With the Australian Fashion Industry Awards fast approaching, Ragtrader is taking a daily look inside each category — the finalists, the work behind the entries and the strategy that earned them their place.
Next up: Best Use of Technology, featuring exceptional technology-driven initiatives across the fashion business landscape. The six finalists are APG & Co, Aur Oceà, Carla Zampatti, PVH Brands Australia, Sheike and Silver Fleece.
Winners will be revealed at the AFIA Awards Lunch on Thursday 6 August at The Promenade Docklands, Melbourne. Tickets are on sale now.
The AFIAs 2026 are supported by Headline Sponsor The Retail Score, Gold Sponsors Better Packaging and ReStore, Silver Sponsors Apparel21 and Williams Logistics and Bronze Sponsor Afterpay.
Here's the work that got the finalists there in alphabetical order:
APG & Co
APG & Co was the first Australian fashion retailer to introduce CLO 3D garment simulation and remains its most progressive local adopter — an eight-year journey that began in 2019 and accelerated through COVID, when the business needed teams designing collaboratively from home.
CLO lets teams simulate garments in a 360-degree digital environment, integrating pattern making, fabric behaviour and fit accuracy before any physical sample is created. Saba completed 100% of development styles on CLO in 2022, with Sportscraft and Jag following in 2023. By 2025, APG had fully trained and onboarded 10 of its supplier factories on CLO and CLO-SET, initially covering their licence fees to accelerate adoption. In 2026, the business introduced CLO to Seamless, which has since onboarded the platform as a supporter and promotes it to all members.
The compounded wins landed in FY25: 100% of styles across all three brands developed and managed on the platform, an 80% time reduction on print strike-offs with prints, colours and placement finalised digitally before printing, a 50% cost reduction on development and fit sampling and half of the group's woven factories trained on CLO. An industry best-practice case study in digitising Australian fashion development.
Aur Oceà
The biggest barrier in online swimwear isn't price or style — it's fit. Customer uncertainty around sizing drives hesitation at purchase and multi-size ordering that inflates returns. Aur Oceà built a fit-focused technology ecosystem under Project Confidence to attack the problem head-on.
Magic Fit delivers intelligent, personalised size recommendations at the point of purchase without a tape measure, embedded across product pages, while Try with Mirra removes the friction of upfront payment entirely — letting customers trial multiple sizes or pieces at home before committing. Both were integrated directly into the brand's Shopify ecosystem with a considered rollout that preserved its elevated, editorial experience.
The results validate the approach. Try with Mirra has proven a powerful acquisition engine, with 85% of users being first-time customers and an average order value more than 60% higher than standard purchases — confident multi-piece buying in action. Magic Fit is delivering a 20% conversion rate and an 86.7% completion rate, contributing to nearly 15% of total orders while lifting average order value by 18%. Together the tools have improved conversion, particularly among first-time customers, and deepened engagement across new collections — technology aligned squarely with the brand's focus on fit, quality and considered purchasing.
Carla Zampatti
The Carla AI Mentor — based on the fashion designer herself, Carla Zampatti — was created so every woman in Australia can act on Carla Zampatti's message: just take the journey, regardless of where she lives, what language she speaks or how she came to entrepreneurship. Built from six years of delivery through the Future Female Entrepreneurs Program and Enterprising ME, the platform responds to research showing the barrier for women is not ambition but access.
The AI mentor draws on more than eight million words of curated entrepreneurship knowledge, vetted through the lived experience of women in business. A deliberate architectural decision sets it apart: the platform does not retain, share or train on users' confidential information or business ideas, directly addressing focus-group fears about mainstream AI tools. It was launched by Governor-General Sam Mostyn and Carla Zampatti CEO Alex Schuman at Parliament House in November 2025.
In its first six months, the platform attracted more than 70,000 visitors — more than double the original 12-month target of 35,000 — and hosted 1,092 conversations with aspiring female entrepreneurs on strategy, funding and idea validation. It sits within an ecosystem engaging 36,000-plus women and girls nationally, with the Future Female Entrepreneurs Program independently evaluated at $767 million in estimated net benefit.
PVH Brands Australia
PVH Brands Australia — home to Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Van Heusen — set out to transform fragmented customer data into a unified first-party intelligence capability. Before the program, customer interactions lived across multiple disconnected systems, limiting connected omnichannel experiences and sophisticated lifecycle marketing.
Built on Salesforce Data Cloud with Deloitte as implementation partner, the CDP and CRM transformation created a single customer view under one concept: One Customer, One Connected Experience. The scale was significant — teams across six time zones, two countries and three brands, with data unified across several previously disconnected retail and commerce platforms. Dozens of use cases were delivered alongside rebuilt templates and consumer journeys, including enhanced welcome journeys, abandoned cart programs and win-back journeys targeting lapsed high-value customers.
Delivered in 2025, the program produced measurable commercial and operational impact within its first year, with core lifecycle marketing initiatives deployed across acquisition, retention and reactivation and increased automation across CRM execution. ANZ served as the pilot for the wider APAC region — and the implementation is now the blueprint for PVH's global rollout.
Sheike
Sheike Society is less a loyalty program than connected technology infrastructure. Rather than layering a templated platform onto existing systems, Sheike architected a fully custom ecosystem across Shopify Plus, CEGID and Klaviyo — with CEGID as the single source of truth resolving every transaction, points balance, reward and tier movement across more than 50 stores and ecommerce in real time.
Purpose-built customer metafields and metaobjects within Shopify dynamically surface loyalty states, rewards messaging and points visibility throughout the storefront, while LiteCard integration puts membership cards in Apple Wallet and Google Pay for instant in-store recognition. The wider stack adds Shoplift for A/B testing, Tagalys for search and merchandising, Gorgias for unified customer support and Refundid for instant refunds and exchanges.
The ecosystem surpassed its 12-month member acquisition target within nine months, more than doubling it. Members who save their digital wallet card purchase 23% more frequently, and 37% of members shop across both channels versus 27% of non-members. Mobile-first optimisation sharpened an experience where more than 86% of sessions are mobile. Gorgias integration cut first response times to under one minute with average resolution at 11.5 hours — well below the industry benchmark — while Net Promoter Scores sit at 70% online and 80% in store.
Silver Fleece
South Australian knitwear manufacturer Silver Fleece implemented Shima Seiki Wholegarment 3D knitting technology as part of a broader Industry 4.0 transformation — modernising local production and strengthening sovereign Australian manufacturing capability.
Where traditional knitwear is produced in panels before being cut, linked and sewn, Wholegarment technology knits complete seamless garments directly from yarn in a single three-dimensional process. The staged implementation integrated the knitting technology with AI-assisted design and programming systems, Apex 4 software, workflow automation and real-time production data — supported by advanced training for machine operators and a pilot-production phase before full rollout.
The measurable gains are substantial. Production time per garment fell from three hours 30 minutes to two hours 10 minutes, a 38% reduction, while lead times dropped from 21 days to 12 — a 43% improvement in responsiveness. The seamless knit-to-shape process cut material waste from 14% to 2%, an 85% reduction in textile waste compared with cut-and-sew methods. Beyond efficiency, the platform enables rapid prototyping, complex technical garment development and product customisation — positioning Silver Fleece at the forefront of advanced Australian knitwear manufacturing.