California Apparel News

How software leaders are charging ahead in the speed-to-market race

The idea of designing a collection 14 months in advance is so last century. Today, to hit a trend with a bull’s-eye shot, you’re going to have to fire closer to the target. And designing closer to the season means speeding up product development, the most time-consuming part of creating a collection.These leading software solutions providers for the apparel industry can help you do that, with everything from Product Lifecycle Management applications to 3-D motion simulators and the latest in Computer-Assisted Design software.

When it comes to technology, California is one of the world’s most innovative regions. From Silicon Valley to film animation studios like Dreamworks, California both creates and embraces technology. And while some in the industry perceive that California is ahead of New York when it comes to implementing the latest technologies, others perceive that California is lagging behind the Europeans when it comes to cranking out fast fashion.

California Apparel News talked with four innovators to get their take.

New Generation Computing

Perhaps because Los Angeles is populated with so many new, fast-growing companies—especially in the surf and skate arena—it has a competitive edge, says Mark Burnstein, vice president of PLM solutions for NGC.

When it comes to deciding whether or not to implement a Product Lifecycle Management application, “it all depends on your mindset,” says Burnstein. “I think in more established parts of the country, it takes a lot to get them to change. They say, ’Hey, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so what if I use spreadsheets and e-mails? My business is okay.’ But the West Coast is like, “Business is exploding, what can I put in place to help me manage it?’”

Over the past year, NGC’s business on the West Coast has tripled as PLM is seen more as a necessity than a luxury. “You have your innovators who are willing to risk money and time and effort in a new kind of software product. Then you have your early adopters, the ones who are leading the trail, and then you have your mainstream adopters, and that’s just where we are now.”

Moreover, newer companies are surprisingly patient compared to established ones, and are willing to make an investment in something that may not amortize the cost over value for a few years. “But the old guard says, ’If I invest this money today, what else could I have spent it on if I’m not going to see results for three or four years? I could have bought a house.’ They don’t really think about the return on investment.”

So what’s Burnstein’s sales pitch in the face of such resistance? He bluntly tells a client, “If you’re not able to be competitive and constantly improving in the apparel business, you’re going to be out of business. It’s not like you’re making widgets and sell so many thousands per year. If you miss the fashion for a couple of seasons, you’re done: People aren’t going to buy your product.”

Burnstein points out the importance of speed-to-market in today’s ultra-competitive business climate, and how PLM can help companies design closer to season. “The closer you are to the trend, the better you can forecast what’s happening.”

Fashion designers at one of NGC’s clients were convinced that adopting a PLM system would add time to their already harried days. Management, however, insisted, and the designers were shocked to find that PLM saved them two to three hours per day because of the smooth and thorough information flow about things like approved samples and zipper suppliers. Says Burnstein, “The minute something is approved, you have these automatic alerts that notify people downstream.”

Founded in 1982, NGC’s clients include Maidenform, GoldToe, Armani Exchange, and Casual Male. Its flagship product is called e-SPS, a PLM application launched in 1999 initially as a way for companies to collaborate more easily with overseas suppliers. The program has been updated each year, becoming more of a comprehensive solution in the process.

The latest version, which was released in late July, includes such innovations as a customizable user interface. This allows each user to create an interface catering to the tasks he or she most often performs, drawing up screens and providing information most pertinent to that worker. Competing PLM applications, says Burnstein, are typically either out of the box—one size fits all—or need to be custom-built by the solutions provider. “Here, it’s very easy for each user to set up their own interface,” says Burnstein.

Other new features to e-SPS include enhanced line planning and more cost-management functionality. With the latter, the program can now estimate costs, such as shipping and related fees, involved in sending products from one place to another, whether Shanghai to Los Angeles, or Hong Kong to Long Beach. There are also tools to calculate the number of garments per shipping container, so that containers are not shipped only halfway full.

Visibility is the key concept driving the refinement of e-SPS. “Our product provides visibility throughout the production cycle,” says Burnstein. “Most other PLMs, from line plan through adoption, that’s where they stop. Nothing having to do with collaboration on the supply chain.” With this one application, vendors can login to see purchase orders, pack and ship orders, and update information until the package finally arrives in the distribution center. “Our system tracks from the time you have a concept to the time it’s received in the warehouse.”

C-Design

The French have had a thirst for beauty for centuries, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the leading French software companies catering to the apparel industry specializes in the visually driven world of design software.

Founded in Paris in 1998, C-Design is one of Europe’s leading providers of apparel design software, with major specialty-store clients such as Christian Dior, Zara, New Look, and Pinkie. In summer 2006, it opened its first U.S.-based office, and is currently working on deals with a number of “very, very big” American companies, according to founder and CEO Patrick Abbou.

The company’s flagship product is called C-Design Fashion. As opposed to popular but generic programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, C-Design Fashion was designed specifically for the needs of fashion designers and patternmakers. “We are the only ones with this special approach and special process,” says Abbou.

C-Design Fashion comes as one comprehensive application with no need for additional software or plug-ins. It was developed in partnership with graphics-industry giant Corel, which provides the program’s graphics engine, and with California-based Hewlett-Packard. C-Design worked with Hewlett Packard to produce the HP Tablet PC already equipped with the C-Design Fashion software, allowing designers to use a pen and tablet instead of keyboard and mouse for up to 99 percent of the design process. Prices start at $9,500 per licensed user.

Like all software aimed at the apparel industry, the program is meant to save time, facilitate greater accuracy, and aid in speed-to-market.

The program is multifaceted and intended to be used by multiple departments in the design process. “Some of our competitors start lower in price, but when you get all their options, it’s more expensive. And you’ll need to switch all the time from one piece of software to another to do a different task.”

C-Design Fashion gives the designer a library of 18,000 men’s, women’s, and children’s garments to use as starting points. Colors, graphics, logos, and effects like stonewashing are easily added. Patternmakers can then create a technical package with measurements, fabrications, and sewing instructions, drawing on a database of 50 customizable technical packs.

C-Design Fashion also has an interface for marketing and visual merchandising, allowing users to easily create graphics for shop windows, in-store displays, and even fashion shows. There is also a project management aspect to C-Design Fashion so that a collection can be tracked throughout the development and production process.

But despite this last feature, C-Design Fashion functions much differently from a PLM application. “Sometimes with PLM, you are far away from the product itself because you are in too many fields,” says Abbou. PLMs can be cumbersome, he explains, whereas with C-Design Fashion, relevant data is entered on the design page, “so all the time you are focused on the product.”

Depending on the customer, C-Design Fashion can be incorporated with a PLM system or stand alone. And it is not geared toward any particular type of user, large or small. “It can be used by a freelancer or the biggest apparel company in the world,” says Abbou.

As for what differentiates C-Design Fashion from popular CAD programs, Abbou says his program represents the evolution of Computer Assisted Design. Although C-Design Fashion is not the first program to combine bitmap and vector graphics formats, it is the first to seamlessly combine them in a drag and drop format. This allows a designer to create a drawing of a shirt, for example, and then import a photograph of a palm tree and drag it right onto the shirt.

Another key feature of the software is its ability not just to import files in over 80 different formats, but export them as well in other native file formats. “This allows a company to be compatible with a freelancer using Photoshop or Illustrator,” says Abbou. “This was very important for the vision of the software—to be very open with the world and other technologies.”

Tukatech

Ram Sareen has seen the future, and it is Tesco.

Not that the U.K.-based masters of fast fashion will invade the United States, but its business model will exert a profound influence, if it hasn’t already.

The reason is that Tesco is the first fashion retailer to go 100 percent digital in the creation of product samples. And the rest of the apparel industry, says Sareen, “has no choice except to head that way.”

For the past three years, Tesco has been using Tukatech’s service TUKAweb in the creation of its master pattern blocks, just one of Tukatech’s software-based solutions for the apparel industry. Founded in Los Angeles in 1996 by Sareen, a former regional manager for Gerber and software consultant, Tukatech is named after Sareen’s wife and aims to “do everything that others do not do.” Tukatech fully implements technology, combining engineering with consulting and unlimited training to its clients. “It’s not that our system is better,” says Sareen, “it’s what we do with it.”

Driving the company is the push to make every company just a little bit more like Tesco, a kind of Wal-Mart of the United Kingdom, which has expanded from groceries to practically every product category imaginable, including fashion, which the mega-retailer churns out at a pace that makes H&M look slow.

To do that involves speeding up the product development process, since manufacturing and shipping are typically done as quickly as is currently possible. The product development process is hindered by the drawn-out process of making samples for approval. This is what technology can fix, if companies are brave enough to cease doing things the way they’ve been done the past 50 years. “The ultimate goal,” says Sareen, “and it does involve a paradigm change, is to not even make a sample garment. Why can’t we view electronically what the garment will look like?”

Apparel is one of the few industries that does not rely on 3-D modeling, says Sareen. “Nobody would make a building and then say, ’Maybe we should have done it this way, or change the position of the windows, or make it taller. But we do this all day long in the garment industry.”

But whereas buildings are static, clothing moves. And the challenge of 3-D modeling is replicating how a garment moves on the human body. “Almost every 3-D software supplier has a static look of how the garment is going to fit. The avatar model is standing there, and you drape the garment to see how it will look. But in real life it doesn’t happen like that.”

The answer is Tukatech’s E-fit Simulator, which it released in summer 2006 in partnership with Autodesk, which makes the software’s motion simulator engine. Other apparel software programs have motion abilities, says Sareen, but none that are built directly into the program. “If you ask other companies if they have a built-in motion simulator, the answer will be no.”

E-fit Simulator shows where garments are fitting tightly and loosely when a body is in motion, and works best in tandem with another Tukatech product, TUKAforms, a soft-body mannequin that can be squeezed just like the human body. Made in Los Angeles with a price tag of $3,500–$5,000, TUKAforms can be made to replicate a company’s fit model or a generic model. They are ideally placed throughout the supply chain, from design studio to manufacturing plant, so that everyone involved has a point of reference. It addresses today’s global environment and eliminates the need to fly a fit model around the world. Tukatech’s clients include Lane Bryant, Bebe, Calvin Klein, and Dillard’s. “I can honestly say that they’ve all been able to reduce the time necessary to make the first sample and get an approval,” says Sareen.

E-fit Simulator and TUKAforms show the company’s comprehensive approach to being a solutions provider. With other companies, says Sareen, “Somebody makes the mannequin, somebody makes the PLM, and somebody makes the 3-D. There is no other company that has taken care of the entire process. And there is no other company that has unlimited training—forever.”

Tukatech offers a wide range of products aimed at apparel companies large and small. For fast-growing but cash-strapped companies leery of investing in Tukatech’s PLM application, called TUKAplan, TUKAweb can serve as a convenient way of test-driving the software at an hourly rate. TUKAweb uses a partnership with Kinko’s to provide service centers around the world; its customers number 2,500 companies in 49 countries. “My goal is to offer technology to the 85 percent of the industry that cannot afford to buy it,” says Sareen.

Other products include TUKAcad, a sophisticated production suite that combines patternmaking, grading, and marker making into one unified package. The latest release includes new video training lessons. TUKAstudio is a complete design studio solution for creating all fabric components from colorways, repeats, jacquards, plaids, and yarn dyes, all the way to visual merchandising.

Tukatech boasts a worldwide staff of 300 located in 13 offices, and yet includes no salespeople. Explains Sareen, emphasizing Tukatech’s comprehensive approach, “55 percent of my business comes from existing customers, so why do I need salespeople?”

Browzwear

Kent Parajon is a super salesman. Over the past seven years he has faced every manner of resistance from customers in the apparel industry. And he’s not trying to sell ice to Eskimos; he’s trying to help them meet the speed-to-market challenge and become more successful.

Thankfully things are changing, and today the industry is embracing technology. “I’ve seen how the market has grown,” says the North American sales rep for Tel Aviv–based Browzwear. “When I first started selling this, people looked at me and said, ’You know, this is beautiful, but it looks like something out of ’Star Wars,’ and I don’t think we’re ready for it.’”

The widget Parajon is selling is V-stitcher, Browzwear’s three-dimensional design software. The application uses complex mathematical algorithms to replicate how garments will drape on the human body, speeding up the sample process. Reluctant customers intimidated by the new technology changed their minds once they saw all the program could do. “Once clients were given their wish list and I could show it to them, then the interest started to gain more, and within the last year 3-D has really started to take a nice root in the apparel industry.”

Unlike other suppliers of design software, Browzwear developed its own engine to run the application. “We have the most powerful 3-D engine right now,” Parajon says. “As far as rendering and simulating of drape, it is the most precise. We are the leader and innovator of this type of technology,” he adds.

Users of V-stitcher first create a virtual replica of their fit models. This is made easier by a database of over 100 body measurements. Once the fit model has been replicated, designers import a pattern from any CAD program. The pattern is then placed on the avatar model, and fabric properties are added, such as type of fabric and weight.

Innovations in the latest version of V-stitcher include a selection of 3-D environments. The virtual fit model can now be seen in an apartment, nightclub, and other places. Browzwear can also custom-make environments to a client’s specifications.

The ideal customer for V-stitcher is a well-established company. “The software is not cheap, though it’s not really expensive compared to a lot of other types of software out there. It has to be a company where their business model is set up that they’re making lots of samples and doing business overseas—a major manufacturer.” Such companies, he says, “want to save time, go faster to market, show their lines virtually in a day’s time instead of months, to cut the whole development process down.”