Operationalising DPC At New Balance

[All images provided by new balance.]

After making significant, early strides, New Balance have remained at the forefront of 3D – marrying their commitment to heritage with a major drive towards digital content and digital creation. We sat down with two key figures in the brand’s digital strategy to talk tools, assets, and what it means to operationalise DPC.

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The Interline: More than two years ago, we spotlighted New Balance’s journey towards digital product creation. At that time, you’d been able to translate a lot of the pioneering work you’d done in design and development into downstream visualisation – which was something a lot of brands at that time were working towards as a reaction to the sudden, pandemic-era shift to eCommerce. Since then, that use of digital assets as a replacement for product photography has become a major driver for scaling 3D / DPC industry-wide; everybody wants to replace buyer-facing assets with digital ones. But what’s interesting is that New Balance is now almost coming full circle, and you’ve since spent a lot of time focusing on design, and asking some big questions about what the next stage of that evolution looks like. Why are you placing that renewed emphasis on digital design and development, and how does that fit into New Balance’s overall product creation process and route to market?

Jared Goldman, VP of Innovation, Digital Design & Operations: When we first started with digital design, we had a simple goal: to have designers working and showing concepts in 3D vs 2D illustrator. The ability to make decisions and for non-creatives to understand an idea is much higher when looking at a 3D asset. The more we’ve gone through this process – getting deeper into digital product creation – the more that target has shifted, in several different directions.

Downstream, we want our digital teams to be able to create assets and visuals and experiences that photography can’t do. It might be animations, product information spotlights where we’re exploding shoes into their individual components – whatever the format, the aim now is to use digital tools and assets to be as expressive and engaging with product storytelling as we can be, without the constraints of having to put a shoe in front of a camera.

Within product creation, we’re really focusing on making the initial design stage faster and better by encouraging all our designers to work in 3D from the start. Looking at a 2D sketch, you’re always going to be trying to guess what the product should look like. But if you and your colleagues are working with a 3D asset then everyone’s looking at the same thing, with no room for interpretation, and you’re getting the ability to make more accurate decisions and ultimately get to a final product quicker, without any compromises.

Something we’ve started, and we’re going after in a big way over the next couple of years, is the digital side of product development and production – whether the digital asset can serve as the tech package. We’re constantly asking ourselves questions like, “what is a 3D tech pack going to look like?” and “what do technical specifications really need to look like in general?” because that, to us, is the next logical step.

And we’re also working on bringing all those things together in a way that just helps people work better together. We’ve really done a lot of work with Gravity Sketch over the last couple of years, and being able to design, review, and collaborate in VR opens up the possibility to cut a huge amount of time out of the whole process. People have always talked about digital samples, and how much faster and more sustainable they are than physical ones, but the ability to have a designer wearing a headset in the US, reviewing a model, in real-time, with a partner at a factory in Vietnam – that’s on a whole different level.

So I think everything we’re doing with digital assets and tools, in design and beyond, is in service of making smarter decisions and getting the best possible products to market faster.

The Interline: What does it mean to really operationalise all those different objectives and workflows? How are you approaching the task of making 3D design and development a repeatable process that becomes the standard for New Balance’s designers? And how do you work to make digital assets the cornerstones of those other processes?

Mary Grim, Head of Global Digital Operations: There’s a lot to unpack there, obviously, but the best summary is that we’re very focused on having the right tools and processes to facilitate everything Jared just spoke about. Realising that value of the content we are creating is about having the right systems (tools, skills and processes) for every part of the digital ecosystem.

So from that point of view, I don’t even believe it’s about thinking in terms of assets any more. The kind of digital pipelines we’re building obviously carry assets a but really operationalising it all is about standing up people and process with our digital creation capabilities. It’s about training, learning by doing, and anchoring digital creation in the day-to-day. It’s the side of DPC that isn’t as outwardly exciting because it’s not directly about the product, but it’s all necessary to bring that vision for a complete pipeline to life, ensuring workflows and processes scale.

It’s not just about learning new tools; it’s about really understanding what digital content and digital products are. I talk a lot about this all being part of a programme of digital literacy, and I think that’s a useful way to think about it – because you can continue to technically improve at creating digital product without automatically getting better at understanding and seeing digital product well enough to critically assess and make decisions with confidence.

In that context, the important thing is that this is a vision we’re going after step-by-step. So probably the most vital thing is to align everyone on priorities, which means going back to basics and making sure that everyone – top-down – agrees on which areas of digital transformation to prioritise and pursue, because there are just too many exciting opportunities to pursue them all at once.

We have a wildly talented team at New Balance, and I don’t just mean in design. I’m fortunate and energized in that I get to work with people who recognise that getting the most out of these opportunities isn’t a matter of adopting new digital tools, but instead thinking about what their priorities are, and how digital can help change the way we do business.

And honestly, I think this is something people underestimate. Obviously, every business, and every department has priorities, but actually aligning priorities specifically across the brand is mission critical to successfully moving forward and scaling big ideas like DPC. The costs, complexity and change management involved cannot be managed successfully in a silo.

Jared Goldman: I want to support that, because Mary and I are working together on our roadmap, and having everybody aligned to it is incredibly important when you’re asking people to change. If we want our factory partners to invest in Gravity Sketch, for example, and to buy VR headsets, then those factories are going to need to see and share in a clear vision for where we’re going, and why we’re asking them to spend money.

The same goes for senior leadership: there has to be a very clear business case for change, and while sometimes it’s an easily-measurable return on investment, in others it’s more a case of laying the groundwork for a different way of working in the near future. In every case, you need everybody on board.

And it’s important to be selective about what you want to achieve. There are so many possibilities that open up when you hit different levels of digital creation maturity, so you have to be careful about concentrating on particular areas, not spreading yourself too thin, and determining the right speed and scale to target. Do you stand a better chance of success by testing or piloting a new tool or process, or do you potentially secure more uptake by saying “this is the way we’re going to work now, and we’ll support everyone in making the transition”?

That’s a situational question, and I don’t know if there’s a single right answer. We’ve definitely experimented with both ways. But whatever route you take, having people truly aligned to the direction is going to be essential.

The Interline: How do you go about building trust in 3D for your internal teams and supply chain partners? You’ve already reached the stage where you’re successfully selling based on digital assets, and you’re able to conduct final line reviews based almost entirely on digital assets – having people make mission-critical decisions in 3D. But there’s a long journey to get universal trust and acceptance, and that’s a journey a lot of brands are still on.

Jared Goldman: That’s an ongoing thing. We’ve made amazing progress, and I know there’s more to come, but it’s a big undertaking and a really high bar to clear when you’re not just challenging the design tools people are used to using, but maybe even starting to re-evaluate the entire go-to-market calendar.

There were times, during COVID, where we had no choice but to make decisions from a digital sample, and that definitely helped to prove the point that people didn’t always need a physical sample. But there’s also a careful balance to be struck between having a digital-first mindset, where you create in 3D by default, and how close the link is between those 3D assets and the final shoe. That’s an area where you only build trust through time, repetition, and improvement – you keep making 3D assets and you keep making physical shoes, and progressively those two things become closer and closer to one another.

So I think time and progress will take care of a lot of that, but people will also need to update their mindsets. All of us buy things online, sight-unseen. And yes, we end up returning some of it, and the stakes are lower when you’re choosing what to buy instead of what to make, but as a society we’ve crossed that river and people are comfortable making buying choices without touching or feeling the products.

We’re not asking product teams to never make physical samples, but as an industry we should be encouraging those teams not to make three different upper variations, physically, before they choose the one they want to progress. We should be making those variations digitally, and people should be able to trust what they’re seeing enough to make those choices with confidence.

Beyond that, digital creation potentially unlocks some much deeper changes. We work on an 18-month calendar, and that hasn’t really changed in a long time, even though we have all these new tools designed to take time out of the process. It’s a big ask to change a structure that’s existed for so long, but things have changed and there’s that ambition I mentioned to really build a 3D tech pack, where your 3D object contains all your technical specs, materials, data and so on. And when the environment and your own systems have altered that much, at what point does it stop making sense to just keep working to the same calendar and using the same processes? I think greater trust gets you closer to an answer there, too.

Mary Grim: From a digital perspective, I think all the right people are now pushing in the right direction, and based on where we are in our journey we are aligned on a vision based on first-hand experience. Anyone who’s worked in the industry for a while only needs to think back to the first time they saw a 2D sketch, in their first role, and felt a bit disconnected from the people around them who spent hours talking about the sketch as though the product was in the room with them. Making the leap to then trusting and working with a representation of a product instead of the physical product was a muscle that had to be developed.  The same thing is happening with 3D – with the qualifier that there’s less of a distance from a 3D model to a physical product than there is with a 2D sketch.

People really do learn by doing. And while we’re definitely at different stages in footwear and apparel we’re passionately driven to build these pipelines and support the brand in acquiring the digital literacy we need to make the most of them.

The Interline: The digital literacy you’re talking about is an important element, because user adoption is still often cited as one of the barriers to scaling digital product creation. It’s one thing to tell people that 3D is becoming the standard way of working, and another to support the community, across your entire value chain, in making that transition.

Jared Goldman: The route and the timeline to that literacy and adoption is going to vary depending on the audience you’re talking about.

For designers, it’s a matter of using the tools that make sense for them, for a period of time until an unlock happens. We’ve seen that when designers work in Gravity Sketch for 40 to 50 hours, for instance, there’s a click – a point where people reach a level where a wider possibility space opens up. And even though we’re seeing a lot of value from our work with Gravity Sketch, we don’t want to be prescriptive about what tools people use to create – as long as they’re creating 3D models that we can use afterwards. Different tools work for different people.

We also offer a lot of training and support to help make this as easy an onramp as it can be. Because there’s definitely an intimidation factor when one designer shows up and they’re spinning 3D assets around, and zooming in and out, and another has a 2D sketch to show. So we want to make it as straightforward and as non-intimidating as it can be for people to acquire those skills, which means training directly from the Gravity Sketch team (who’ve been a great partner for us) as well as other designers sharing knowledge around materials, textures, and so on.

We recognise that it’s not easy to change, but we’re finding more and more that giving people the right support, and letting them spend enough time refining their skills, works.

Outside of design, I think the aim is not to have a learning curve at all. The goal with anyone viewing and interacting with a 3D asset is for them to just be able to trust what they see and use it as a decision-making tool the exact same way they’re used to doing with physical assets and other data sources.

The Interline: Let’s talk about that pipeline from design, because while you’re keen on people using the tools that work for them, you’ve also put a lot of work into creating a more intuitive starting point in Gravity Sketch. The aim there is to unify VR design and collaboration – bringing people into the same virtual space to look at the same product – as well as allowing your designers to create model geometry that’s on a par with the 3D CAD mainstay platforms. How did that come about, and how does it integrate with the rest of your 3D pipeline?

Jared Goldman: We definitely have a mix of both VR and flatscreen tools: there’s a huge group of people who use Modo [the 3D modelling toolset from Foundry – Editor] but our experience of using and scaling Gravity Sketch has been really interesting, and we’re excited by the results.

When we first heard about it, I was a little bit apprehensive. After all, working in VR isn’t something many people were used to and like a lot of 3D teams there was a very real scepticism around bringing yet another tool on board. But then we had a couple of designers who really took to it, and other people picked up on the possibilities pretty quickly and totally organically – mainly because the actual interface is so intuitive.

That sounds like a weird thing to say about an immersive, VR tool, but once people get past the idea that they need to wear a headset, and that they’re designing in a digital environment, the actual controls, the dashboard, the modelling tools and so on are all pretty simple.

Think about it this way: if you’d never designed a 3D model before, would you find it easier to physically draw a line in 3D space, or to plug in coordinates on two X/Y axes? One of those instinctively feels more like hardcore engineering, and the other feels closer to the spirit of footwear design. I think it says a lot that the team at Gravity Sketch are designers themselves, because they’ve created a tool that gets straight to the heart of the craft.

But the really interesting part is how far we’ve been able to take things from there. When more people started picking Gravity Sketch up, we thought it would just be a cool sketching tool that our designers could have fun with. Then we started to hire more people who were experts in Gravity Sketch specifically, and they were able to create concept models that were the equal of what people were building in Modo, and then those could be taken into Keyshot where we’d add materials, lighting, and textures – and suddenly we had a super-strong concept faster than ever, with a more natural workflow for creating it.

Those two things – the intuitive interface and the ability to create models that then become part of the existing pipeline – were where the momentum came from. People actively wanted to use Gravity Sketch, so we started adding more people who specialised in it, and we worked with the Gravity Sketch team on training that incorporated real projects, which made a huge difference.

The final piece is that we paired up with Gravity Sketch on our Pensole Academy class over the summer.  Every student who came into that class was given a VR headset a couple of weeks in advance. Our objective with the class was to have all the students create and collaborate in Gravity Sketch and not do any 2D illustrator drawings. That’s a pretty radical idea for a class teaching footwear design.

Over the 5-week class, students put in the hours using Gravity Sketch – our highest user was up over 75 hours. You could see the difference in the work for those that put in the time. Alyssa Duhart was one of the top students in the Pensole class, who is now a student ambassador for Gravity Sketch since completing the class. She also had the opportunity to talk at the 2023 Gravity Sketch Around Festival last week, with me, and will be a New Balance Apprentice in January. That success story is a strong testament to the fact that it’s all about putting the time in with these tools, and embracing technology.

Mary Grim: The exciting part for me is that this is really laying the groundwork for new possibilities, not just learning new tools in isolation. We’re always thinking about foundation and the future state: we need to make sure we’re nailing the fundamentals today, and giving people the right tools and capabilities, but our eye is firmly on what this all unlocks for the future. It’s not just about a different way of creating; we want to see how far we can go with the tools and partnerships that enable an optimised digital pipeline.

The Interline: Let’s talk about taking digital assets upstream. Separately from the design and development community, a major part of operationalising 3D working is building the same level of trust and collaboration with external partners, and demonstrating the return on investment potential for them. You’ve mentioned the vision for 3D tech packs, and the need to align everyone with a common vision: how does that collaboration with vendors and factories work today, and how are you aiming to build on it in the future?

Jared Goldman: We want whatever designers are creating to be able to move seamlessly through the digital process. So, if I’m starting a model in Gravity Sketch, I want to be able to save the file that can then be opened by Modo, so the team using that can build on my work and finalize it. And ultimately, it would be ideal if we could take that further into manufacturing and use the same asset to drive pattern cutting.

When you’re thinking about a pipeline, it’s not just one-way – it’s a circle. If we’re creating those assets the right way, they can come back to us after the factory has looked at them, and the designer can edit them based on their feedback. A successful workflow is one that’s built on an asset that’s usable by everyone.

If we create a 3D model that everyone here is happy with, but then the factory can’t actually use any of the data and somebody there has to recreate it in another program, then that’s really defeating the purpose. And that’s something we’re really strongly focused on at the moment: a way to keep the flow that we have going in-house moving throughout the supply chain, so that there’s no need to revert to 2D, or restart or reverse-engineer anything in between design and production.

Mary Grim: What we’re talking about here: that’s the true pipeline. We’re not designing just for the sake of designing in 3D. Operationalising digital product creation isn’t about finding a single solution that does everything, but it is about meeting people where they are, in balance enabling creative freedom and connecting the dots across platforms.

The goal is to get people into the 3D space, get them comfortable, and get them designing, and from there the goal of operations is to create the connections so that work can continue to flow.

When it comes to actually connecting tools and codifying standards, I think that’s the work the industry as a whole needs to undertake over the next few years.

The Interline: What do you see as the major possibilities that operationalised 3D could unlock for you in the near future? We’ve already talked about making better-informed, quicker creative decisions, and telling the right stories through sales and merchandising, but there still seems to be a huge amount of potential to tap into. How do you choose what to go after next?

Mary Grim: I think for the brand, without giving too much away, our priorities are about really optimising our content. There’s a huge amount we can do with what we’re building, and the biggest opportunities in front of us are going to be shaped by our ability to make 3D content that’s as universally usable as it can be.

That’s the biggest challenge for operations, but it’s also something I look at as being an endless possibility, because we’re at the stage where physical products and digital products are equally important. They are different pipelines with different requirements, but they’re so tightly related that we have the opportunity to use the digital to inform the physical in a way we never had before.

I think it’s important to keep that perspective. This whole digital unlock isn’t about incremental changes, it’s about having the chance to do things completely different, and to really rethink how we show up, internally and externally. We’re very cognisant of the scale of the opportunity here, and it’s heavily embedded in our prioritisation and decision-making for the near and the longer term.