Released in The Interline’s AI Report 2024, this executive interview with Style3D | Assyst is one of a fourteen-part series that sees The Interline quiz executives from companies who have either introduced new AI solutions or added meaningful new AI capabilities into their existing platforms.
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Key Takeaways:
- The integration of AI with 3D tools allows users to generate high-quality digital products, significantly boosting productivity and supporting the digitisation of the fashion industry.
- Style3D | ASSYST’s AI model is tailored specifically for the fashion industry, enhancing creativity, efficiency, and digital workflows through visual data and industry-specific needs.
- Their solutions are designed to be multimodal and reusable, ensuring they align with physical products and support direct-to-production processes, thereby delivering measurable value and impact.
What’s your working definition of AI? Does it differ from the public understanding, which is currently dominated by large language models and generative text-to-image models? And how does that definition manifest itself in your solution(s)?
At Style3D | ASSYST, we have an ‘AI in fashion’ approach to Artificial Intelligence. Our AI model is an industry-specific model, and it is especially trained on visual data and the needs of the fashion industry. For us, the outcome of AI is not merely a visual representation but an enhancement of creativity, efficiency, and the delivery of a comprehensive digital product.
Our expertise in garment design, digital fabrics, and visualization is deeply embedded into our AI products. We also have a profound understanding of how fashion professionals work, and thus, we offer an AI approach that seamlessly aligns with their workflows. Our AI tools, for example, accept various inputs, including not just text but also sketches or images as prompts. This makes it easy to use and easy to add to an existing process.
What also sets us apart is the integration of our AI industry model with our design tools.
Style3D | ASSYST stands as a key player in digital fashion providing a wide range of 3D solutions and structured data for every step of the clothing industry, from design to production. The combination with AIGC is a huge boost to creativity and productivity.
Over the last few years, Style3D has established its reputation by focusing on 3D tools and the digital ecosystem around them, especially in design and production. You’re now placing a big emphasis on AI in the form of generative content for materials, textures, models, and eCommerce assets. How did that shift come about? And why do you believe there’s such a strong synergy between 3D and AI?
The fashion industry is extremely creativity-driven and is constantly challenged to meet diverse consumer demands for personalized products. This leads to an almost continuous product creation process with some eCommerce platforms requiring 5.000 to 6.000 SKUs (stylecolorsize) per day.
In our 3D and 2D solutions, we help companies to generate and manage the huge amount of structured data throughout their development and production process.
With our AI + 3D, Style3D users easily add materials, textures, and visual improvements to their simulations, based on our extensive asset libraries. Our 3D simulations provide an optimal environment for product creation, featuring real-time effects and all the assistance IT can give. Moreover, using Style3D AI, our users can effortlessly generate high-quality images of their digital products for ecommerce and other digital platforms. This synergy significantly enhances productivity and leads to fast results. At the same time, it helps fashion companies to boost their digitization efforts. You see, AI and its capacities are a natural enhancement of our 3D tools.
A key challenge for brand and retail organisations right now is quantifying where AI can create business value – and where it can augment and support specialist skills, rather than replacing them. How have you approached engineering AI solutions that are sufficiently grounded in the real product, pattern, material, cost, and other vital, practical concerns? And where do you expect those solutions to deliver measurable impact and value?
No matter the volume of SKUs required, along the whole industrial chain from trend-based designs to sample garments to the market-ready products, businesses are always facing the challenge of efficiency and cost. When you look closely at how fashion and apparel companies operate, you’ll see that to deliver genuine value, AI generated content needs to possess specific qualities.
Primarily, the output needs to be multimodal, meaning different types of content are generated at the various stages and remain interconnected. You can use AI inspired design to quickly define the volume of SKUs at an early stage, or digital products can be used to assess their later market value. This is where the second AI requirement sets in. The generated content needs to align with the physical products, seamlessly supporting a direct-to-production process. And lastly, the generated content should be reusable; for example, patterns and designs can be stored as data resources for future use.
When fashion professionals look at our Style3D | ASSYST tools, they’ll find all this.
One of the driving forces in 3D and digital product creation at the moment is the need to move beyond isolated change or amendments (in design and patternmaking, for instance) and into enterprise-wide digital transformation. How do you see AI factoring into this? What do you believe the pathway from AI to 3D simulation and 2D patterns, and then back to AI again can do to further transform the route from an initial idea to a finished product?
We have started to integrate AI technology fully with our 3D products to streamline the entire industry R&D process. This sets the stage for our ‘AI + 3D/2D + AI’ process, leveraging AI for creativity and realism while ensuring 3D accuracy for consistent design and production readiness as this integration extends to connecting our CAD, nesting, and costing solutions. Our approach ensures that AI delivers immediate value to a fashion company and can be implemented right away.
For designers for example, AI + 3D is an inspiration accelerator. It doesn’t take over their jobs or do everything for them, but it significantly speeds up the design process. This means designers can reach their desired results faster and sometimes even better than before.
Our AI supports this workflow section in various ways: enabling prompts for inspiration with the option to edit individual sections of the AI generated fabric pattern or garment, offering AI try-ons to inspire styling and improve decision making at an early stage, or providing options to visually prompt models and backgrounds and conduct high-quality photoshoots for every region or brand.
And just like with any new tech, there’s a learning curve. Therefore, brands, agencies and manufacturers can test out the newest AI tools at one of our Style3D Styleverse showrooms, where they’re integrated with other fashion technologies. Through our Styleverse concept, we help the fashion industry to connect and to explore the latest tech, allowing them to shape their digitization approach based on value.
With AI, as a class of technologies, being as hype-prone as it is, there are a lot of technology companies from outside fashion now creating either industry-agnostic tools, or fashion-specific tools as new products. As a company that’s been pretty deeply immersed in the digital transformation journey of the brands that are already deploying DPC tools and workflows, what perspective does that give you on the importance of industry-specific experience and expertise to this next wave of enterprise technology?
Our deep understanding of the industry’s characteristics and customer needs from the outset is differentiating us from generic AI tools and siloed solutions. Through extensive research and our industry-specific model, we help the fashion industry to solve its major challenges: to become more efficient and at the same time more sustainable. This is particularly crucial given the trillion-dollar-valuation of the textile and apparel industry and its global impact.
Historically, fashion companies have been struggling with low digitalization, high costs, excessive inventory, and inefficiency due to the traditional separation of production and sales. Isolated solutions will even foster this effect.
At Style3D | ASSYST, we are committed to helping the fashion industry reshape with a profound integrated approach based on research and technology. In this global approach, AI not only helps to accelerate the design process but also simplifies digitization when it is integrated with a fully comprehensive tool set. Fitted into an end-to-end process fashion companies can improve massively using Style3D | ASSYST technology and address many of their core economic and sustainable challenges.
What do you see as the near-term future of AI – both within your solution(s) and in general? Do you believe it will be a transformative class of technologies the way people expect?
Today, we stand on the brink of a revolutionary era, where artificial intelligence reshapes every facet of the industry. From fostering design ingenuity to promoting sustainable methodologies, AI acts as a driving force behind remarkable transformations.
As major trends, the textile and apparel industry is transforming towards personalization and sustainability. Digital technologies like 3D and AI are being embraced by designers to accelerate apparel design and development processes and on the company level to cater to personalization and other needs of consumers. For consumers, AI will mean their expectations will be met with extended product experience, while for fashion creators, AI provides great support in their daily work.
So, AI-driven solutions bring product creators closer to consumer needs and production capacities, enabling a better grasp of the market trends and meeting market demands, and ultimately reduce waste.
Our technological advancements are also reshaping production methods, reducing costs, labor, and materials. Consequently, the fashion industry is poised to embark on a journey towards sustainable, more flexible, and faster development. In the long run, digital R & D and marketing models are to become the norm in the fashion industry and with our AI this will be accelerated.