Discussing DPC with Mirko Scolari of Happy Finish

Released in The Interline’s DPC Report 2023, this executive interview is one of a sixteen-part series that sees The Interline quiz executives from major DPC companies on the evolution of 3D and digital product creation tools and workflows, and ask their opinions on what the future holds for the the extended possibilities of digital assets.

For more on digital product creation in fashion, download the full DPC Report 2023 completely free of charge and ungated.

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What do you believe are the greatest opportunities that are realistically achievable, in 2024, through investment in DPC talent and tools?

In our view, the investment in DPC talent and future-ready tools in 2023/24 can have a significant positive impact on areas of strategic importance for brands, such as sustainability, speed to market, digital ecosystem development, and purchasing journeys for sell-in and sell-through.

As DPC and CG workflows evolve, tools like Nvidia’s Omniverse or Epic Unreal Engine are paving the way for much needed greater interoperability among proprietary platforms, tools and applications.

In our experience this is absolutely critical for ensuring that digital assets can be utilised more seamlessly and beyond walled-garden ecosystems. In the end this will help scale the digital asset lifecycle, make it more efficient and future-ready, as well as open up much wider talent pools.

In light of the importance that fashion brands, big and small, are placing on digital product creation, what does it mean, to you, to be strategic technology and service partner at such a pivotal point in the industry’s adoption of 3D / DPC?

Being a strategic technology and service partner comes with a unique blend of opportunity and responsibility. At this point in the DPC and CG (r)evolution, our role increasingly transcends service provision alone, and we act as a critical friend to our partner brands, a key influencer who helps inform and shape decision-making. It’s a tremendous opportunity to help define and establish best practices. As a strategic partner, there’s a great responsibility to help brands align their digital asset lifecycle strategies with consumer expectations.

One significant challenge we often find in the adoption of DPC is a tendency towards siloed thinking within brands, particularly regarding the use of 3D assets. As a partner, there’s an opportunity for us to recognise and address this challenge. By facilitating cross-departmental collaboration, we help brands see the full potential of 3D assets beyond their immediate or departmental use case. This approach not only optimises the investment in DPC but also enhances the overall effectiveness and impact of the brand’s marketing and communication (marcoms) strategies and helps deliver against ambitious goals towards net zero.

We can act as a playmaker, bridging the gap between marketing, communications, and DPC functions. This role involves not just technical assistance but strategic consultancy, helping brands to fund and extract the most value from their digital product creation investments. The goal is always to create a cohesive strategy where DPC becomes an integral part of the brand’s DNA, influencing everything from product design to customer engagement.

In essence, being a strategic partner at this pivotal point means being both a visionary and a pragmatist. It’s about seeing the potential of DPC and CG in revolutionising the fashion industry and being adept at translating this potential into tangible, effective solutions for each unique brand.

For a lot of fashion organisations, building and scaling content creation pipelines, and managing the lifecycles of digital assets, have not traditionally been core competencies, which is why you’ve found that more than 60% of brands are facing challenges in this area. But we’re now at a juncture where these are quickly become essential capabilities. How large is the gap, in your experience, between fashion’s ambitions for digital twins and actual maturity? And what’s your approach to bridging it through technology and cultural change?

In our experience, the gap between the fashion industry’s aspirations for digital twins and its actual maturity in managing digital content and asset lifecycles is significant, especially in some established brands. This disparity is not just a matter of adopting new technologies; it’s about a fundamental shift in approach and mindset.

Incumbent fashion brands have traditionally excelled in the art of crafting unique, high-quality products, akin to haute couture. However, scaling content creation pipelines is more akin to ready-to-wear – it’s about producing high volumes consistently and efficiently. This requires a different set of skills and processes, and many brands are finding themselves in unfamiliar territory.

Addressing this gap requires more than just new tools; it necessitates a cultural and organisational shift. Many older, established brands are structured in a way that impedes innovation. In contrast, smaller, more agile players are quicker to adopt new technologies and workflows, gaining competitive advantages.

As per the famous Tolstoy quote where ”All happy families are alike; and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” we work very closely with brands to understand their unique challenges and strengths. We tailor solutions not just to technological needs, but to organisational structures and cultures.

For example, digital product creation (DPC) teams often operate separately from e-commerce and marketing divisions. This lack of integration leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. The challenge is not just in adopting new technology but in fostering end-to-end thinking across internal silos. The key is a holistic, interdepartmental approach that allows for digital asset portability, accelerating lead times from design through marketing and ultimately to the consumer.

Is the best content creation and asset management / use pipeline one that borrows best practices and tools from other sectors as well as industry-specific solutions and uses them to create a common platform for fashion, or one that’s highly tailored for each individual brand?

In our experience, the optimal approach involves a balanced blend of cross-sector best practices, such as much more digitally matured industries like Automotive, Architectural – BIM – and of course gaming and industry-specific solutions.

As mentioned above, interoperability is crucial here. By embracing open standards and a broader, more open approach, brands benefit in several ways. Firstly, it fosters innovation by allowing new ideas and techniques to flow freely across different sectors and from brand to brand. Secondly, it contributes to the development of a larger talent pool.

On the other hand, opting for a single, proprietary platform can be limiting in the long run. Such platforms might not evolve quickly enough to keep pace with technological advancements or changing industry needs. Furthermore, they often lock brands into a specific way of working, which can stifle creativity and innovation.

In our view, the goal should be to craft solutions that are specific to each brand’s requirements, using a mix of the best practices available.

For us, the most effective content creation pipelines in fashion are those that are built on the principles of interoperability and flexibility, incorporating best practices and innovation from across the board. This approach allows for the crafting of solutions that are both innovative and tailored to the specific needs of each brand.

One of the biggest bottlenecks to scaling digital product creation is the assignment of a large workload to a small talent pool. Across industry and education, the effort to grow that talent pool is ongoing but relatively slow, which creates a strong argument for automation. What’s your experience of automating content creation pipelines to break this barrier, and what benefits have you and your clients seen?

The real challenge now is to reconcile creativity with efficiency, scale, and breadth. In our experience, the evolution of DPC and CG has reached a point where the focus is shifting from churning content for various channels to the strategic configuration and automation of these asset pipelines. This transition marks a significant development in how value is perceived and generated in the industry.

We believe that the real value for brands now lies in the ability to configure and automate their CG asset and content creation pipelines, while devoting more focus on how creativity permeates throughout their entire value chain.

This shift emphasises not just the output but the process itself. Automation plays a key role here, transforming what was once a labour-intensive process into a significantly more streamlined and templatised operation.

By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, we can help brands optimise their use of available talent.

In our view, automating content creation pipelines is a critical step in breaking the scalability barrier in CG and DPC. It not only addresses the talent shortage but also brings substantial benefits in terms of sustainability, consistency, quality, scale, and cost.

How would you describe the ideal 3D / DPC pipeline – category-specific or generalised – and what barriers are currently preventing it from being built and widely adopted? What pieces still need to be put in place for fashion to stand the best chance of achieving what you define as the full-scale vision for DPC?

We believe that the ideal CG / (DPC) pipeline represents a balance between universal standards and brand-, category, and product-specific customisation. In our day to day, we come across several barriers and missing pieces that often get in the way:

1. Walled Gardens and Closed Ecosystems: Too many vendors in the DPC space still operate within closed or near closed ecosystems. This limits innovation and knowledge sharing, which are essential for the development of a more integrated and efficient DPC / CG ecosystem.
2. Short-term Thinking: There’s a prevailing short-term mindset focused on immediate gains rather than long-term, strategic goals. This approach hinders the development of standardised, interoperable solutions that would greatly benefit brands and the industry in the medium to long-term.
3. Siloed Approach to Asset Lifecycle: There’s a need to view digital product twins and their asset lifecycle more holistically, breaking down internal silos. DPC should be understood as the starting point of the asset lifecycle, not an end in itself, with a focus on how these assets are managed, updated, and utilised throughout their lifecycle.

In our view, creative automation is key, tailored to the specific needs of different product lines, categories, and brands. This means deploying automated content creation tools that can adapt to a variety of requirements while maintaining brand consistency and quality.