Personalized Fashion: An Unlikely Hero in the Story of Sustainability
What if to save and sustain the planet, it meant unleashing creativity with personalized, on-demand fashion? It may sound too good to be true, but Ronen Samuel, the CEO of Kornit Digital, explains why this model is both immensely profitable for business and utterly essential for the world.
What if to save and sustain the planet, it meant unleashing creativity with personalized, on-demand fashion? It may sound too good to be true, but Ronen Samuel, the CEO of Kornit Digital, explains why this model is both immensely profitable for business and utterly essential for the world.
At Kornit, Samuel is combining the concepts of personalization and customization with a mission of sustainability and efficiency. The outcome is a business model that both saves its bottom line and saves the planet in the process. So how exactly is Kornit leveraging these ideas to transform the fashion industry? And in what ways is the company bridging the physical and virtual worlds to create what’s never before been created?
Samuel’s civilian career blossomed at an Israeli printing company called Indigo that was later acquired by HP and it was a relocation to Asia that opened him up to seeing sustainability issues in the garment industry first-hand. Samuel knew there was an opportunity to drive change and recognized that Kornit was really solving a big problem in the market.
“I understood that there’s much, much bigger play,” Samuel said. “The much bigger play is not only doing it with technologies that enable you to do on-demand, short runs, personalization, customization but the entire market, the entire apparel textiles fashion market, is very, very conservative. It actually didn’t change for the last 100 years. When we look at this market, the market from the design of a product to product on the shelf is 18 months. It doesn’t fit today’s consumer’s needs. And I understood that Kornit can play a much bigger role in changing the industry, to become much more sustainable, on-demand and enabling the creativity that both the consumer and the designers need.”
People want customization and Kornit understands that, but for the company, it is not only about pursuing a large market to get with the times and meet consumer demands; its mission is to promote sustainable fashion in the textile market, the world’s second-biggest polluting industry, and to create an impact globally.
“Just to give you an example of the negative impact on the world; 30% of everything that is being produced today is actually never being sold. It’s a waste,” Samuel said. “And if you calculate the impact of this waste, to create the 30% you’re using 28 trillion liters of water. 28 trillion liters of water is like the entire population of the U.S drinking water for 72 years. This is the amount of water you are throwing away every year by producing this excess production.”
Kornit has positioned itself perfectly at the intersection of the physical and the digital. To find out how the company and its CEO is connecting the dots between sustainability, personalization, and future technologies, how fashion is moving to avatars and the metaverse, and how Samuel dared to envision new realities, tune into Business X factors.
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