Apparel

Industries in the Apparel Manufacturing subsector group establishments with two distinct manufacturing processes: (1) cut and sew (i.e., purchasing fabric and cutting and sewing to make a garment), and (2) the manufacture of garments in establishments that first knit fabric and then cut and sew the fabric into a garment. The Apparel Manufacturing subsector includes a diverse range of establishments manufacturing full lines of ready-to-wear apparel and custom apparel: apparel contractors, performing cutting or sewing operations on materials owned by others; jobbers performing entrepreneurial functions involved in apparel manufacture; and tailors, manufacturing custom garments for individual clients are all included. Knitting, when done alone, is classified in the Textile Mills subsector, but when knitting is combined with the production of complete garments, the activity is classified in Apparel Manufacturing.

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Preventing Escapes in Luxury Goods Manufacturing With Apps

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🔖 Topics: Product Escapes, Digital Work Instructions

🏭 Vertical: Apparel

🏢 Organizations: Tulip


There are two main causes of escapes. The first is a quality issue in a manufacturer’s production line — and the second is a lack of material and production data to detect and mitigate these quality issues in real time. Quality issues occur in your production line when your workers follow inconsistent processes and turn out variances of the same product. Another reason why escapes occur is the inability to detect quality issues early on, most commonly due to a lack of operational and material tracking data.

Unlike many other sectors, luxury goods manufacturing has a highly manual production process. After all, it’s the handmade quality that attracts buyers and justifies the premium price. While manufacturers need to maintain the human element in their production process, they also need to solve the challenge of inconsistent quality and late detection of defects. By adopting digital tools such as digital work instructions, luxury goods manufacturers can start building human-centric operations in which technologies serve to augment their employees’ skills — enabling them to work faster, better, and more efficiently.

Read more at Tulip Blog

‘Pushing the limits of innovation’ - 3D printed footwear showcased by Dior at Paris Fashion Week

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✍️ Author: Oliver Johnson

🔖 Topics: 3D Printing, Laser Bed Power Fusion, Sustainability, Circular Economy

🏭 Vertical: Apparel

🏢 Organizations: Dior


The two different types of shoes created by Dior, derbys and boots, were printed using laser powder bed fusion technology, but the brand did not disclose the specific system used. The footwear was just about visible on the catwalk beneath long pants that models were wearing, but close-up images have now been released.

In a video shared by the official Dior Twitter account, a member of the design team spoke about the sustainability of the shoes: “What interested us here is that, once the tongue has been unstitched and the undersoles and laces have been removed, 80% of the material can be entirely reused for other purposes. It’s a circular approach.”

Read more at TCT Magazine

The 100% Recyclable Running Shoe That’s Only Available by Subscription

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✍️ Author: Ed Ballard

🔖 Topics: Sustainability, Recycling

🏭 Vertical: Apparel

🏢 Organizations: On Holding, Arkema


To make a shoe that can be ground up, melted down and reincarnated as another shoe, Swiss sportswear brand On didn’t just need new materials and manufacturing processes. It designed a new sales model. In June, On began shipping the first 10,000 pairs of its latest model, starting with U.S. customers. The Cloudneo is pitched as “the shoe you will never own.” Instead, runners pay $29.99 a month for an endless supply, provided they return worn-out pairs to be recycled. On executives say this arrangement will lock in a supply of raw material for new shoes, reducing waste.

Read more at Wall Street Journal (Paid)

A French Sneaker Maker Grapples With How to Bring Production Home

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✍️ Author: Trefor Moss

🔖 Topics: Reshoring

🏭 Vertical: Apparel

🏢 Organizations: Salomon


After 15 years of manufacturing entirely in Asia, French sportswear firm Salomon SAS, eager to cut emissions and reduce bottlenecks, decided it was time to start making its signature sports shoes at home. The challenge, in a country where shoemaking died out years ago, was how to build the necessary supply chain.

Read more at Wall Street Journal (Paid)

Price optimization notebook for apparel retail using Google Vertex AI

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✍️ Authors: Volodymyr Koliadin, Ilya Katsov

🔖 Topics: Demand Planning

🏭 Vertical: Apparel

🏢 Organizations: Google


One of the key requirements of a price optimization system is an accurate forecasting model to quickly simulate demand response to price changes. Historically, developing a Machine Learning forecast model required a long timeline with heavy involvement from skilled specialists in data engineering, data science, and MLOps. The teams needed to perform a variety of tasks in feature engineering, model architecture selection, hyperparameter optimization, and then manage and monitor deployed models.

Vertex AI Forecast provides advanced AutoML workflow for time series forecasting which helps dramatically reduce the engineering and research effort required to develop accurate forecasting models. The service easily scales up to large datasets with over 100 million rows and 1000 columns, covering years of data for thousands of products with hundreds of possible demand drivers. Most importantly it produces highly accurate forecasts. The model scored in the top 2.5% of submissions in M5, the most recent global forecasting competition which used data from Walmart.

Read more at Google Cloud Blog

How AI (Artificial Intelligence) Will Impact T-shirt Printing Industry?

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✍️ Author: Abhishek Agarwal

🔖 Topics: artificial intelligence

🏭 Vertical: Apparel


Besides printing for pattern-making, digitization, grading, and marker planning, the t-shirt manufacturing industry uses CAD software. The t-shirt printing industry uses ANN for defect detection during fabric inspections. Other tools like PPC help coordinate between various production departments to meet delivery dates and deliver orders to buyers on time. Besides manufacturing, AI also assists consumers in choosing the right product for their purposes.

Using t-shirt design software, for example, offers a wide range of design and customization options. It is easy to design a shirt using these AI-driven online t-shirt designing software for your eCommerce store, and even a beginner can do it. The t-shirt printing software enables your customers to add shadows, create distressed looks, and manipulate artwork on their t-shirts. There are print-ready template designs that can be set to your t-shirt according to your preferences using AI based t-shirt design tools. Additionally, the software offers design areas for expressing creative ideas. Furthermore, you can see how your t-shirt will look prior to printing, which saves you time and money.

Read more at Customer Think

Why Robots Can’t Sew Your T-Shirt

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✍️ Author: Harris Quinn

🔖 Topics: Glocalization, reshoring

🏭 Vertical: Apparel, Textiles

🏢 Organizations: SoftWear Automation, Sewbo


But sewing has been notoriously difficult to automate, because textiles bunch and stretch as they’re worked with. Human hands are adept at keeping fabric organized as it passes through a sewing machine. Robots typically are not deft enough to handle the task.

SoftWear’s robots overcame those hurdles. They can make a T-shirt. But making them as cheaply as human workers do in places like China or Guatemala, where workers earn a fraction of what they might make in the US, will be a challenge, says Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.

SoftWear calls its robotic systems Sewbots. They are basically elaborate work tables that pair sewing machines with complex sensors. The company zealously guards the details of how they work, but here are the basics: Fabric is cut into pieces that will become parts of the shirt: the front, the back, and the sleeves. Those pieces are loaded into a work line where, instead of a person pushing the fabric through a sewing machine, a complicated vacuum system stretches and moves the material. Cameras track the threads in each panel, allowing the system to make adjustments while the garment is being constructed.

Read more at WIRED

Classify This Robot-Woven Sneaker With 3D-Printed Soles as 'Footware'

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✍️ Author: Brian T. Horowitz

🏭 Vertical: Apparel, Machinery

🏢 Organizations: Adidas, IEEE, MIT, KRAM-WEISSHAAR


For athletes trying to run fast, the proper shoe can be essential to achieving peak performance. For athletes trying to run as fast as humanly possible, a runner’s shoe can also become a work of individually customized engineering.

This is why Adidas has married 3D printing with robotic automation in a mass-market footwear project it’s called Futurecraft.Strung, expected to be available for purchase as soon as later this year. Using a customized, 3D-printed sole, a Futurecraft.Strung manufacturing robot can place some 2,000 threads from up to 10 different sneaker yarns in one upper section of the shoe.

Read more at IEEE Spectrum