Earlier this month, The Interline hosted AVP’s new online event, DAM X DPC Unleashed, which brought together speakers from brand and technology backgrounds to talk about how Digital Asset Management can help unlock the promises of Digital Product Creation. The full replay of that event is now available, in two parts, and the team at AVP have also published a follow-on article and a useful calculator for quantifying the sunk cost of the gap between digital product creation and digital asset management.
Read on for an overview of the event, and for embedded players for both parts.
For four years, The Interline has published an annual report on digital product creation (DPC) for fashion, covering apparel, footwear, and accessories. And although the content of each yearly edition has been different – not to mention the tools used to create the cover designs evolving year-over-year – there’s been a consistent theme across every edition.
The “holy grail” of DPC, as we’ve always seen it, has been to have an accurate digital representation that can stand in for the physical product wherever a decision needs to be made, whether that decision is commercial in nature, purely creative, deeply technical, or whether it’s a buying choice being made by a consumer or a retail partner.
To fulfil that brief, a 3D garment must be a “container” rather than just a visual snapshot. And as that label suggests, a container that’s viable as a stand-in for a physical sample or finished product needs to be a vessel for many things. Geometry and textures, sure, but also construction details, sewing operations, material attributes, colours, costs, points of measure, design intent, target margins, and lots, lots more.
Perhaps more importantly, a full-spectrum digital container for a garment, accessory, or shoe would have to capture the relationships between those things – relationships that evolve unpredictability over the course of the product journey, and that are absolutely essential for being able to extract an instruction set for a producible garment at the other end of the process, rather than just opening the lid and pouring out a mess of different components.
The best label for all these things is “assets”. In its purest definition, that’s applicable to the finished, fixed-form thing, but it’s just as applicable to its constituent parts, or to the data and objects generated during its lifecycle, or to the living links between those objects.
“Asset,” then, has a lot of potential meanings. It also has a legacy. An asset, in traditional terms, is used to refer to something finished and static, that just needs to travel to the right places, and be optimised for the use cases where it’s being pressed into service. Think of an advertising campaign image, already tweaked and edited, and now ready to be used across different channels, in different sizes.
That’s what fashion is used to referring to as an asset. And, consequently, that’s also the scope of what we traditionally think of as digital asset management (DAM) – a tool for marketing and communications teams that allows them to work with libraries of fixed-form, static pieces of content.
But as the demand for digital asset scales, and the cost of creating them diverges depending on whether the machinery behind them is 3D or AI, it’s becoming clearer that delivering on that original promise of DPC is going to require a different definition of what constitutes an asset – reframing it to be less of a fixed object, and more of an assemblage of living things.
All of this was the brief for DAM X DPC Unleashed, which took place on May 12th, and brought together speakers from not just The Interline and AVP, but brands like H&M, and seasoned experts in digital product creation and digital transformation.
The live event itself drew a lot of discussion and debate, making it clear that, while the vision for a feature-complete digital twin hasn’t been realised in fashion, the ambition is still there – and the creative, technical, and strategic community is more committed than ever to finding the right technological infrastructure to support it.
In part one, The Interline’s Ben Hanson gives an overview of the challenge, the landscape, and his predictions for the near future. Then Bhargava Ram Kummamuru, Head of DPC at H&M Group, gives a presentation that documents the brand’s journey to digitise its product creation processes, and how both its technology ecosystem and its talent community are evolving to get ahead of the changing definition of DAM.
Ram and Ben then both return in part two, which centres on a panel discussion that also brigs in Kara Van Malssen, Partner and Managing Director at AVP; Craig Planson, Chief Revenue Officer at Browzwear; Mandy Block, Customer Success Manager at Orange Logic; and Mark Vickers, an independent expert with years of multi-brand experience.
The panel tackles some big questions, including whether the DPC definition still captures the scope of what brands and their partners are aiming to accomplish, how the absence or the limitations of digital assets are affecting strategic outcomes today, what it means to “scale DPC,” what the future of digital asset management looks like, and much more.
For more detail on where the AVP team themselves see DAM delivering on the original promise of DPC, after watching the event replay consider reading The Missing Link in Digital Product Creation: Why Apparel Brands Need DAM.