An efficiency artifact for costume designers
NANA IS A NEW PROFESSIONAL WHO GRADUATED FROM UNIVERSITY LAST YEAR AND IS CURRENTLY WORKING AS A DESIGNER ASSISTANT FOR A WOMEN'S CLOTHING BRAND IN HANGZHOU, WHERE SHE ASSISTS FASHION DESIGNERS IN DEVELOPING NEW SAMPLES.
But in fact, Nana's daily work is busy and trivial, like a hard-working ant, constantly carrying various fashion trends related to the brand's style and tonality, whether it is market research, competitor trends, runway fashion weeks or fabric suppliers, every information that is beneficial to the development of new models is a subset of her work, and the follow-up development progress, tracking the follow-up sales situation, etc., are gathered together, reproducing the most ordinary work scene in the fashion designer industry.
In the past, a large part of NANA's time and energy would be occupied by a bunch of inconsistent and non-standard workflows, and she often suspected that her work was just meaningless, such as:
1. Organize pictures in a designer work group of dozens of people, some are compressed packages, some are online tools such as Petal.com, Feishu, etc., and some are network disk links of several G, and the pictures are not necessarily high-definition;
2. After the pictures are collected, they should also be classified and sorted according to various dimensions such as color, silhouette, fabric, etc., so as to facilitate the subsequent search;
3. When sorting out the opinions of the payment, you always have to turn dozens of pages of chat records, not to mention the extremely low efficiency, and it may be cleaned up after expiration. It is also difficult to respond to specific opinions in offline meetings;
4. When taking stock of the price, sales, SKU and other sales data of the style as a reference, the team could not find a good way to do the standard presentation, or even the original e-commerce link;
Fortunately, starting in 2022, NANA's design department has been connectedApparel Design Collaboration Platform "Mei Nian"。 Since then, she has felt that her "low-value" information collection and organization efficiency has improved significantly, and she has more confidence when reporting to her superiors and connecting with all aspects of the work process, and Nana has been able to reserve more time for herself to participate in the design work.
And NANA is not alone, she is just a microcosm of thousands of fashion designers, small, but typical. beThrough the use of Meinian, a data intelligence SaaS product in the apparel industry, she has been able to break free from the trivialities of day after day and devote her limited work energy to the advancement of design capabilities。
In an industry like the garment industry, where the fashion trend keeps pace with the times, but the way of working is primitive and backward, the help of "Meinian" to designers and clothing companies is just about to appear.
Looking for money in the clothing industry, generally speaking, is to go to Taobao Tmall, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Vipshop, wholesale markets, order fairs and other online and offline markets, as well as fashion week shows to "dig treasures", and dig out some styles that may be popular as a reference for the development of new models.
The trouble lies in the fact that there is only one person in the designer department of a clothing brand, some people like to take screenshots on mobile phones and computers, some people like to use petals to collect, and some people directly save shopping links... In the end, these various ways to find money are nothing more than the presentation of compressed packages or links in the work group, which directly leads to a sharp increase in the cost of information synchronization between teams and the time cost of follow-up sorting, and the size and clarity of the collected pictures cannot be guaranteed.
The rumored "Designers spend 70% of their time sorting out requirements and accumulating materials, and only 30% of their time using software to design"It's not just a joke.
It's just a matter of how you find a model, and over time, most designers will forget why they kept that style material in the first place, after all, the inspiration is fleeting. Therefore, it is extremely important to find the target style materials conveniently and quickly when needed in the later stage, and it is necessary to make 70% of the designer's early search work play its due value, and no longer "lie down" in folders or chat records.
In recent years, there have been companiesThrough the apparel design collaboration platform of Zhiyi Technology - "Meinian", it took the lead in realizing the data and intelligence of "finding money".。
The first is the collection and management of style materials.
After accessing the "Meinian" plug-in, users can right-click to collect any style of material when browsing any style of material in the browser, whether it is Zhiyi series products or Taobao Tmall product pages, Baidu pictures and other websites, and directlyOriginal pixel indexingInspiration Concentration,No downloads, no screenshots。
At the time of collection, you can make notes about the title, price and inspiration points of the style to prevent forgetting. At the same time, the source and time will also be recorded, if it is the operation in the Zhiyi products, you can also jump to the original link at any time, and view more style information when browsing the material in the future.
All the collected high-definition materials can be uploaded to the cloud in batches, and the mobile/web terminal can be synchronized in real time, and you can log in to view.Does not occupy local memoryYou can watch it whenever and wherever you want.
On the other hand, focusing on the vertical segmentation of clothing design, "Meinian" relies on image recognition technology to automatically and intelligently identify the styles, colors, silhouettes and processes in the collected pictures, and mark and classify them.
It is worth noting that in order to cope with the secondary arrangement/reuse that may be faced in the later design work, the same material style will generally be classified under multiple categories, with multiple tag attributes, and of course, customization is also supported.
Based on this,The most important function of "Meinian" in the search for money has also surfaced, that is, the intelligent marking, screening and classification of materials。
With the support of powerful image recognition and automatic marking technology, the efficiency of users to retrieve past style materials has been doubled, and a series of data such as style, silhouette, color, fabric, process, and source of the collected styles are automatically classified in "Meinian".
For example, you can pair a dressAutomatic/CustomMarked with multiple tags such as "low customer unit price", "floral", "H-shape", "2023 spring new style", "purple", "bow", "chiffon", etc., if you want to search for "2023 spring new style" in the future, you can find it in the style collection under this label.
Over time, "beautiful thoughts" will remainBased on past collection preferences, it intelligently recommends similar and identical models on multiple platforms, as another channel for designers to find styles, or a source of inspiration.
EvenAppraisal of team members' daily payment findings, can get a more intuitive data presentation in "Meinian": collection members, collection time, audit progress, statistics of members' selection contributions, selection pass rate, etc., to facilitate work management.
When it comes to the review process, the first points that people pay attention to are:The standardization of the process, as well as the efficiency of the review of payments。
In the past, most fashion designer teams used online WeChat work groups/Feishu Docs offline meetings to make paymentsThe design lead wants to know more, either by chatting with instructions in the work group or dictating in a meeting.
The effective correspondence and retention of information is not to be said for the time being, but the wholeThe review process is the same as ten years ago, and it is impossible to see what specific impact the rapid development of digital information technology has had on the apparel industry in the past ten years.
Dan Fan's design director asked more: "How is the 30-day sales of this style of the competition store on the Douyin channel?" How much does it cost? Which colors sell best? "I have to wait for the person looking for a model to trace the link of this style material, and then count the sales data of various e-commerce platforms.
In addition, many designers have their own ideas when choosing models.For example, if you fancy a certain design point, or think that the version is good, or compete with the store to promote a new model, it is worth paying attention to. However, no matter what the reason, it is often impossible to completely and accurately convey the idea and style materials to the design supervisor, so that the design supervisor cannot get the designer's good intentions when reviewing the model.
So in the digital information age, how should fashion designers correctly realize the standardization and efficiency of the review, andPrecisionCommunicate the intent and information of the selection?
Our answer is "beautiful thoughts".
atIn terms of the standardization of the review process, designers can freely set the scope of sharing and collaboration and create the selection collection of "Meinian".selection/review tasks,Customize the review hierarchy andAppoint the appraiser,Get real-time visibility into task progress and completion.
Just include it in the inspiration set with set permissions at the time of collection, and let the members with the review authority start the review process, no longer limited by time and space, and select and review the payment online on the web and mobile phone anytime and anywhere.
As mentioned above, sales data, jump links, inspiration flashes, and intelligently generated series tags that are recorded in the book when looking for money can be submittedSupplementary information at the time of the review of the payment.
Based on the online and data-based selection process starting from the collection of materials,Under the intervention of "Meinian", the review can retain the style information to the greatest extent and convey the intention of the selection, so as to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the judge。
In addition, the reviewer can directly make box annotations and comments on the material, record the inspiration he thinks the selection, and add a reason for rejection if the review is not approved.So that the money selector, the reviewer, and other members of the design team can get full and timely communicationmeantimeThe collection time of the selector and the review time of the reviewerand other behavioral data will also be recorded in the style details, commonlyPrecipitate backups.
After the new model is developed and launched, the sales data will be reviewed, and the root cause of the one-to-one correspondence can be found in "Meinian" for the highlights or shortcomings in the design, the efficiency of a certain link in collaboration and communication, or the right or wrong judgment.
For example, when the company reviews why a certain windbreaker in the 38 festival promotion can sell out, the design department can search for keywords such as the 2023 spring windbreaker in "Meinian".Step by step, the development process at that time, as well as the design ideas of each person such as the selector and the reviewer, were retained and reused as examples。
Even if the summary is insufficient, you can find the adjustment and optimization foothold of the new season in the visual standardization process of "Meinian" and realize itImplement measures from the specific implementation side, and achieve perfection in the process and efficiency of clothing design with a goal。
Going back to the use case of NANA at the beginning of the article, we learned from the customer research return visit that the entire design department is actually benefiting from "Meinian".The selection efficiency has increased by 50%, the explosion rate has increased by 10%, and the selection work has changed from one day a weekIn addition to other changes, team management is also very beneficial.
First of allThe training cycle for newcomers, such as NANA's designer's assistant, can be used in a standardized workflowReduce growth time to 50%, and because of the visual work record and design asset retention of "Meinian", they also helped themIntangible losses due to personnel changes are reduced。
Flexible and efficient online design collaboration not only improves information transparency and efficiency, but also avoids the risk of subjective judgment of decision-makers, and supplements the decision-making basis with data on the basis of linkage with other products of Zhiyi.
As the company reported on the experience of using "Meinian":
"It's very convenient for the team to use Meinian to connect and collaborate, and its collection function is very good, we use it as a cloud disk storage style, and at the same time review the design draft.
In the past, I used to pay in WeChat, but it was very inconvenient and often made mistakes, and I also explored some other ways later, but there was never a satisfactory one.
Meinian was not familiar with it at first, but after the training, everyone liked it more. We treat it as a cloud disk, so that you can directly connect to these resources without sending them back and forth, so as not to find some things sometimes.
Now designers upload their weekly models and then review them as one of the management tools for the design department. ”
We also believe that the data intelligence SaaS products in the apparel industry represented by "Meinian" are expected to help more and more apparel companies in the future, like a trickle into a river, to use the power of data to drive the growth of the entire apparel design industry, find a higher ceiling of efficiency, and even new possibilities for business growth.
