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:
- The greatest opportunities in investing in DPC in 2024 revolve around speeding up product development and reducing prototyping costs to be achieved by forming stronger partnerships across the technology ecosystem.
- Fabric digitisation at scale means that every physical fabric on the market will have a digital twin. The technology needs to be affordable, easy to use, interoperable, be relatively hardware agnostic, and operate on a cloud-infrastructure.
- For fashion to achieve full-scale DPC, the industry needs a concerted push towards common frameworks, as well as strong leadership.
What do you believe are the greatest opportunities that are realistically achievable, in 2024, through investment in DPC talent and tools?
The greatest short-term opportunities through investment in DPC will centre around enhancing the speed and agility of bringing products to market while reducing physical prototyping costs. To achieve this, I believe it’s important for technology companies to form stronger partnerships across the ecosystem. Many of us serve the same customers, and it makes sense for us to work together to create better digital workflows for the end user.
In the next year, I also believe we will see new opportunities as we learn to navigate the increasing pressure from government regulations mandating traceability and transparency in supply chains. DPC isn’t just a tool for innovation; it’s becoming a necessary framework for compliance and ethical governance in fashion.
For fashion to truly achieve the ambitions it has for digital product creation, it will need to be easy and affordable for brands and their partners to be able to accurately digitise fabrics – because digital materials will be the foundations for basically everything the industry wants to build on top of 3D. How is Bandicoot’s approach to unlocking that foundation different from the way other technology and service companies are tackling the same challenge?
Bandicoot’s approach to digitising fabrics is rooted in simplicity and accessibility – we’re creating an end-to-end solution that ‘just works’, at large scale for an industry with strict quality requirements.
At a high level, fabric digitisation technology is now divided into two camps: direct capture and approximation. Direct capture is the established approach, and the team behind Bandicoot has created new science that now actually makes this approach easy, affordable and scalable. It’s critical to first focus on creating digital materials that are scientifically accurate and true to their physical counterparts, and then make it easy, affordable and scalable. It doesn’t matter that you get something fast and cheap if what you get is unfit for its purpose.
Key players in the industry are recognising that Bandicoot has unlocked something fundamentally new, and many are already using our solution to realise measurable benefits that were simply not possible before. We’ve simplified the process, making use of ubiquitous photography equipment to produce high-quality, faithful digital twins, sidestepping the need for expensive and complex machinery and training. It’s Bandicoot’s goal to lead by example, pushing the industry towards a future where 3D is built upon reliable and trustworthy material digitisation.
What is it going to mean for the industry to really scale fabric digitisation? Is it fair to say that industrialising and rolling out material capture capabilities to the supply chain has stalled, and if so, what is it about Bandicoot’s method that makes it better-positioned to embed genuine scale and broad adoption into the value chain?
Eventually, fabric digitisation at scale means that every physical fabric on the market will have a digital twin. In order to achieve this, we need the technology to be affordable, easy to use, and available where and when it’s needed. In order to scale true and accurate fabric digitisation, the technology must be relatively hardware agnostic, operate on a cloud-infrastructure, integrate seamlessly with other relevant tools to form flexible and effective workflows, and it must be extremely easy to operate correctly.
Most alternatives on the market either miss the mark on quality or the key factors that make the tech scalable. Bandicoot is strategically positioned at the sweet spot in the middle, between no-compromise-on-quality and built-for-scale.
We’re seeing the current state of the industry as more of a shift, rather than a stall. We’re experiencing more widespread adoption and usage than ever before. But the roll out has shifted. It’s less two-sided, between either brand or supply chain, than first anticipated. It’s now more three-sided, where “Fabric-Digitisation-as-a-Service” is becoming more relevant, because there is more expertise to DPC than just knowing how to use the technology.
A key advantage of Bandicoot’s solution is that it’s so easy to build a global network of serviced digitisation hubs with it. We have already been working with customers to build out several digitisation hubs spread around the world, simultaneously, fully operational within a week.
The economic climate right now is introducing some uncertainty around the investment required to deliver on strategic goals for DPC, where the return on that investment is going to come from, and how soon. What’s your perspective on how and where 3D / DPC strategies can deliver the most meaningful value? And what does it say about the industry’s long-term belief in DPC that Bandicoot itself was able to close a million-dollar funding round, from investors who have a lot of first-hand experience of the fashion and textile industry, during this kind of downturn?
DPC is transforming how fashion companies operate. It’s improving how we develop products and market them, and in time, it will enable entirely new business models. This shift to a quicker, more responsive model is not just about immediate returns; it’s about staying relevant and maintaining competitiveness in the market.
Our recent funding round isn’t just a financial win; it validates Bandicoot’s value to customers, partners, and the industry as a whole. It’s been a challenging environment to raise funding in, but we are fortunate to have the support from visionary investors who recognise the company’s unique value proposition and market potential. In addition, Bandicoot’s new investors are all from within the textiles industry, and they bring decades of industry knowledge and networks. To me, that summarises everything that needs to be said about the industry’s long-term belief in Bandicoot’s pioneering scientific achievements, and the value of 3D and DPC.
This is your second interview for our DPC Reports, so let’s talk about what’s changed since we last spoke, in late 2022. Bandicoot has been pursuing that high-volume digitisation capability we’ve already talked about, but what other developments have you made at the material level, and in the global scanning network you’re building?
Since our last update, Bandicoot has made significant leaps forward. Quality has been at the centre of our attention, and we have also rolled out some important new features. In addition to the expected PBR texture maps, we now also generate “alpha maps”, necessary for digitising transparent materials. We have made significant improvements to our automatic tiling technology to ensure seamlessly tiled digital textures across a wider range of materials. Our improved “stitching” technology, which automatically stitches together overlapping scans, has been used to digitise pattern repeats up to 3 x 3 metres.
We continuously focus on improving the user experience, and we have built some very cool new technology that allows our customers to do high volume digitisation with no compromise to quality. This enables digitisation at volumes the world has never seen before. I can only mention what’s already been released. We have some very exciting releases that I’m not able to go into detail on yet. The industry will see more of those soon.
We invite anyone interested in trying Bandicoot’s solution to compare the results with any alternative fabric digitisation technology on the market. It’s something you’ll want to see with your own eyes.
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?
The ideal 3D / DPC pipeline is category-specific. It’s complicated, but there simply is no one-size-fits-all. A bit ironic, but I believe one of the biggest barriers preventing us from moving forward is the continued search for a generalised pipeline and this mindset. Other important barriers include a lack of skilled people in the right roles, lack of universal standards and formats, and varying degrees of technological adoption across the supply chain. To build pipelines primed for widespread adoption, the industry needs a concerted push towards common frameworks and strong leadership.
My simple version of fashion’s full-scale DPC vision is when 3D/DPC is so normal and integrated that we evolve out of talking about it the way we do now – as this new, floating technology, separate from the core business. In the future, we will look back wondering how on earth we used to do this business without it.
