This month, Lectra unveiled its new Valia Fashion solution. A digital platform designed to integrate easily into the industrial side of fashion, connecting brands and manufacturers in new ways – across software and equipment – Valia aims to unify and unlock new value from unstructured fashion data. And the strategy built around it is Lectra’s way of forging even further ahead with the company’s long-standing (and forward-thinking) commitment to connectivity and Industry 4.0.
The Interline was on-site at Lectra’s Bordeaux campus for the announcement, and we have an upcoming exclusive interview with Nicolas Favreau, Product Marketing Director. This story dives into the history and the future of Lectra to explain why Valia Fashion doesn’t just represent a unique vision for creation, manufacturing, and marketing of fashion – but why that vision relies on decades of foundational work from one of fashion’s original digital innovators.
In 1973, Lectra was conceived as a software business – initially focused on 2D CAD. The French company then became a cornerstone of the fashion, automotive, and furniture industries when it paired that software expertise with an expansion into manufacturing hardware. Today, a significant portion of all fashion products are made – to some extent – using Lectra equipment and systems.
So when CEO Daniel Harari reveals that he sees software as a service (SaaS) solutions becoming a larger share of the company’s revenue than Lectra’s far-reaching cutting room hardware business within the next two years, this is not a small claim.
But it is a claim Lectra can make with some real confidence. After decades of extending its reach and capabilities throughout the supply chain, and after seven full years of commitment to a vision for a fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the company sees a clear pathway to combining the data and visibility generated by its equipment with a fast-growing software portfolio (and no small share of AI) help overhaul the way the industry works.
The key to this confidence lies in the fact that this combination offers a way to tackle the full scope of fashion industry’s challenges as a holistic whole – not as isolated tasks. As important as speed to market, material utilisation, fibre traceability, production efficiency, competitive benchmarking and other key areas are, by themselves, the combination of those things is something Lectra believes it now has the keys to address collectively – turning a global network of unstructured data into comprehensive digital transformation.
To understand how Lectra got here, though, it’s important to start by looking back at how the company’s DNA came to align so neatly with fashion’s current sky-high demand for visibility, efficiency, accountability, and actionable insights.
To hear Harari tell it, the keys lie in a series of prescient strategic choices.
In 2009, despite the global financial crisis, Lectra adopted a seemingly counterintuitive strategy of “going premium” – aligning its prices with the results it was confident its core solutions could achieve, and investing extensively in R&D to ensure that those results continued to scale.
In 2017, facing persistent challenges due to global uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and unpredictable demand, Lectra made a forward-looking commitment to the vision for Industry 4.0 – a new sea change in manufacturing that hinges on four elements: cloud, IoT, big data, and AI.
At the time, these seemed a lot like buzzwords that could eventually fade. In fact The Interline remembers being present at that 2017 launch event (under a different umbrella) and thinking that many of these ideas were ahead of their time. And for at least some of the last seven years, the value and the definition of each of those elements has been challenged at one time or another. But over time it has become clearer that not only have the individual pieces developed, but the combination of them has reached a tipping point where each can enhance the other, and that the unity between them can help pull together other industry priorities that otherwise seem at odds with one another.
As a case in point, Lectra has an authentic belief that sustainability and profitability go hand in hand, rather than competing against one another.
Matthieu Bonenfant, Lectra’s vice president of product marketing, describes this belief in the power of data, equipment, and solutions combined as the key to unlocking “Econogy”—a fusion of economy and ecology. And this is certainly not the only area where Lectra’s current strategy (and especially its launch of Valia Fashion) could support sustainability strategies through both direct means (reducing waste through improvements across the material development, procurement, and usage process) and through new insights obtained from specialised fashion data.
This two-sided approach to reducing fashion’s environmental footprint in the face of complexity also indicates Lectra’s awareness of a growing shift in how fashion should operate. As well as reducing the impact of each individual product – by optimising material yield, streamlining decision-making to reduce samples, and so on – there is an awareness among brands that the key really lies in only bringing to market what consumers really want to buy.
The success of these products will be determined by data-driven market insights which, combined with an intelligent, connected production environment will increase the chances of them being on the market at the right time, in the right place, and positioned at the right price.
The driving principle behind bringing those different elements together, as the Lectra team told us, was to flip the script on how fashion operates – shifting from a traditional “push” into a “pull” approach, where the industry only makes what it’s confident customers will buy.
And this is where the launch of Valia Fashion makes an even deeper kind of sense, as part of a broad portfolio of Lectra solutions (both acquired and ‘strategic partnerships;) that are all oriented around that vision for a “pull” model – and that all contribute to the ability of brand and retail businesses to build those capabilities in different ways.
The importance of creating secured and efficient networks along the chain is covered with Kubix Link, a central and all-encompassing platform that’s designed to streamline collection collaboration, and connect data, processes and people.
Retviews helps brands make informed decisions with actionable insights through automated fashion benchmarking – supporting brands in understanding the competitive landscape that their products will be launching into.
Crucial traceability, compliance and authenticity issues are addressed with TextileGenesis, which has global partnerships with +90% of ESG standards and leading sustainable fibre producers, and which offers modular, progressive approaches to building traceability both product-backwards (quantifying the impact of something that has already been made) and fibre-forwards, through its innovative FibrecoinsTM technology.
Additionally, Launchmetrics optimises brand campaigns, provides adaptability to shifting consumer demands and ensures long-term competitiveness in a dynamic market, thanks to a holistic view on performance and broad brand campaigns. The key metric created within this part of the portfolio is MIV, or Media Impact Value, which aims to put an intelligible number next to the difficult-to-define concept of “brand”.
Lectra’s most recent strategic partnerships are with Six Atomic, which applies generative AI to technical design and product development as a way to respond to the growing lack of skilled pattern makers, and AQC, which targets the automation of the inspection of material quality, again compensating for workforce shortages that Lectra sees as being a major force in fashion’s near-term future of competing and innovating against a difficult economic backdrop.
Crucially, most of these technologies are suffused with AI, which Lectra systems in general have incorporated “for decades,” according to Harari.
While AI is, of course, something that every public technology company has a stance on today, few are as well-equipped as Lectra to bring the segmentation and analysis potential of AI to bear on real fashion data – with all its fragmentation, complexity, and opacity. With over 8,000 connected pieces of equipment globally, Lectra should be capable of both capturing new data at source in a way that other companies will struggle to match, and of extracting meaningful, industry-shifting insights from that data with the different portfolio solutions above.
And that provides the launchpad for VALIA Fashion, which Lectra is billing as “fashion’s next big thing” not just as a cute naming convention, but in recognition of their ambition to bring order, control, optimisation and visibility to one of the areas of fashion (production) that has seen the least digitisation. So what looks, on the surface, perhaps like a tool positioned more for manufacturers has a larger life as the springboard from which a wider industry transformation can happen, as Maximilien Abadie, Lectra’s Chief Strategy Officer put it:
“The beauty of Valia Fashion is that it looks simple, but behind it actually is extremely sophisticated. Because we manage different production types: made-to-measure, customised, personalised, mass, agile, short series. (All) while taking into account the different material characteristics, equipment availabilities, equipment capabilities and the constraints of customers.”
In specific terms, Valia Fashion is aimed at really moving the needle on all the different considerations fashion has across its manufacturing lifecycle. This means taking account of all the information around quantities, sizes, different fabrics and their characteristics and constraints, and then estimating and simulating the most efficient nesting to minimise fabric waste. At a higher level, Valia Fashion is, in effect, a simulation of either a single production facility or an entire sourcing base, with live digital twins providing instant feedback, drastically reducing manual intervention, time, and costs – and enabling businesses to adjust in real time, launching production with the certainty of ordering the right quantity, and ensuring the most efficient use of materials.
Most importantly, Valia Fashion is designed to adjust the production orders if necessary, drawing a virtuous loop and addressing upcoming challenges of lack of fabric knowledge and estimation expertise, which was based on empirical or theoretical guessing.
As a plug-and-play system, Valia Fashion is also designed for wide accessibility, supporting both experienced and new users alike, and increasing the chances of a potentially very disruptive technology seeing widespread adoption.
Both upstream and downstream, the same data is generated, consumed, and used – and intelligence and connectivity, for Lectra, is now the foundation on which the future of fashion is going to be built. If this feels familiar, it’s important to remember that the same two cornerstones are also the bedrock of Industry 4.0, helping to bring Lectra’s strategy full circle:
“Our goal is to connect processes, Data and people. The three all together at the same time. Kubix Link is the masterpiece of everything we are working on, born from the data perspective,” says Abadie.
The Lectra team were also keen to remind us of the importance of supporting skills development and technology awareness in the next generation of fashion professionals – providing them with the framework they need to understand and act on data-driven insights. To that end, Lectra provides free licenses to around 2,000 universities, in the belief that students trained on these tools will gain a significant competitive advantage upon entering the market.
Continuing to invest 12% of its revenue on R&D, Lectra remains as committed as ever to helping fashion transition from traditional to more modern ways of working – not just in industrial and production applications, but across the value chain. And now it seems like the industry may be catching up.
