California Apparel News

Name a fashion brand that wants consumers to buy on price alone. I bet you’re having trouble. Am I right?

A brand’s worst nightmare is to become a commodity. Unfortunately, we’ve seen an aggressively promotional retail environment in the United States, driven by increased competition and the economic downturn. New business models and supply chain–management approaches are allowing lower-priced competitors to enter the market and thrive. Think Forever 21, Uniqlo and Joe Fresh.

So how do you protect your brand positioning in this environment?

The key to protecting your brand is through the one aspect of your business that is the most difficult to copy—your ability to consistently innovate to meet customer desires—in short, the focus here is on design. Design can no longer be isolated. Design and innovation must be integrated throughout your entire value chain. You can create value when everyone in the product-development team is aligned on what needs to happen, from product conception through production.

As Sir Jonathan Ive once said, “[The design process] is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think, the final result suffers.” Who would know better than him. After all, he is the man behind the design of Apple’s iconic products.

By integrating design throughout the value chain, you have management visibility at the product’s inception, and you can track how those ideas are translating to not only the aesthetic goals of the collection but also the financial ones. This allows you to work with the design team in real time along with product-development staffers, merchants and sales to develop a product that both answers the aesthetic of your brand and your target consumer in a financially responsible manner. Additionally, products that are likely to miss the mark can be discarded early in the process before too many resources are invested in them.

On the flip side, if your teams are disconnected, you end up building unrealistic products that are consistently vulnerable to getting stripped down in later parts of the supply chain to meet financial targets. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up a victim of commoditization.

Ensuring that design is a core tenet of your strategy isn’t always easy, but technology can help by breaking down the walls between design and the rest of the organization. This provides design with more information, and it allows other teams along the value chain to mobilize to execute better. This is true design innovation and, ultimately, success.

For an interesting example, recall the recent cotton crisis. Fabric prices were changing daily, and connected design and development teams were able to share “in the moment” information about the prices in real time. Designers who had this ready access used the new constraints to creatively use cotton-blend fabrics. You may remember this is when sheer layered T-shirts in multiple colors became a thing. Merchant teams had instant access to the line as it was being developed and could focus the development teams through this difficult period. By connecting via technology they were able to overcome a challenging environment.

Sometimes investing in design can generate ideas that are ahead of their time. Often a design asset is not fully utilized and this intellectual property is not stored in a way that allows it to be reused when the right time comes. Dropped or unused styles, fabrics, prints and yarn-dye patterns still have inherent value as long as you can find a way to tag and file them properly and make it a practice to reuse these assets.

Companies that are able to easily access their digital libraries of design properties, and redeploy them into best-selling products, find that innovation is further enhanced. Their designers understand that even if the time isn’t right today, the idea can be easily deployed in the future. This encourages them to be even more innovative because nothing is ever truly lost. Through the use of technology to document these ideas, they become a currency of sorts that is banked and can drive the future wealth of the company.

Taking this approach can impact both the top line and the bottom line. Case in point—Motiv Strategies and the Design Management Institute developed the “Design Value Index” to track the financial results of design-centric companies. The index revealed that these companies beat the S&P by 228 percent during the last 10 years.

Impressive, right?

Luis Velázquez is a business consultant with Lectra North America, where he works directly with companies to determine what key processes and technologies can be updated to help unlock potential growth or drive enterprise value. Lectra is a provider of technology solutions to industries using soft materials, including fashion, automotive, furniture and technical textiles. For more information, visit www.lectra.com.