Unique.Fashion Provides Tools, Community for Designers

At Gerber’s 2018 Ideation, keynote speaker and Millennial designer Rebecca Minkoff commented that she and her brother, who is a partner in the business, “think like companies that can potentially disrupt us.” The joint announcement between New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and OnPoint Manufacturing of Unique.Fashion is set to be one of those disruptors by making it easier for young fashion design graduates—or any fashion designer for that matter—to have access to software tools and an on-demand manufacturing platform that will help them get their designs to market in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. The site will initially be available to FIT students and graduates but will scale up to an open platform over time.

What is Unique.Fashion? It’s a partnership between FIT and OnPoint Manufacturing using the Human Solutions sizing engine. Users will be able to access tools available through a special website, Eliose.Fashion, to help in the design process and prepare their designs for manufacturing. Once a pattern is uploaded to the designer’s Unique.Fashion website, it will be available for purchase. Designers are responsible for marketing their designs and driving customers to their microsites. Unique.Fashion asks for no long-term commitment or control over the design. The designer dictates what sizes they want to offer and maintains complete artistic control.

A unique feature of this site is the innovative sizing engine OnPoint Manufacturing has developed in collaboration with Human Solutions. In this model, the designer uploads the garment, backed by a pattern and all of the necessary manufacturing instructions using the designer module of Unique.Fashion. Buyers can then select the garment they want to purchase and enter minimal data to determine size—age, height, weight, and gender. With this data, the system automatically parses through the 27,000 avatars that Human Solutions has placed in the database to choose the size that is the closest fit and returns more than 100 measurements that are used to choose the pattern that will deliver the closest fit. Then the garment is ordered, paid for, manufactured on-demand, and shipped.

“We are not limiting sizes to the normal 2-4-6-8,” says Kirby Best, Chairman at OnPoint Manufacturing. “Sizes can include 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. Most fashion houses want to limit the sizes available in order to limit inventory risk. The limiting factor for our sizing—or micro-sizing as we term it—is the width of the fabric, whether it can accommodate larger sizes. Patterns for all of these sizes are automatically generated based on designer specifications. We will actually make as many as four million patterns for each style. Since they are created electronically, once we have grading and ratio rules done, it only costs a couple hours of computer time to generate these massive amounts of patterns.”

Best reports that these four metrics have been proven to deliver accurate sizing. And the ability to choose from 27,000 avatars for body shape is also a huge benefit. Best sees this as a disruptive force in the way fashion will be brought to market, if his experience in another on-demand market is any indicator.

Best previously ran on-demand book printer Lightning Source. He reports that Lightning Source recently produced 290,000 unique titles in a single day and is a driving force in revolutionizing book printing. While it will take Unique.Fashion some time to scale up to anything near those levels, Best believes these on-demand manufacturing solutions will do the same thing for fashion as on-demand book production has done for books. The benefits are the same: no minimum order quantity, no need for inventory, payment up front before the item is produced, and a huge reduction in returns. Currently, OnPoint Manufacturing is not digitally printing its fabrics due to the slow speeds of today’s digital fabric printers as compared to the rest of the manufacturing process, meaning he must keep fabric inventories on hand.

However, that is about to change with digital fabric presses such as the EFI BOLT, which prints at up to 90 meters/minute, coming to market next year. This would mean that only base fabrics need to be inventoried. In the book world, Lightning Source limited the types of paper that could be used for book printing, making for a simpler supply chain. One can imagine that the same thing will happen in on-demand manufacturing of apparel when everything from print through shipping is all under one roof, and as automated as possible.

Best reports that the company continues to refine its sizing metrics to accommodate all body types. “For example,” he says, “a woman might be taller from the waist to the shoulder than the standard ratio, or shorter from waist to knees. We are starting to develop height ratios to accommodate these differences. We are also working on diagonal ratios to accommodate even more body shapes.”

Best is also keeping his eye on potential competitors, much like Minkoff, “thinking like companies that can potentially disrupt us.” One potential disruptor to the automated sizing model is the future of laser measuring, which is becoming less expensive and more accessible. “That won’t be a problem for us,” he says, “since we will be able to feed those measurements into the system at the time of order.”

We encourage our readers to keep an eye on Unique.Fashion and other emerging technologies in the world of on-demand fashion with a view toward their own future strategies and the threat of disruption from non-traditional competitors. In today’s fast-paced and highly technological market, nimbleness key. Unique.Fashion offers that nimbleness for fashion designers and opens the door for many more young, talented designers to get a good start on building a market following. Find article here PrintingNews.com/00000000 ■