Fabrics have been going digital along with everything else in recent years, and now companies are weaving virtual materials into real workflows to speed up and streamline design, development and decision-making.
But these virtual versions of real materials, complete with their look, texture and performance properties that can take the place of physical samples, are creating a whole new category of supply chain questions—and opportunity for those willing to explore the answers.
While many still see digital fabrics as a fun tool to try out for look books and campaigns, according to Quinten Schaap, founding director of Antwerp-based Bakermat, which curates and sells high quality fabrics and digitizes them for use in various 3D environments, there’s so much more to it.
“A huge gap and a real opportunity is in seeing how can we utilize this as an actual tool for change and an actual tool to make the supply chain stronger, but also more sustainable,” Schaap said during a recent webinar by The Interline, Is the Digital Materials Supply Chain Ready to Scale? “When digital materials start serving not only the visualization, but design, sourcing, decision-making as well, it can really become part of the brand’s infrastructure.”
If people see the design aspect as the only incentive, digital materials will struggle to scale, Schaap continued. One other incentive Bakermat offers keeps companies from creating the sample waste that traditionally accompanies testing colorways. “We can digitally recolor on the yarn and then we can showcase these new colorways the client is proposing…that helps guide clients towards more consciousness and reduce unnecessary physical development as well.”
To consider digital fabrics as solely visual aids is underselling their value in a big way, Jennie Peterson, partner at New Focus Textiles, a Hong Kong-based woven fabric manufacturer, agreed.
“It can be a package that has so many other files and other data within a set. You can have certifications, you can have traceability, you can have different layers of information that are within the file. You can have your lifecycle and performance data. You can have your network connectivity and interoperability. You can have your test reports for your seam slippage and your tearing,” she said. “Digital fabrics are [also] a way to communicate something visual in a way that can be machine readable, in a way that can be processed through AI, and it’s data that can be organized instead of being strictly a visual or physical item.”
Digital fabrics are also serving to foster collaboration—and IRL sourcing opportunities.
Designers using Bakermat’s 3D library have discovered new mills because of a virtual fabric they see and like. “People are starting to realize that if there are databases and libraries of digital materials, this could be used basically as a sourcing tool for physical materials, [too],” said Schaap. “That’s where Bakermat fits in because we sit between the textile supplier and a digital creator. We curate, digitize and distribute these textiles so they’re both physically available for sourcing and digitally available for creation.”
Of course—just as when sustainability entered the scene—one of the newest supply chain questions is: whose responsibility is it to invest in digitizing fabrics? The brands want it to be the fabric supplier and the fabric suppliers want it to be the brands.
“There’s some logic behind having the suppliers provide the digital materials, whether that’s the fabric manufacturer or the garment manufacturer, the idea being that they’re creating the material or the product and so they should own that source of truth that can then flow seamlessly downstream,” Katherine Absher, manager of fashion & digital design marketing at Cotton Incorporated, said during the discussion, adding that some suppliers see it as an R&D investment.
It’s an investment that can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars just for the technology alone. As a supplier, Peterson thinks the digital fabric creation should stay with them since they have the fiber information, the construction information and all the data that makes up that fabric. But once they create a file and share it, it’s nearly impossible to secure that asset they’ve invested in, she said.
“For the suppliers to be able to invest, they need to have a sense of control or ownership to be able to edit and manage the data that’s within the file and set permissions or know who’s accessing it,” Peterson said. “And they need to be able to see this as a strategic investment and not just as a risk.”
Garment manufacturers—who have had their hands slapped too many times before by mind-changing buyers—don’t want that risk. They want the brands to take it on.
“There can be a perspective that they prefer the brands to take on the responsibility for making materials, because ultimately it’s the brand customer that judges whether or not the material is accurate and whether they can use it to help them make prototyping decisions,” Absher explained. “It can be the most challenging to make the case towards the fabric manufacturers because they’re furthest upstream, and so they’re furthest away from getting the benefits right now out of digital materials as they currently exist.”
On the brand side, she said there’s a recognition that, “at least right now, it’s unrealistic to expect to have all the digital materials come from suppliers.” Because of that, some brands are keeping some capability for creating digital materials in house.
In a supply chain that’s constantly squeezed, until the costs come down, the fuzziness of who should foot the bill might see scale happen at a slow clip.
“For large brands, incentives are pretty clear,” Schaap said. “If you are able to do this in a big scale, you can increase efficiency, reduce your waste, have faster go-to-market cycles, all of this. But I think for smaller companies, designers, smaller brands or smaller manufacturers, the return only becomes positive once you reach a certain scale, and when you’re scanning hundreds of fabrics and using them across teams and collections, then it makes sense. But if not, then the investment in hardware, software and skilled people might not be the way to go.”
Third parties like Bakermat are trying to bridge the gap, as is Cotton Incorporated by offering its digital materials as a free resource.
“The hope is that the digital fabrics can serve as a bridge between the inspiration and then the actual creation, the manufacturing of those fabrics and eventually adoption into product,” Absher said.
Beyond hope, the reality is that suppliers and customers have their work cut out when it comes to opening lines of communication about aligning on digital fabric and creating more transparent and equitable partnerships if there’s any hope of real scale soon. Schaap said it will also take creating a shared intent—as to whether we’re scaling digital materials primarily for efficiency, sustainability, creativity or transparency—and that shared goals and standards will see necessary collaborations follow.
Either way, as Absher said, “This is the way that the industry works now. And it’s getting more important; it’s not just a hype level like some of the other technologies that we’ve seen. It’s getting more relevant, more helpful and more valuable.”
