Overcome the challenge of selling garments with 3D
Whilst the selling process has always been challenging, certain pressures are making it more challenging than ever. Preparing collections for wholesale merchandising is an increasingly collaborative process. In addition, timescales for creating collections are contracting with more revisions getting made closer to the point of sale. This results in less time to educate sales teams on new styles and risks weakening of the messaging around new collections. In addition, manufacturing and shipping of physical salesman samples often struggle to match this speed resulting in sales teams having fewer and/or late assets to show customers when trying to secure orders.
Digital wholesale based on 3D garments provides a solution. It has the advantages that it makes collections available to sales staff earlier and gives the ability to visualize more fabric options & colourways than would be sampled. On the other hand, designers are continually having to sell their ideas to stakeholders and selling with 3D is hard if the visuals lack realism. The lack of context of how the garment will look like when worn or the use of uncanny or unattractive avatars to show the garment represents a challenge. When selling you want the best possible digital aesthetic to sell designs and model photography is still considered the standard as it presents clothes in both the most relatable and inspirational way. It is very common to see designers use ray-traced renders on their 3D garments and spend hours manually adjusting renders by hand in Photoshop to get a sense of what the 3D would look like in real people.
Can you imagine a 3D garment tool that helps you match the aesthetic you need to sell? It is possible now with Metail’s EcoShot technology. EcoShot helps brands match the aesthetic level they need to sell, whilst capturing the value of 3D. EcoShot is aimed at apparel brands and manufacturers who use Browzwear to design all categories of garments. Working as a visualisation tool, EcoShot allows you to create true to life garment-on-model imagery and to show 3D clothes on real people. By creating great-looking visualisations of designs whilst avoiding the distractions typical computer-generated avatars can cause EcoShot helps maximise positive reactions to your ideas. It also frees up your time for creative work by automating 3D block libraries and avoiding time-consuming Photoshop work.
Bernd Sauer, Apparel Development Director at Puma, commented “When Covid-19 travel restrictions caused our global 360 Go-To-Market meeting to be switched to a digital event, EcoShot gave us the flexibility to show our 3D garments on real people. EcoShot helped ensure that our Go-To-Market and Business Units chose to incorporate 3D garments into their virtual merchandise planning for the next season.”
The benefits of EcoShot are not limited to product development teams; individuals in other business units involved in taking products to market can use the EcoShot images created to assist with their tasks. EcoShot images transport the imagination put into 3D garments, from creation to selling, helping designers, product managers, merchandisers and buyers make decisions quickly, all whilst using fewer samples and fostering sustainability in the early stage of the apparel product development.
