It's International Women's Day and Ragtrader is celebrating the key women who make up Australia's fashion industry. Here, Australian Fashion Council industry relations manager Samantha Delgos builds a case for 3D sampling.
Despite the growing benefits of 3D digital sampling - from halving sampling costs to driving down environmental impacts - scaling it is easier said than done. Especially for larger brands.
This is highlighted by the Australian Fashion Council (AFC), which is currently on a mission to help more than 15,000 fashion labels across the country take on 3D digital sampling by trialling design workflows between participating brands and technology vendors.
Since early 2022, FashTech Lab has completed two pilot programs and one business case from the first one, with a second business case due shortly.
Australian fashion brand Cue was involved in the first pilot and had identified a hurdle when integrating the Digital Sampling Workflow software into their existing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system.
According to the initial business case, the scale of Cue and the restructuring required to embed new processes into a fast-moving, volume business would have required further planning and problem-solving. Cue manufactures a majority of its designs in Australia.
Outside of this pilot, the only other large businesses that have successfully onboarded 3D design workflows are Australian low-price retailer Kmart and local fashion brands JAG and Kookai.
“Particularly for bigger businesses, it can be harder when they're running at such a pace to slow down and implement or transition to a whole new way of working,” AFC industry relations manager Samantha Delgos says.
“But I think what we were seeing, and what the brands were saying to us is: once they see how much quicker you can turn around fit samples, and how they could create multiple colourways at a click of a button and hold online fit sessions with software that was identifying issues before they were even seeing a physical sample… the benefits were certainly starting to outweigh some of the short term challenges of migrating systems.”
Another challenge inhibiting the scaling of 3D design is the current skills shortage in Australian fashion. Delgos says that during its first session in 2022, participating brand Matteau voiced this issue from the get-go.
“As brands start to adopt this technology - because they are starting to see the clear benefits of going digital - then essentially, they're going to be competing with all the other brands for this digital talent, which is already identified as a skill shortage and what we don't have at the moment.”
A third and final learning is communicating the new sampling system to the rest of the organisation because, as Delgos says, it is a transformational system change.
“It's a completely different way of working for brands,” Delgos says. “If the brand representatives have someone from the production or design team jumping on the pilot program, they need to make sure that they're getting the decision makers on board early, and sharing their learnings from the program across all departments,” Delgos explains.
“It's going to start to influence not only the production design teams, but it'll have that flow-on effect to marketing teams if they're then using these digital samples as images and collateral, instead of using ghosting images.
“I mean, when one of the brands saw the digital samples, she said they looked more accurate to her than the photos that they had of the actual physical garments.”
But digital sampling can also filter into wholesale and selling teams as well.
“They don't have to create these massive wholesale collections of every style and every colourway, it just goes all digital. And they can have a full online collection that's just as realistic or more realistic than physical garments.”
Despite the learning curves and challenges, Delgos says this is precisely the role of FashTech Lab - to provide brands with a business case on how to implement digital sampling successfully in their own businesses.
“But it's also a chance for us to showcase what fashion jobs of the future are, and what they look like to students that are coming through universities and TAFE at the moment, and showing that you can go into jobs other than design - it could be digital pattern makers or digital illustrators.
“Being a digital pattern maker means you can work anywhere in Australia or the world. You can be working remotely, they earn a really good salary, and it's still got that craft design element to it as well.”
The process is also uncovering new raw data around the benefits of implementing 3D digital sampling. Through the creation of 30 digital samples in place of physical samples, the first pilot program delivered a 50% reduction in sampling costs and a decrease in sampling time from 12 to four weeks.
But in its latest pilot - which included Country Road, Jac + Jack, The Upside, Manning Cartell, Jordan Gogos, Liandra Swim and Ihraa Swim - the FashTech Lab was able to quantify the reduced environmental impact of digital sampling for the first time.
Through the production of 18 styles - and assuming brands would normally produce at least three fit samples before approving a garment for bulk production - the process saved 635,000 litres of water, and made three times less carbon emissions by not producing physical samples.
Delgos says the second pilot wrapped up in July 2023, which was then followed by a showcase of the digital samples to industry at Sydney Design Week in September.
“Now we're working on an update of our digital sampling business case to launch in 2024, which is a toolkit for AFC members that explains the workflow and key points that they need to consider when looking to transition to digital sampling.”
Amid all this, the AFC is also digging into another passion project called an environmental footprint calculator. Delgos says the calculator has already been developed and implemented in the United Kingdom.
The tool calculates carbon, water and textile waste of a brand’s product ranges using average lifecycle data that has been collected over the past 10 years by the Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP) UK team. It was trialled in Australia through AFC’s FashTech Lab cohort, which garnered a lot of positive feedback according to Delgos.
“This was the first time that the tool has been licensed outside of the UK as part of the FashTech programme.
“What we've since been doing is trialling the footprint tool with a number of other AFC member brands to collect their feedback, and have actually partnered with WRAP UK to start working on the calculator in 2024 and start tailoring it to the Australian clothing and textile industry.
“At the moment, it's very geared towards UK data - like all the fibres and fabrics that they source. So we want to start including more recent environmental data around Australian cotton and Australian wool to ensure that carbon and water results are as accurate as possible.”
Delgos says the AFC is also preparing to launch a research report in early 2024 that looks into the current and future state of local manufacturing in Victoria, alongside its key partners Epson and RMIT University.
“This will begin to imagine the future potential of local manufacturing, if we start to invest in innovative technologies like digital sampling, and what a circular clothing economy could look like in Victoria if we start to rightshore manufacturing capabilities,” Delgos says.
The report will also cover the aforementioned growing skills gap in local fashion manufacturing, which Delgos says is the future of Australian garment production.
“What we want to do is move from digital sampling to on-demand small-scale production through a digitally connected local supply chain - what we call micro factories - because the future of local manufacturing in Australia is definitely to make smaller volume collections made-to-order on demand and to reduce overproduction.”