How Data Helps Fight Fashion Waste

How Data Helps Fight Fashion Waste

Digitalization is helping to combat fashion waste through the notion of Made-To-Order (MTO) ... [+] clothing.

PlatformE

Geeks and fashion don’t usually mix. Software engineers and other technology professionals are known for their reliance on t-shirts, sandals (often worn with socks) or sneakers and a predilection for wearing shorts in the freezing rain and snow. A bold fashion statement for most software engineers is making the decision to dye their hair green or blue.

But putting techie stereotypes aside for a moment, a new intersection point between the tech community and the fashion industry cognoscenti could be surfacing. The fashion industry is notoriously bad at product waste… and technology wants to come to the rescue.

Just hanging around

The BBC has reported one recent example where a fashion designer has helped to develop recyclable clothes hangers. Data analytics applied across fashion industry supply chains has shown the scale of waste in the business; designer Roland Mouret suggests that single-use clothes hangers are the ‘plastic straw’ of the fashion industry.

Working with scientists, Mouret and his team have developed a new hanger constructed from 80% recycled ‘recovered sea plastic’ and 20% recyclable plastic. The hanger problem is not just down to customers discarding them after purchase; apparently some fashion companies ship clothes on cheap hangers (which are then thrown away) before they transfer products to ‘fancier’ hangers in store.

Hanger recycling enterprise First Mile says that hangers take 1,000 years to interrupt down in landfill. Clearly we want smarter supply chains, smarter city distribution networks, smarter adoption of recycled merchandise and smarter hangers if we are going to fight this waste.

Ah, push it

The style waste problem waste runs deeper. The middle difficulty comes all the way down to overproduction and the reality that the industry makes ‘too many’ clothes. This is because the retail area (and fashion specifically) has historically operated on a push version i.E. The use of guide procedures to make what designers wanted to sell, in preference to what clients wanted to shop for.

David Bishop, founder and CTO of Love the Sales, the world's biggest income aggregator for apparel explains that his organization works to assist retailers to maximize the financial recuperation of excess stock.

"There are severa points along the supply chain for fashion items which might be ripe for optimization and disruption. Given we currently live in a world confused with overstocking, perhaps the most pragmatic software of era is to suit this existing, regularly superb stock to customers who've a demand for it, who're often unaware it’s available to shop for,” stated Bishop.

But, of route, many clothing manufacturers simply don’t have the reach to efficaciously reveal their merchandise to all the folks who potentially want them - nor do they have a big sufficient information set or product catalogue to use advanced technologies to clear their merchandise.

“By the use of the underlying metadata of overstocked merchandise and pairing it with consumers who are actively searching for merchandise with matching behavioral metadata, we can clean inventory greater quick. This allows us to accomplice extra inventory with consumers effectively and forestall it accomplishing terminal (dumpable) popularity," stated Bishop.

Although the style industry has attempted to use AI to investigate style consumer selections and make predictions approximately what they will want subsequent, the issue of overproduction is actual and in the UK on my own, an predicted £a hundred and forty ($180) million well worth of clothing goes into landfill every 12 months.

One manner that digitalization is helping to make a dent in style industry waste figures is thru the perception of Made-To-Order (MTO) apparel, that's much more likely to be worn and stored for longer than an off-the-rack buy.

MTO technology expert PlatformE gives designers and brands access to virtual components, substances, colors, fonts, sizes, patches and each other detail of apparel manufacturing; letting them work with their customers to design, version and absolutely create thousands and thousands of design mixtures earlier than settling on what they need to peer through to production.

In realistic terms, this represents the capability to lessen the tens of millions of pattern merchandise created and discarded each year. When examined towards customer sentiment, predictive analytics and buy records, it could even decrease the manufacturing of probably unsuccessful product strains – lots of which come to be in landfill or even burned.

London, UK-based totally PlatformE offers the three-D customization tools for manufacturers includingGucci, whose organization makes use of the era to create customized apparel for man or woman customers.

Efficiency thru software

Co-founder & president of PlatformE Gonçalo Cruz explains that his company has taken a software centric method to efficiency.

“Providing customers and companions with a Software Development Kit (SDK), which connects and integrates a disparate system of manufacturers, shops and factories, enables our customers to scale at the same time as nonetheless having the flexibility to use their desired format, User Interface (UI) and User eXperience (UX). In addition, as our era is e-commerce engine agnostic, it's far interoperable with any e-commerce structures, each commercially to be had and proprietary, growing our flexibility to integrate,” stated Cruz.

Any client can create a digital collection for his or her very own fashion emblem ‘.Com’ or source. The cloud-based totally solution offers brands get entry to to a 3D digital database of accessories and garb, hosted via PlatformE. Fashion designers can use this tailoring kit to create alternatives for customizable merchandise, which the agency conceptualizes after which uploads into its software program-based totally ‘engine’. Using a dashboard, retail manufacturers are capable of gauge client alternatives and examine significant data which includes maximum popular styles, shades, substances and other editions. 

While it changed into complicated to create an summary common sense at the again cease, which knows and integrates with quite a whole lot every manufacturing system, Cruz insists that the client (frequently a clothier, however it is able to be an person customer) enjoy is vastly simplified as a end result.

 “Complexity is reduced proper from start of the virtual facts system wherein all product permutations – in the billions – are generated by way of PlatformE’s engine, without the need to create a single physical pattern. Customers are able to visualize their manufactured from desire and location an order based on a virtual sample generated by way of a 3D layered idea, or picture that does not actually exist bodily at that point in time. PlatformE’s Application Programming Interface (API) then translates that order right into a laptop language that the manufacturing unit can understand, performing as a virtual middleman among the distinct gamers inside the production method. The end result is a buy-activated production technique, operating on an on-demand basis and decreasing overproduction to 0%,” claims Cruz.

Setting a new trend

But can data and software really change the fashion world? Well yes, data analytics can change almost every aspect of business if it is applied in an intelligent way. Not every buying habit will change overnight… and not every supply chain construct will change overnight, but the trend for Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) consumption is real and people have started to rent their clothes and build so-called capsule wardrobes.

Will the development of fashion industry data intelligence engines stop all self-respecting geeks committing a few fashion faux pas nightmares? Well now, styling yourself with socks & sandals has its own Wikipedia page - so there’s your answer.

Socks and sandals, a tough act to pull off.

Wikipedia