There are many startups in the consumer retail space that help consumers buy the right apparel from them. But, beyond discovery and curation platforms in the fashion industry, startups like Stylumia and Threadsol are now helping brands, retailers and manufacturers make better business decisions and manufacture apparel as per industry trends while also reducing cost overheads.
“As a brand in the value-fashion segment, we cannot afford wastage at the manufacturing level or mismatch of inventory at a retail level,” says Vasanth Kumar, Managing Director of Max Fashion. The company utilises CAD to help design silhouette for each garment before sending it to vendors for manufacturing to reduce wastage on fabrics.
The company is also piloting with Stylumia for design optimisation. Close to 70-80% of the cost of production of a garment can be attributed to the cost of the fabric. Factories all over the world waste close to 15% of the fabric they purchase. This is what drove NIFT graduate and three software graduates to devise a solution in 2013.
“Apart from the aim of saving fabric and reducing wastage, ThreadSol solutions minimise human intervention by automating the planning processes. ThreadSol solutions also reduce manual effort of data entry and data aggregation,” says Mausmi Ambastha, Co-Founder at ThreadSol, which is backed by Blume Ventures. The company counts MAS Holdings, a $750-million turnover company as one of its clients.
MAS Holdings, which manufactures and exports to global labels like Nike, Marks & Spencer and Victoria’s Secret, uses the platform to cut down three to five days of its lead time. Similarly, fashion decision making platform Stylumia, launched by former Myntra COO Ganesh Subramanian, helps design teams across different brands decide on trends, colours and patterns, which will do well for the upcoming season.
“Every retailer or brand has an inspiration, and send out a team to a fashion destination to see what their inspiration brands are doing and pick up the samples they like. These are then customised for India. With our platform, we do this digitally along with consumer data on what is doing well, which is different for each brand based on what their priorities are,” says Ganesh Subramanian, Co-Founder of Stylumia.
Stylumia crawls data on online retail across brands, social media and search intent of users, crunching it using computer vision to a visually presentable form. The platform, which went live in April, is used by clients like Max Fashion, Vero Moda as well as online brands like Femella.
Source: Economic Times
