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.

Key Takeaways:

  • Without shifting their strategic focus, brands that have already embraced DPC as part of their design workflows now have the captive to extend the value of those digital assets in merchandising.
  • Beyond those immediate possibilities, there is no single fixed definition of scale and maturity; brands will instead be looking to prioritise the use cases that align with their strategic objectives.
  • Key drivers like speed, informed decision-making, and better consumer-facing experiences will dictate the direction in which DPC pipelines develop.
What do you believe are the greatest opportunities that are realistically achievable, in 2024, through investment in DPC talent and tools?

The industry has had a laser focus on embedding DPC into design, tech design and ecommerce/marketing – without shifting focus from these key functional groups, there are massive opportunities that brands can realize in the coming year by embedding DPC into merchant tasks. Capabilities like visual assortment and planning tools are emerging, and we are already seeing them gather momentum based on the success of early adopters. Enabling merchants to leverage digital samples opens the door for even more robust insights, stronger strategies, and faster assortment iterations. We are seeing clients leveraging assets to gain early consumer insights, connect digital samples to merch plans and begin to see the end-to-end benefits of a DPC transformation.

After running your digital product creation survey for several years, you changed the emphasis this time around – moving away from actually ranking maturity for the first time. What precipitated this change in 2023, and what insights did you glean?

The scale we’ve used in years past utilized a 1-5 maturity scale with 1 representing little to no activity, 2- developing strategy, 3- conducting proofs of concept, 4- in the process of scaling, 5- operating at scale. From 2020 to 2022, we saw a massive jump in maturity in every capability- no surprise there.

In our work with clients across the industry, we know that there is significant nuance in what scaling means within each capability and brand. In our 2024 survey, we chose to pause looking at maturity, and really zoom in on what scaling looks like across brands. We expect that the industry will remain in scaling mode in 2024 and see value in the insights gleaned from deep diving on the challenges and successes that will ultimately elevate brands to operate with DPC capabilities at scale.

In your “2022 DPC in Retail Research”, the data you gathered revealed a significant amount of acceleration (in both ambition and adoption) in what you refer to as “make” and “sell” capabilities – taking digital product creation both up and downstream. Has that blended approach persisted, or are we seeing the industry lean more heavily in one particular direction?

The industry shows strength across both areas, but brands do tend to have strength in one area or the other. Brands with advanced capabilities in creating beautiful digital sample visualizations may still be piloting digital use cases in design. It isn’t rare to see a brand prioritizing one focus over the other, depending on their own strategic imperatives.

We’ve seen brands focused on really embedding design and digital development into product creation and development in 2023- the “make” part of the digital thread. We are also seeing this in the continued focus and advancements around material digitization. In this year’s survey, respondents overwhelmingly indicated that speed to market, agility and product design were the top priorities of digital product creation. These all indicate a continued prioritization of “make” capabilities.

However, capabilities within the “sell” section of the digital thread are just as, if not more, mature for certain segments of the industry. Luxury Brands, for instance, have had huge success with a focus on selling and customer experiences that push the boundaries of the “sell” capabilities. These brands have built followings and gained valuable customer insights by focusing on how to use digital assets in virtual stores, on gaming platforms, with digital runway shows and in some Web 2.0 applications.

There is value in focusing on both ends of the spectrum, and brands are realizing their ROI based on custom strategic approaches.

As broad as the horizon is for 3D and digital product creation, no DPC strategy can be completely open-ended, and your research this year really underlined the need to set and measure return on investment – whether its incremental or transformational. How do you recommend our readers think about tracking and proving short-term value as well as keeping tabs on the vision for long-term digital transformation?

Every initiative should start with the problem the brand is solving for and use that to direct the focus. It’s important to recognize where you are and want to be within the industry, using that to inform the short- and long-term priorities and approach.

Even as the horizon for a DPC transformation shifts, a brand can establish a long-term vision with clear objectives for DPC that are grounded in the strategic imperatives of a company. With a long-term view set, break the vision into achievable sprints to establish the short-term value and allow for flexibility to adjust as you test and learn with proofs of concept before moving to pilot and implementation. With technology changing and maturing, it is important to build room for innovation and adaptation in the vision- plan for reflection and monitor the priorities of the brand and industry.

Robust metrics and KPIs are useful, but don’t over complicate it- focus on what is most important to the business and metrics that track user adoption and support a strong change management strategy.

Generative AI and the very real applications within DPC can’t be ignored. We are already seeing AI tools in DPC- including virtual try on, realistic avatars and material generation. AI and DPC will continue to live in an overlapping space, and machine learning offers many potential and current compliments to already existing DPC capabilities.

Software companies that serve DPC should and will continue to grow their generative capabilities to create efficiencies, speed and scale in the coming months and years. We should be seeing AI with the right inputs as an efficiency tool in digital product development and design- generating concepts, creating color runs, enhancing the realism of digital samples, and replacing repetitive tasks.

An interesting aspect of AI also lies in navigating the legality and policy that impacts data ownership and usage. This will continue to flesh out over the next year, and we expect to see rigor being established to protect the rights of creators and brands.

Brands should be monitoring how AI can serve their goals alongside DPC and the legal aspects of how AI is applied across the board. The right applications will allow their talent to focus efforts, generating bigger returns and enhancing inputs in the worlds of design and merchandising.

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?

DPC is an ecosystem of capabilities, and there is no one size fits all approach to a digital product creation pipeline, but the ideal pipeline fosters collaboration and speeds up decisions during “make” and enhances the customer experience in “sell”. In “make”, the capabilities are anchored in technology that serves all areas of the product development and adoption processes and do not isolate the digital responsibility to one area of the business.  The ideal pipeline begins with materials and other libraries that enable the focus of the brand (fit, visualization, design, etc.).

The ideal DPC pipeline is centred on the needs of the business, as well. To give two often referenced goals: a brand might be focused on creating a fast/speed to market lever, and that will look different from a brand focused on a pipeline that brings assets to ecommerce. Setting strategic goals ahead of defining the DPC pipeline is an absolute imperative.

One of the things that excites me most about DPC is the door it opens to connect all kinds of data to visuals of the product and assortment, so the ideal pipeline is integrated into the enterprise data and used across the business. This unprecedented access to information requires potentially complex data management strategies- organizing this data remains a barrier to the ideal pipeline for a lot of companies.

According to our “2023 DPC in Retail Research”, the biggest barriers to brands building a digital pipeline are organizational change management and a scarcity of skilled talent, two points that do go hand in hand. Successful initiatives are upskilling their people as they move them through the transformation and look to these teams to lead the change.

Looking into 2024, digital product creation can enable agility for brands that have spent the past years investing in a pipeline that solves for their unique strategic imperatives. The key in the coming year(s) will be to monitor emerging tech that fills the current white spaces and allows brands to connect the technology across different capabilities and truly deploy an end-to-end digital product creation ecosystem.

Stories from the fold between fashion and technology, told by industry experts.