Published on the 07/07/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson
How global apparel manufacturers optimise resources with Kiwi technology…
Snazzy designerwear might impress on the basis of looks alone, but for tech aficionados, there’s a little more substance to them than style. That’s because a local company has likely had a hand in their production: New Zealand-owned (but Los Angeles-based) ShapeShifter provides software which helps the likes of Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein and Victoria’s Secret produce gear more smartly. More than that, the company’s CE reckons there’s a technological shift on the way for the clothing industry and his company wants a piece of that action.
ShapeShifter is an optimisation specialist. Its ShapeShifter Prophet (SSP) software figures out the best way to slice up a bolt of cloth to minimise wastage; less is more and optimised fabric use can mean millions of dollars in savings.
It is a little more complex than that, though, as boss Tim White explained another constraint which applies in the high fashion environment: “Fabric costs, in some cases, may need to be balanced with cutting time. A number of our customers want to see an improvement in cutting time, freeing up capacity in factories to either increase throughput, or meet customer-imposed deadlines.”
In other words, figuring out how best to slice out thousands of pairs of Victoria’s Secret undies from a big piece of chiffon can take a while. The process, described here, is pretty interesting: a paper layer called a marker is created on to which those undies are stenciled. Fit more stencils in on the same piece of paper (which overlays that lacy cloth), and more undies pop out of the other side of the production process.
CAD programmes make the marker and squishing the optimal number of outlines onto the marker is what takes up time.
Not for Prophet: “Our software utilises cloud processing capacity, allowing customers to process infinite numbers of orders concurrently. With other software, orders need to be queued resulting in a considerable amount of lost time waiting for results.” There’s a pretty cool video of SSP Optimiser in action here.
With SSP, explained White, merchandisers and sales staff are able to rapidly provide fast and accurate quotes, bringing down a previous time of 24-plus hours to a matter of 10 to 15 minutes. The fast will eat the slow, as they say; what’s more, SSP promises to improve ‘marker efficiency’ (and that of the underlying cloth) by up to 3 per cent.
If you thought your Microsoft Office 365 subscription represented a fair chunk of change each month, as enterprise software SSP is slightly more eye-watering as White makes clear: “Our software isn’t the cheapest by any means. Our customers pay on average $US10,000 to $US15,000 per month [but] we have zero customer churn.”
He said the clothing business, probably one of the oldest vertical industries in the world alongside that other infamous one, is itself ripe for technological disruption. “There are some significant changes coming in the market which has seen relatively little change in the last 15 years.”
Apply technology to taxis, hotel rooms and that sort of thing, and great efficiencies are likely to result, along with great benefits to consumers. Maybe your glad rags are about to get less costly (or more customised, given that the margin seems to go into the brand rather than the cost of manufacture).
As an efficiency specialist already plying its trade among some of the biggest names in fashion, ShapeShifter is well placed to play a role in those changes; already ,the company – which has no New Zealand-based employees – said it has been improving its market presence in Asia, particularly in Taiwan and Vietnam.
