Discussing DPC with Steven Gay of Mode Maison

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?

Mode Maison is not just a company; it’s a vision of the future. Our mission is to redefine the way people experience digital environments, to create a world where the virtual is as rich, vibrant, and meaningful as the physical. We believe in a future where digital environments are not just backdrops for action, but integral parts of the story; characters in their own right. We are not just building environments; we are creating experiences, crafting stories, and unlocking possibilities.

Already achievable and brought to life by our cross-disciplinary team of creatives, storytellers, material scientists and physicists, our concept of Future of Environments (FoEs) represents a step change in DPC. FoEs are more than just highly immersive virtual locations or worlds; they represent a paradigm shift in how we understand and interact with the digital realm. They are characterized by unprecedented hyperrealism, scientifically-backed material accuracy, and unrivaled virtual world creation and scalability. They are the key to unlocking true utility in the digital realm.

Our vision goes beyond just creating individual environments. We are also pioneering efforts towards global standardization through the DigitalCore™ Consortium (more on that below). Our goal is to enable truly interoperable and composable digitized futures, where different environments and elements can seamlessly interact and combine, creating a truly unified and dynamic digitized retail model of the future.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Advanced rendering engines, especially ones where vast amounts of real world / sensed data powers its simulation (ie a neural BRDF model, neural physics-based model/engine, etc), will unlock an entirely unimaginable world. This requires entirely specific interdisciplinary insights and understanding, vast amounts of real world data that hasn’t been imagined could be converged…until now… Enter Mode Maison.

Mode Maison has a very unique history – one that arguably puts it closer to the ground in terms of understanding the bleeding edge of industry demand and industry-led innovation than anyone. Walk us through how your first-hand experience as a brand aggregator in the luxury home space turned into the catalyst for building a multi-disciplinary technology team that now has the remit of solving some of the biggest challenges – and unlocking some of the biggest opportunities – in luxury in general. How connected are those two threads?

Our end-to-end digitization technology and underlying technology infrastructure has squarely placed us at the epicenter of industry demand and innovation as it relates to digitization. The implications of our digitization technologies and infrastructure are beginning to transform some of the largest and most innovative brands and companies into entirely digitally-backed, digital asset based businesses and are unlocking a new retail model of the future.

So… how did we get here?

As the last global bastion of luxury to remain nearly entirely offline, the world of luxury home historically has been paralyzed in an impossible position: Brand digitization without brand dilution. Compared to every other industry, the difficulty level is set to 11 and the knob has broken off. Inherent to the luxury home industry, products are categorically large, have nearly infinite SKUs, high manufacturing costs, and as the pinnacle of complexity, products do not, or in many cases never exist in the real world until unless they are ordered (typically less than 1-3% of products offered by brands have ever actually been seen or made by the brands themselves!).

So how do you sell something that doesn’t exist, has never existed, would cost more money than even Amazon has (if you were to manufacture every single SKU), and, even if you somehow did have all those, would require the largest and most complex production effort in history (warehousing, global production, set design, logistics, location scouting, massive worldwide photo studios, etc)? Hard enough. Now take that, but multiply it by a thousand. Being luxury, everything has to be more beautiful, more immersive (i.e. shown in more depth and fidelity across different scenarios), more emotionally driven (bringing products to life through visual and exciting storytelling), and as a kicker, with a professionally discerning audience base (both brands and trade consumers). Enter Mode Maison.

Even with the deck massively stacked against this industry as a whole, we embarked on a journey to unlock this industry. Mode Maison is the innovative digital retail platform transforming the $100 Billion+ global luxury home goods industry and is the first and only multi-brand retail platform built entirely on top of digital assets / digital twins.

We redefined how home goods are bought and sold through technology, data and unimagined storytelling, and have broad application not only to home goods (which was first and where we have stacked several massive moats in a category with no other multi-brand players) but also now to any good.

Distilled down, Mode Maison is a dynamic confluence of (1) cutting-edge computer vision / A.I. and (2) a reimagined, immersive future of consumer experience. Think: Pixar meets Net-a-Porter / Farfetch.

We say Pixar very deliberately, because much in the same way Pixar changed the world of cinema forever when they unveiled Toy Story in 1995 (the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film), Mode Maison is in a uniquely similar position. As the first entirely digitally-backed, complete end-to-end digitized retail infrastructure, we’ve unlocked novel data flywheels and technologies that have, to this point, been impossible to achieve and underpin our capability of becoming the complete, global digitization infrastructure of the future of commerce, what we call “DigitalCore Retail.” This is a new model of retail which reimagines the future of storytelling and consumer-brand interaction enabled by owning, down to the parametric level, the digital data and creating the standardization for every thread that comprises every product.

A lot of brand and retail organizations are, right now, focused on a common objective: creating digital representations of components, materials, and finished products and taking them as far downstream (in terms of fidelity and distance) as they can go. The limits of that approach, so far, are dictated by the fact that each organization is approaching it in their own unique way, as part of their own tech estate. If the shared objective is to create a digital model of retail – to sell products that don’t exist yet through a connected, codified ecosystem – then standardization of data, process, and protocol would seem to be the logical next steps. How do you think about that idea of a new, digital infrastructure for retail that provides everyone with a common playbook and an unmoving target?

A lack of standardization of data, process, and protocol would be a death knell for our business.

Our digital infrastructure is predicated on total interoperability, flexibility, scalability and sustainability. As a startup, these are non-starters both for building the multi-brand retail platform side of the business as well as Mode Maison Labs, which licenses our technology ecosystem to brands. There’s a lot of creative salesmanship out there, but as we say to our brands, the world of digitization only gets more complex, unless you start from a single source of truth (SSOT), which you can only do by sensing the real world using physics and starting from there. If you start in a computer to create your digital materials you are introducing bias from the start and again, that should be a non-starter for any brand that cares about interoperability, flexibility, scalability and sustainability. And we’re okay with sounding like a broken record on this.

This idea coalesced into the need to create and launch the DigitalCore™ Consortium – a key part of Mode Maison’s long-term strategy. It is focused on unlocking true composability and interoperability across various aspects of the digital landscape. This includes rendering engines, the entire Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), the entire supply chain, and more. The consortium is ultimately aimed at ushering in an entirely unimagined world of retail and storytelling via unlocked creativity and immersive storytelling.

To be more specific, the DigitalCore™ Consortium is introducing a genomics-inspired standardization paradigm with the goal of defining the material world around us and establishing the “DNA of materials”, an unbiased SSOT data container. By creating the most holistic material profile converging optical, physical and multimodal mapping data streams, the DigitalCore™ Consortium’s aim is to establish the “DigitalCore DNA” that will serve as the underlying infrastructure for digitization standards and enable a future of physically-based, highly flexible, and exponentially scalable digital capabilities.

Another of the cornerstones of an effective model for an asset-based, all-digital ecosystem that runs from design all the way downstream will be completely accurate material capture and use. This is something we’ve previously described as being the key to unlocking a domino effect across all the different use cases that fashion brands have envisioned for digital product creation; where the industry wants to use a digital asset, it needs to use fabrics that are physically and aesthetically totally uncompromising. How do you believe your approach (Total Material Appearance Capture) differs from other material digitisation hardware, platforms, and standards? How do you plan to industrialize it and incentivise adoption among suppliers? And what are the key unlocks you’re targeting?

Current digitization solutions do not allow for large material digitization, and an A4 paper size scanner is a non-starter. Perhaps that works for a shirt or a sneaker (sort of…) but not for a sofa. We built the TMAC, the largest fully automated, cross-polarized photometric stereo scanning technology (hardware and software) with a 1m x 1m scan area (and is great for small material scans as well) that fully democratizes the digital material creation process for brands, creators, and 3D artists. This enables scientifically based, physically accurate, hyper fidelity digital material creation at scale and complete interoperability across engines.

Incentivizing and educating go hand in hand for us. We love talking to brands in various stages of their digitization journeys. “Good enough” (we hate good enough) is the enemy here, and some brands are talking to us about true digital transformation, some brands understand they need to embrace a digitized world but are not sure how to start, and some brands are going to find themselves in tough positions with bloated workflows and marketing organizations, rising capex, and on the other side of the sustainability conversation.

Our ultimate goal is to democratize our material digitization technology, and one day put our technology inside of an iPhone to create beautiful digital materials parametrically. It’s definitely a future state, but every day we are moving closer to that reality.

When it comes to real-time and offline rendering for sales and marketing, fashion is largely using off-the-shelf tools and best practices that have migrated over from other industries, turning rendering engines from architecture, gaming, VFX and other sectors into a patchwork toolkit that functions for fashion and retail but that isn’t explicitly designed for it. What do you see as the future for that side of high-fidelity digitisation? And how does Mode Maison think about the balance between developing software and offering services that cover the full scope of digital selling and storytelling?

As much as this is going to irk my friends in the gaming industry, the future of global digitization will not be born from games. The future relies on unbiased sensed data from the real world, which will ultimately unlock an entirely scalable, interoperable, and entirely integrated new world where the lines between digital and physical become so blurred that they effectively become erased. “By gamers for gamers” has been the mandate engrained across CG/simulation technologies from its very beginning, but as we move towards a fully integrated, physically-backed, entirely digitized new future, the fundamental framework for digitization relies on a dramatically new set of principles, or what we call the DigitalCore™ framework.

For us the question of balance is around technology versus storytelling. People ask us, are you a digitization technology company or a multi-brand retail platform that pushes the boundaries of storytelling; and the answer is…“Yes”. Before Mode Maison I worked with Ralph Lauren himself on the global creative concepts for Purple Label. Anything “technology” in my mind came at the expense of storytelling, and I had a natural aversion to technology that claimed to somehow augment the creative. When we started Mode Maison, from day one we were cognizant of not building “tech for tech’s sake”. The CMOs out there have a very difficult job of integrating technology but also being a champion for their creatives. It’s not easy, but it’s our mission to have technology not just enable the creative but push the boundaries of the creative.

How would you describe the ideal 3D / DPC pipeline – category-specific or generalized – 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?

Scalable, physically-based, retail DPC pipelines today must rely on unbiased, real world data. Think of this similarly to the Autonomous Vehicles landscape. Prior to sensed “road miles” data generated from the increasing number of AVs on the road, autonomy simply was an idea. However, the more sensed road miles generated from AVs on the road, the more real world data there was to feed into creating meaningfully reliable synthetic datasets on which to train AVs. We are at this same inflection point. The more unbiased, sensed real world data, the increasingly faster and more wild our retail and experiential world will become.