Growth marketer and tech entrepreneur since 2015. Alejandro leads the Digital Marketing team at GAT Fashion Lab.
If ten years ago someone told you that the most efficient designer in a company is a machine that can make thousands of designs in seconds, would you have believed it? And that those designs could then be tried on in augmented reality or modeled by digital models? And that they would be created according to real-time trends?
Well, all of that can be done today, and if you're not very close to the world of technology, it will seem incredible or like a movie, but no, as of the date we wrote this article (January 2023), anyone with access to the internet and without much technical knowledge can do amazing things thanks to technological progress.
It is no secret that we have been experiencing a lot of technological advancement in recent years, and the fashion industry is no exception. Here, we will tell you about some of the hottest technologies that you should be checking out right now, whether you are a designer, marketer, or work for a fashion brand or a clothing manufacturer, technology is revolutionizing our industry at an incredible pace.
It is probably one of the hottest technologies of recent years. In 2022, we saw many advances that will certainly have a big impact in the coming years. Artificial intelligence is a discipline of computer science that aims to replicate and develop intelligence through computers, and although what we think of first when we hear about it are humanoid robots, the truth is that it is closer to us than we think.
Google, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, are some examples of AI models that we interact with almost every day. Have you ever wondered why videos or photos of things you like appear on social networks? or why Pinterest always suggests similar images to the ones you have on your boards? this is thanks to the algorithms of social networks that use artificial intelligence to show each of us what we like the most.
At a more applied level for companies, AI can be used to make advanced predictions in financial, demand, production, etc. areas, it can even be used by legal teams to interpret or draft documents.
And although there are many branches and applications of artificial intelligence, we want to highlight one that we are convinced will revolutionize our industry forever:
We are so convinced that Generative AI will have such an impact that we dedicated an exclusive article that you can see by clicking here. Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on the development of models and algorithms that can create (generate) new and original content, such as text, images, music, etc. These models are trained with large amounts of existing data and then use that information to create new things that may resemble the training data but are not the same.
With these examples, perhaps it becomes clearer:
We used Midjourney, a Generative AI that creates unique images, and asked it to create a "hyper-realistic futuristic fashion design photography" and this is what it did:
And although some details can be seen in the images, considering that these models are less than a year old and that the images are generated in less than 20 seconds, all the small details are secondary.
Here we leave you a step-by-step guide that we wrote on how to use Generative AI in the fashion industry, especially in the early stages of design.
Another Generative AI model, but focused on text is GPT, an AI capable of writing unique text based on what it has learned and that replicates the way we humans write, we asked ChatGPT to tell us what Generative AI is and this is what it said:
GPT can be used for multiple purposes, from writing articles, reviewing contracts, writing code (software), translating to any language, and generating ideas for titles or copies for social networks. And although in this article we are focusing on the fashion industry, and at first glance text may not seem very relevant, marketing teams would get a lot of benefit from this tool.
In January 2023 ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney have free trials, our invitation is for you to experiment with these tools, it's the perfect time to start applying them to your work, they will save you a lot of time.
Although it is a technology that has been on the market for many years, during the 2020 pandemic, it gained much more relevance along with everything related to the metaverse. And although at first, it may seem like something very game-like, the potential of this technology to reduce the development time and costs of samples is impressive.
At GAT Fashion Lab, we use 3D technology to make the prototypes of the garments that we sell to our customers (fashion brands), before 3D we used to make physical garments that could take us up to 4 or 6 weeks (because of the fabric supply) and that could take another 10-15 days to get to the customer, who upon seeing it and asking for a change would force us to make it again and take another bunch of time to make the adjustments.
Thanks to the implementation of 3D, we managed to make these first designs in less than 8 or 6 hours, with the advantage that the 2D patterns are already adjusted to cut the garments, and we can also adjust the garments to the different measurement tables of each customer. 3D even allows us to validate the patterns and fit of each garment without having to cut a single inch of fabric.
Some brands like H&M already use 3D technology to speed up their design processes and to create stunning animations that they post on their social media and that generate a lot of engagement with their audiences. And with a 3D model you can generate hyper-realistic photos and videos, which could also save you a lot of money on content production.
We leave you this article that we wrote a few months ago telling how 3D technology helped us reduce the sample development time from several weeks to just a couple of hours.
Scraping is a technique that uses software to extract (download) information from one or multiple websites. For example, we could enter the e-commerce of brand X and download all the images of their products and feed another data analytics software that uses AI to give us details of how the collections or garments are composed by colors, silhouettes, sizes, fabrics, etc.
Although it sounds like very advanced technology, there are already many systems that allow you to download large volumes of images such as Browse.ai, where you can easily train a robot to download information and then allows you to analyze it.
Artificial intelligence complements that interpret large volumes of data and even design based on certain inputs with Generative AI tools, if they require a little more development time, however, it is very likely that it will not take long until we start to see this type of solutions.
Data Analytics is an area of computer science that has been on the market for much longer, generally PLM systems include many dashboards that make reporting from these systems easier, however, in creative training, there is a lack of technical training in these tools that provide too much value and can make design tasks more precise and efficient. From learning to use Excel to consulting databases and creating boards in Power BI or Tableau, are skills that companies, including those in the fashion industry, are increasingly valuing, as data makes decision-making easier even in creative activities.
Our invitation is always to be nurturing new skills always, design tasks, writing, content creation and other activities that we thought a machine could not do, we are increasingly seeing them being better developed, and although we do not believe that machines will replace us in these activities, knowing how they work and applying them to our day-to-day will make us more valuable to the market.
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