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How Does This Amazing Tech Speed Up Your Fabric Sourcing Process
- BenQ
- 2017-10-23
The right fabric can make or break your apparel line. The wrong choice may make it difficult or impossible to bring your creative vision to life. You have to spend days, weeks or months starting over. Avoid this time-consuming and costly situation with our fabric sourcing checklist for fashion designers and a must-have piece of technology.
Fabric Sourcing Checklist
● Type of Fabrics: What fabric makes the most sense for your apparel? Make a list of your fabric needs and wants to start the sourcing process.
● Reputable and Ethical Fabric Sources: Research their reputation in the market and whether they follow ethical practices.
● Sample Availability: You don't want to place an order sight-unseen, as online pictures can hide many faults. Stick with the businesses offering free or paid samples.
● Your Budget: Establish your fabric budget so you know which sources you can realistically work with for your project.
● Minimum Order: How much fabric do you need to purchase for a minimum order? If you have to have a particular fabric but the order volume doesn't work for you, try to see if the manufacturer has flexibility.
How to Collaborate With Designers
Now that you have a list of consistent, reputable, ethical and affordable sources, it's time to work with fashion designers to make your final fabric sourcing selections. This process requires close collaboration between the fashion designers and sourcing teams.
Inefficient processes lead to a lot of wasted time at this stage. You want your business to focus on getting your products out there, not getting hung up on selecting the fabric. One of the best areas to focus on is your collaboration tools. If you have a solution that streamlines communication and sharing between the teams, you speed up your time to market.
Google Jamboard is the high-tech solution to your collaboration concerns. It allows team members to collaborate in real-time. They can illustrate their ideas, show off fabric drapes and cuts, and introduce other sourcing options by searching directly through Jamboard and adding content from the web.
Jamboard allows you to easily search for and compare different fabrics, apparel designs and other elements essential to your ideas. You can enlarge the fabric photos on the multi-touch 4K big screen to get up close and personal with the material. If you have fabric photos and videos saved on your computer, you can display it on the board via tablets or smartphones.
You can bring in content from the web, insert content, move things around on the board and even project your Jamboard into a video call. After all, sometimes your designers won't be able to spend time on-site with you during the sourcing process. You can include them in the process no matter where they're at.
Jamboard is extremely interactive, with support for multiple people to write on the board. You can improve your designs, narrow your fabric sources down to the best options, and plan your apparel production in a collaborative environment. Everything gets saved to your Google Drive, so you have access to that platform's powerful sharing capabilities.
The fabric sourcing process requires a lot of research, experimentation and collaboration. Bring in the right technology to support your efforts and streamline your workflow.