful, they feel great. It's a wonderful brand with a, with a rich heritage. I mean, that's what people are celebrating.

That's what people want. Yeah, you know, and actually that quality product is essential, you know.

And we have so many examples in the footwear industry of, I mean, really amazing brands with great rich heritage and stories. And, and, you know, people are so committed as far as making quality product that, you know, that really stands the test of time, that's fashionable, that's, you know, wonderful. So I think it's— that's what's fun about this industry. And it, like I said, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's high-performance product taking you to to the top of Everest or, you know, for a pair of UGG slippers that offer you the most comfortable morning, you know, Sunday morning possible. So yeah, it's everywhere.

That's brilliant. Well, I think there's another thing that I wanted to talk to you about, Chris. It's something I know that you've been working on recently, which is the Materials Exchange.

That's right. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, if you can tell me more about that, it's quite an interesting project. It's really a lot to get into.

It's so much fun to be working on this. So Material Exchange is a is a web-based materials platform for two businesses, whether it's a, you know, it's going to be a supplier and a brand to be able to have a, you know, a secure communication and visualization of materials. So the idea is suppliers will upload their materials onto Material Exchange, along with high-resolution images, or in many cases, 3D scans of these materials. And then the brands will literally be able to go shopping in the same way that today we can, you know, it's the difference between having a Lonely Planet book 20 years ago to look for a hotel in a foreign country and now being able to go onto a website and sort by where it's located and what floor you want to be on and whether they have breakfast or, you know, free internet or anything else. We don't have that capability in materials. And it's really a shame. So our industry is still— all materials are still managed by books. And the books are great. It's wonderful to touch and feel materials. We'll never get away from needing to touch and feel materials. But the idea of filtering and sorting through those thousands of material instance— I mean, I use the idea, it's like, imagine if you're looking for a camouflage print, right? It's like, you're going to go to your materials library and look through every single book and put a little Post-it note on the camouflage prints, right? And then at the end of the day you're going to open up all these books and try to decide which camouflage print you want to use. It's like, imagine if you have a website and you type in camouflage print and you had, you know, 80 different options and then you narrow it down. It's like, oh, I want to source it in, you know, Bangladesh, and I want it to be 100% cotton, and I want it to have an abrasion resistance of this, and I want it to be, you know, etc., etc. And then you make your decision as to which one you're going to pick, and it's so much easier. And I think it's, it's easy to explain, just everyone is like Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, like a hotel. I get it, you know, I want to filter by how much it's going to cost and, and where it's sourced and all these other things, but we just don't have it.

Yeah.

And the only way that this is going to happen is if we work together as an industry to make it happen. No single brand— I mean, Deckers for sure, in which Deckers has no affiliation with it other than the fact that they've been extremely generous with their time to allow me to work on it. Yeah. Um, but I'm working with, you know, with other people from other brands as well that are doing this. You have to You know, it's like I have friends at VF Corp and at Kolaris and at Wolverine and all these different companies, and we're all coming together and talking about this and saying, how do we make this tool for our industry? And then, you know, it's like I'm having these amazing meetings with suppliers and they're like, we've invested so much money in, you know, in our own PLM systems and trying to make it, you know, make it available for people to get our data. And yet we continue to do all of our communication through email. Which is just archaic. And so the Material Exchange is really this movement of, of brands and suppliers, and as well as the FDRA, which is the Footwear Developers and Retailers of America, has had played a huge part in this. And we're trying to make this platform that everyone can, you know, just improve their efficiency and visualization of these materials.

It must be hard though, because you've got that FDRA in America, but when you're talking about materials in Bangladesh I mean, how do you get that reliability of information from all over the world, you know, not just Bangladesh, South America?

I mean, the reality is where it's, it's no different than the businesses that we're conducting today. How do you get reliable information today? I mean, if they print it in a book, do you believe it? I mean, it's like, I mean, we have relationships with these companies. These are— and, and I— it's not Alibaba. I mean, this is— these are businesses that we work with every single day. We're just trying to make platform that makes it easier to have these interactions.

We've got a lot of 3D going on at these events, a lot of people talking about that. Is the developments in rendering—

That's exactly right.

—really helping you guys achieve this? Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, and that's honestly, that was one of the biggest inspirations of the Material Exchange. And it's grown to be so much more than that. Because at the end of the day, we don't have a database. I mean, we literally don't have a way to search for a material, which is insane, really. And we might have a, you know, we have an amazing PLM system at Deckers, and it's been, you know, it's been implemented for many years. We have an incredible materials library with over 20,000 materials, not one picture of a material. I mean, it's like you, you don't necessarily even know what these materials look like, but we have the data and that's good. And all that data has been hand-entered by Deckers employees to create those 20,000 thousand instances. And you can imagine the amount of time and effort and, and mistakes that happen along the way and everything else to do that. And if we just have a platform where the supplier enters that information once and validate that it's correct, and then every one of their customers can go on to the site and use that information, I mean, it changes everything.

I mean, it makes perfect sense.

It's an ambitious goal, I'll tell you that. It does. And we have like so many additional things that we want to build into it. I mean, we're We're working with a sustainability company right now, and we, I mean, we have this vision for actually having sustainability data on the site directly. So you could make a, you could filter out product by the sustainable, like, by the impact that it has on the environment. I mean, that's, that's the power of a platform like this, is we can make better decisions about the way that we're building things because we'll have a tool to actually filter and, and research this stuff. But as far as 3D, It did start there. It started there because the reality is to represent a material accurately on a 3D garment or shoe, you need to have a 3D scan of the material. And that process is a little complicated. You need to buy a special scanner, which is like this big box, this big expensive box with a camera in it that has basically puts different lighting situations onto that material, and then it builds— it uses a technology called photogrammetry, which builds a 3D representation of what that material looks like. So when you put it on your product, it depicts it accurately so that shadows cast properly. If it has transparent areas like holes in a mesh, you see through those holes. I mean, it prepares that file so you can visualize it properly, and it's so powerful when you've done it right. It's— I mean, it's incredibly convincing. It looks perfectly real. And accurate and beautiful. And but it takes a lot of time to prepare these files. And so we invested in a scanner and hired 2 people to spend all day long just scanning and scanning and scanning. And, you know, some months into it, we were like, you know what, suppliers should be doing this. This is not like— you can't imagine every single brand scanning the same, in many cases, the same materials for their own personal materials library. It's like obviously 3D isn't going away. This requirement is going to be necessary from every brand going into 3D. Let's build a place for all these files to go. And by the way, we don't have a database anyway for, for materials. So why don't we, you know, why doesn't that all come together into this one platform, which is Material Exchange, which is super exciting. Yeah.

Does it like zoom into the material as well? Like how, how macro do you get?

Well, that's the thing. With a, with a proper 3D scan, it looks— I mean, it looks quite lifelike. So what's amazing about it is you'll take a, you know, you'll take a shape, whether it's a shoe or, um, you know, a 3D model of a piece of textile draped over a, you know, ball or something like that, so you can see all the folds and whatnot. And then you apply these textures to it and it looks perfectly real. You can zoom in, you can spin it around, you can see how the light bounces off of it. It's incredibly accurate. But I mean, that's the thing. And there's different qualities of scanners. There's, you know, there's different— obviously some art goes into preparing these files properly. It's not super easy. But today there's just, you know, we haven't— the world hasn't started. So people need to find solutions for where these things are going to go and how we're going to use them. And, you know, the Material Exchange will work without any scans in it at all. Um, but as people are doing that now, they have a place to put that.

Okay, so you can do it just off the data?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's a database, so even if a supplier decides they don't want to put any pictures of their materials— I don't know why they would want to do that, they could, it wouldn't be a very fun, uh, environment to research materials, but it's possible.

We see a lot of problems with standardization, especially when you're working with different suppliers, different technologies sometimes, you know. How do you plan to tackle that? Yeah, we're—

so it's really— there's a couple things that are, are big issues. Um, one of them is the standardization of the actual physical properties of a material, uh, the engineering properties which need to describe how that material might drape on a garment. Yes. So that is not standardized. As far as the images, they're— I mean, these, these scans, they, they basically are outputting JPEG images. That's very standard. It's not— I'm not so worried about that side of it. There's a quality concern, right, as far as maintaining. But that's— we've built in a little star rating system so you can kind of, you know, do a little peer, a little peer pressure onto the suppliers if you're doing a poor job of scanning. But, you know, it's all for, it's all for, you know, the goal of having, you know, progress. But as far as the material standards, we are working with a group called GS1, which is, you know, Global Standards Organization, and they're trying to put together with us these standards. But the reality is we're all, you know, we're all using very similar language to describe materials. Like, it's a leather, you know, and it's got this thickness and this content, you know, oil content. It's like we're all— we're all using the same parameters to describe these things. Some brands might, you know, want 43 different ways of describing a piece of leather, where others might want 36. That's fine. Yeah. Material Exchange will have all of them. And you, you know, if some of them aren't necessary for you, that's fine. But, you know, the supplier knows that information and so they input it on the Material Exchange and it's there for anyone to use it or not. I'm not as worried about standardization and I don't think it's a roadblock. I'm very concerned about when you get into 3D apparel design. Now, footwear, we don't really represent the drape of a material. So it's all about the scan. And we're, you know, when you look at an image of a shoe, a 3D shoe, you're quite a bit closer to it and you really see a lot more texture. As you can imagine, a black bathrobe, you don't see any texture at all, right? So it's— there's differences between kind of the scan quality necessary for apparel versus footwear, but really not that different. I mean, we're all, you know, trying to depict these things. And if you want a close-up of the cuff of that robe, you still need to have those textures in there to make it you know, believable. Yeah, but the drape is a big challenge. And, you know, I was working— I was speaking with Optitex, one of the, one of the 3D apparel, um, 3D apparel companies or providers. And Optitex was like, you know, the, the— fundamentally, even if you entered this drape data 2 years ago on any of our platforms, it would have given you different results than we have today. I mean, it's like, it's— they're not even being consistent with the way that their stuff draping using the same parameters.

Yeah, but that's the same across all of them as well.

And it's— I mean, this is moving very, very quickly, but it's very frustrating. So if you've already set it up and they all have little machines to test, you know, the, you know, the, the amount of stretch and, and, uh, the rigidity of these materials and everything else, uh, you know, they're asking somewhat different questions, but in the end they're also kind of asking all the same questions. They're trying to— you're really just trying to describe what the, you know, what the physical properties of these materials are so you can depict them. And I think that the best thing that we can do is at least, you know, have some consolidation as far as what these questions are, what, what different, you know, things are they trying to get, what type of different information are they all trying to get that is at least the same, and where are the outliers and what can we live without, and then say, okay, here's our standard. We're gonna, you know, we're all gonna ask for these, you know, 14 different things to describe this material and get started because, you know, we can sit around and wait for one, you know, golden standard forever, but I think that the faster we move, you know, we're actually going to get some progress.

Yeah, I mean, you just have to believe in it. Yeah, keep—

again, it's not going away. And there's what, like 4 or 5 major 3D apparel suppliers? And it's like, you know, it's like I use the analogy, it's like we have 3 different charging plugs for electric cars. You know, electric cars were invented you know, recently. And yet we couldn't have one plug. You know, it's like we have to have 3 different plugs. And so, you know, if you have a Tesla, you have this little adapter so you can, you know, plug with another, you know, it's like, it's ridiculous. But because we're a little bit out front on this subject, I think we can have a lot of, I think we can make a lot of traction. Because at the end of the day, there aren't a lot of brands that have adopted 3D at this point. And so the best thing we can do is have the brands that have adopted it all talk together and say, hey, what makes sense? You know, how do we make this, how do we make this work? And I think that fundamentally that's what we're doing. I mean, that's what an event like this is about, is meeting with these people that are on the same path as us and have these conversations and say, hey, what makes the most sense? So, and I think the more open we are about it, the better and richer it's gonna be.

It's an amazing industry to see how open people actually are.

Well, it's, I think that's a new thing, honestly. We haven't, you know, we haven't been all that open. It's why we have a lot of the challenges that we do today. And some of it's gonna be standardization, but a lot of it's communication, just like, you know, learning and trying to implement things. And we'll all compete with our, you know, with our better designs or our smarter sourcing or whatever. There's some things that I think we need to come together, like an event like this, and say, okay, how are we, how are we approaching this? Like, what's good for this industry? Because, you know, it's getting harder. Margins are getting, you know, smaller, and, and you need to be creative. And, and I think in some ways we all just need to work together and be a, be a cohesive industry.

Yeah, well, I think that's a beautiful place to end it. And, um, I think, uh, if anyone wants to get in touch with you or learn more about the Materialist's Exchange? Where would they go to do that?

Yeah, um, we have a website which is material-exchange.com. You can get there right now. It's a splash screen. We're just— we're still piloting the project. It hasn't been rolled out, but there's an— there's a contact email address on there that you can, you can send out and someone will get back to you and give you a demo and teach you more. But that's, that's why we're traveling to these events and talking about it and, and, uh, very available to to meet with anyone that, that's willing to listen and try to make this the best solution for all of us instead of one person's vision. Yeah.

Well, Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming and having a chat to us, and I can't wait to see you again at another Pyro Parallel event, I'm sure. Yeah, New York. Yeah, I'll see you there. All right, cheers, Chris.