Staff: Thanks for sharing a bit of your story, Hillary. I suppose we should start with the beginning – where are you from, and how did you develop an interest in fashion?
Hillary: I’m from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. It’s a pretty small town, surrounded by a lot of corn. Very rural, and not exactly a center for high-fashion, but it was a lovely place to grow up because we could pursue lots of interests in a safe, small-town environment.
And I’ve actually been interested in art since I was quite small. My mom must have decided that I had some skill because she put me in tons of painting and drawing classes, which I loved. In third grade, I actually won a contest to design a mural that would be painted on the playground wall-ball at our school. (It was this big abstract, colorful design, and, funny enough, it’s still there.) I didn’t specifically study fashion until high school, when I signed up for an apparel design sewing class, but my interest in fashion was very much grounded in that early childhood fascination with paints and pencils, form and color.
I went to Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, in part because I’ve always loved Colorado and I really wanted to ski, but also because they have a high-end design program, which turned out to be far more challenging and far more inspiring than I could ever have imagined.
While I was there, I pledged to the Chi Omega sorority, which was great because several of my sorority sisters were ahead of me in the design program, and they were very generous about mentoring those of us who were just starting out. I remember pulling many all-nighters in our sorority kitchen with other girls in the program, where we would be frantically trying to piece together finished designs for our classes. The program is actually very intense because the senior project involves creating your own clothing line—you have to design it, sew it, market it, create a catalogue, and then show your work in an end-of-year runway project. It was a huge capstone project, and I was on the runway committee, so we learned a lot, but we definitely didn’t have much time for sleeping in. But I was also able to study abroad in Paris, where I took classes in Trend Forecasting and Fashion Styling, and to study in that kind of fashion center was incredible.
CSU tries to place all its fashion graduates in internships, and when one of my professors heard about an opening with Diane von Furstenberg, she told me to jump on it.
Diane von Furstenberg is an iconic New York designer who made her name in the ‘60s and ‘70s with her invention of the wrap dress. Her vintage dresses made a resurgence into fashion in the late ‘90s, and since then she’s gained a lot of popularity. And the timing was funny because the summer that I spent in her studio was the summer that they were filming the reality show The City with Whitney Port (I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It was a spinoff of The Hills). The premise of the show was that this girl from California came to New York to work in PR with Diane Von Furstenberg. It was all staged, but they did film it in DVF’s actual studio. One day, they were filming when I was working—so if you see an uncredited, sweaty intern sewing buttons in the background, that would be me. [laughs] But I think they probably cut me out in the final edit. It was a really hot summer, and I wasn’t looking especially glamorous at the time.
From a design point of view, though, it really was an incredible experience. I got to meet Diane, and work with an extraordinarily talented international team on a lot of beautiful couture runway attire. Of course, I was doing the rubbish intern work like getting the design director his cigarettes and ferrying garment bags on the subway (sweating my ass off because it was a record-hot summer). But I also got a first-hand look into what the fashion industry is like at that level. I saw how the design team created and refined their ideas, and how they translated those designs into reality. The fashion industry in New York has a tremendous energy to it—a lot of drama, but also a passion and enthusiasm that sweeps you along with it. I even got a design accepted for the “Dress to Kilt” Scotland-inspired fashion show.
I spent three years as an assistant/associate knitwear designer with the Charter Club, one of the private labels owned by Macy’s—which basically means that I was working with any item of clothing made from knitted fabrics—so primarily sweaters, but also things like cut-and-sew tops and print design. At the time, I was designing clothes exclusively for women, but I learned all of the practical mechanics of design work.
You start with your sketch, your ideas, and then you work with a team to narrow down and refine those ideas; you create a tech pack for the factory, and they create a pattern and sample; you fit the sample on a model and make changes. While all of this is going on, you’re also sourcing your yarns, fabrics, and creating a color palette. The whole process takes months to get an idea from the design board to the racks at the individual stores. It was a lot of fun, though, because we were sometimes creating close to 100,000 units of each garment, so I’d actually see people wearing my designs on the street.
And while it was a privilege to work with such a great team, by the end of that third year, I was starting to feel the constant strain of working in such a fast-paced, high-pressure industry. The work itself is very competitive, and the pace of New York City is also nonstop. Because my work was so specialized, I didn’t always get to design everything that I wanted to design, and I missed the mountains—being active, being outside.
A lot of the lifestyle active-wear companies are based here in Colorado, and a lot of the smaller companies don’t have full-time designers, so I took on a bunch of short-term design commissions as a contractor. The emphasis is different because a lot of people who are buying performance wear care less about the color and cut, and more about the durability and performance of the fabric, but I was trying to make a new career, so I said “yes” to everything. The process helped me to be more well-rounded as a designer. It was challenging in the best way possible.
It worked out especially well, since one of the companies that I worked with was Pearl iZumi, where my now-husband was working in the marketing department. And since I was branching out, I found myself designing clothes for men as well as women. The sourcing and the process is the same, of course, but the actual design work is significantly different, and that was a fun new challenge.
My long-term goal has been to work with my sister Jillian (who also happens to be the marketing photographer for Otero) and start our own label Glenn + Glenn, which will be manufactured here in the U.S. Now that I’m in Colorado, we share an office and it seems like the timing is right to give it a shot. Working with start-ups like Otero has helped me gain confidence because it taught me a lot about the mechanics of the business beyond the fashion design—finding investors, doing pitches, interviewing factories, figuring all of the commercial aspects out. We are planning a contemporary women’s collection with a very clean, contemporary, modern feel with simple, asymmetrical details. The launch of our initial collection is scheduled for the spring of 2019, and we’re very excited.
My internship coordinator from CSU helps organize the Apparel Manufacturing Summit here in Denver, and she asked me to speak on one of the panels about contract designing. Steve attended the conference looking for a designer, and that was that.
No one had ever attempted anything quite like Otero’s 3D Proportional Design system, but I worked very closely with Steve’s distinctive vision and the expertise of our technical designer Genny Turachek, who excels at patterns and fit. It’s been a learning curve for everyone because we’re inventing something new, but I like that Otero allowed me to combine my love of high-end fabrics and the precision detail I learned from von Fustenberg with the performance excellence that’s so important to the Denver fashion scene.
Part of the challenge was Steve’s commitment to using sustainable cotton, because it shrinks, and so figuring out the shrink percentage when you’re using multiple fabrics in a single garment requires minute measurement adjustments and a truly outstanding manufacturing facility, because there isn’t a lot of room for error.
The visual priority is to elongate the body rather than cut it off. So, most of the seams need to be vertical or shaped, no horizontal stripes. I also like using side panels and other vertical elements to visually lengthen the body, but a lot of the effect comes from precision details. For example, we narrowed the placket because, a disproportionately wide placket makes men look boxy and shorter. We also narrowed the cuff detailing so that everything would be proportionate to the scale of the shirt, and so that the same shirt can look beautifully fitted on guys with very different body types.
For us, the priority was to make sure that every aspect of every garment would be exquisitely made, so we chose to use high quality grosgrain ribbons and luxe jersey fabrics instead of the cheap pique that’s more common in mass-market manufacturing.
To a certain extent, men’s fashions are locked into predictable patterns because guys like familiar clothes that are comfortable and fit well, so when we were designing these tees and polos, we weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel, but we were trying to make the Otero look distinctive, fun, and trendy as well as uniquely well-fitted.
Wearable fashion comes down to a perfect balance of comfort and fit, but the durability of the fabric and the quality of the manufacturing are what make it a wardrobe staple that will look good for season after season.
Otero Menswear: Anything But Average
]]>For a focused, high-end, start-up clothing company, developing strong relationships with garment manufacturers is an essential priority, especially when you plan to have twenty-one sizes for every garment. That’s a lot of extra work for the people who actually do the designing, sizing, cutting and sewing. Steve and Brett knew that they would need an extraordinary team to meet those challenges. Between them, Steve and Brett have a combined 40+ years of global menswear manufacturing contacts, so they started by reaching out to past suppliers and exploring contacts they made at industry events around the world. They were insistent that the manufacturer not only be able to produce a high-end, individualized product, but also that the workshop be safe and ethically managed, working within the United Nations guidelines of ethical sustainability. They also wanted to ensure that the workers were all adult, as well as being fairly compensated and well-treated. Without giving away all of our trade secrets, we can say that they partnered with a brilliant menswear manufacturer, who has consistently exceeded even their high demands for quality, materials, workmanship and business practices. They inspected all of the facilities personally and reviewed every step of production—gaining a new appreciation for the fact that high-end garment workers are artists in their own right, who also know everything about current fashion trends. When these industry “insiders” are empowered to make suggestions, they bring a lot of hands-on to the table. And once we explained our fundamental goals, they were able to contribute their creativity and expertise to our entire process, from design, to industry trends, to final production.
This was critical, because the Otero sizing and design concepts are unprecedented; we could never have implemented our design ideas without the enthusiasm and active participation of the people who brought those concepts to life. Their ideas have improved manufacturability, simplified designs, and enabled us to bring our customers the better-fitting garments they deserve. From the beginning, it has been incredibly important to us that everyone who is touched by Otero has a positive experience—from the farmers who grow the cotton to the customers who want to look amazing. Our manufacturers and their production teams have partnered with us to accomplish unprecedented things in this industry. Because no one associated with Otero can be called average.
Many of our garments actually include several kinds of fabric, both woven and knitted. Even after all these months, we are still blown away by the engineering technology that has gone into the manufacturing process. Both polos and t-shirts are primarily knits, and the machines that they use for knitting high-end fabric look like they’ve escaped from a futuristic, oversized sculpture gallery: hundreds of spools and thousands of threads disappear into a contraption that magically transforms cotton thread into greige. It’s the most amazing pairing of art and science.
Everyone loves those extra-soft cotton t-shirts and jeans that have been beautifully worn and feel amazing—but all that gorgeous texture is added in a facility straight out of an especially creepy futuristic horror film…
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But how do regular clothing companies, and clothing consumers, know that they’re creating and shopping responsibly? This is our story.
Otero Menswear is committed to developing awesome fashion trends that meet the highest ethical standards—and, for sustainability, the gold standard is the framework of Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations.
Not every goal applies to every industry, and the women and men on our core team will all tell you that we’re confident on Goal 5: Gender Equality; so, as a fashion-forward company, we have specifically chosen to prioritize on two additional goals as part of our core values: Goal 3: Good Health and Well Being, and Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, because we want to look good, but we also want to feel good about what we wear.
Goal 3 is all about ensuring the health and well-being of everyone who comes into contact with our manufacturing process. It means that we have personally inspected every facility that is used for the production of Otero clothes, and that we have made sure that every facility is modern, sanitary, and safe; and that every facility fairly employs adult laborers, who are all paid a living wage, and who are all respected for their artistic contributions to Otero products. We meet every person who works for Otero. And we will never, under any circumstances, employ slave labor, child labor, or sweatshops. At a very fundamental level, we are invested in both the economic and the physical well-being of our employees. We believe that happy, healthy, alert, professionals who are intellectually engaged with the process of making clothes are essential to the production of the highest-quality fashion in the world.
In our accessories line, we are equally committed to the health and well-being of our manufacturers, and, in fact, all of our accessories are produced by a small family of artisans in Greece. The family has been working leather for generations, and they employ a lot of local labor (including a seemingly endless number of cousins, neighbors, and close friends). In various ways, the entire community seems to be invested in the painstaking process of transforming raw cowhide into meticulously tanned, beautifully tooled works of art. Again, we made a point of visiting every manufacturing facility, and ensuring that all of the artisans involved in this process are fairly employed and free to contribute their artistic expertise to our design and manufacturing process. And if we had a chance to share a lot of amazing Greek food in the process…well…that’s also part of doing business.
While Goal 3 focuses on individuals, Goal 12 focuses on the well-being of the planet in a broader perspective. Fashion can be a terribly polluting industry, especially since so many clothes are manufactured from cost-saving, non-renewable petroleum-based fabrics that will wear out or tear quickly, but won’t truly biodegrade for decades, if not centuries. Our commitment to responsible consumption and production has pushed us toward natural, durable, and ultimately biodegradable fibers.
We have chosen to focus on natural cotton for its feel, its consistency and its overall performance as a high-end, quality material. And we love the versatility of cotton, which can be milled in a variety of ways:
Interview with Steve Villanueva, co-founder of Otero Menswear.
Staff: You are 5’7”, and I know that you’ve always had a difficult time finding clothes that fit, even when the clothes were supposed to have been designed for shorter men. How did you come up with the idea of a more reliable sizing system?
Steve: I knew intuitively that there was more to sizing than just height, because sometimes a shirt would fit my height, but it would be too tight across the shoulders, or baggy at the waist. Sometimes the detailing on the placket or collar would be awkwardly proportioned. And I knew that there had to be a better way to think about sizing. So, instead of using the model that every other company had used, I decided to go back to the basics. The current fashion sizing system was developed in the 1940s, and data has come a really long way since then, so I decided to see what modern science could tell us about the male body.
And it turns out that data was the key. We obtained tens of thousands of body scans and statistically analyzed everything to find out more about how male bodies are built. We were interested in average heights, of course, but also interested in chest-waist ratios and other important sizing proportions.
Staff: How did you analyze all of this data? It looks like a lot of plot points.
Steve: Actually, we found that there were patterns in the data. Overwhelmingly, male bodies fall into two different shapes: triangular (broad shoulders and narrow waists) and rectangular (leaner build, with a smaller chest-waist ratio). 97% of men fall into these 2-shapes. We also consulted with physiologists and discovered that these different shapes serve a purpose. Men with triangular builds have short twitchy muscles that are designed for brief, overwhelming bursts of power. Men with rectangular builds have longer, leaner muscles designed for tremendous endurance. We knew that sizing couldn’t possibly be the same for men with such distinctive builds, so we decided to adjust our whole system to accommodate for body type as well as height and weight.
Staff: Most shirts come in, at most, seven sizes: XS-XXL. Wouldn’t you need an overwhelming number of shirts in each design to accommodate for all of these sizing considerations?
Steve: Actually both myself and Brett Lawrence (a co-founder of Otero Menswear) have a background in operations and strategic supply chain management. So we were always aware that we would need to balance precision sizing with a plausible business model. If we were to offer this kind of sizing for all men, we would need over a hundred sizing designs for every single shirt. That’s a big part of the reason why we decided to concentrate on guys who fall in the 5’4” to 5’9” range. Even with that target focus, we have individually custom-designed 21 sizes for every shirt, with every detail (placket, sleeve length, arm width, collar, hem length) proportionally designed for the height, weight, and body type of the man who will wear the shirt. And our designers did an amazing job because the same shirt can look perfect on guys with very different builds—and that was never possible with the traditional sizing system.
]]>Tech startups always begin when someone says: “Hey, we could do better than that.” And Perfitly is no exception. Perfitly is the new gold standard in digital shipping as their virtual dressing room takes the guess work out of online shopping.
Founder Dave Sharma got the idea when his daughter-in-law signed for a dozen Amazon boxes at once. He asked her what she was ordering, and she said that she was trying on different shoe styles and sizes: “But don’t worry. I’m returning most of them.” For her, the system is convenient and cost-effective, but Dave wondered about the wasted revenue. With free two-way shipping and easy returns, online clothing businesses that have to absorb even 20% product returns are losing billions in stocking, damage, and shipping costs. And, of course, there’s a corresponding impact on the environment from the additional shipping and wasted packing materials.
But how can customers know whether a product is really going to look good while they’re shopping in a virtual store? Every customer would need an accurate virtual dressing room. And that’s where Perfitly comes in.
Like most simple ideas, the trick would be in the execution. Dave brought together a team of experts that had collaborated on tech startups before, and they agreed that a functional virtual dressing room would require four elements:
Easy, right?
The avatar was the first challenge, and, in many ways, the most difficult, because there are layers to the problem: how do you instantly gather data from thousands of bodies, safely store the data without compromising privacy, and then craft an avatar that is both accurate and respectful?
The data gathering was the obvious starting point. Initially, the Perfitly team toyed with the idea of building thousands of scanning booths that could create a topographical map of each customer’s body. These measuring booths would be located in retail stores across the country, so that people could scan themselves in-person once, and then keep their data on file for virtual shopping. But the idea simply wasn’t scalable—the expense of buying, placing, and servicing the booths was prohibitive, and it wouldn’t realistically offer shoppers an effortless alternative to the current buy/return system of online shopping.
The team’s second idea was to use data collected from each customer’s phone. It would be scalable, but at the time (four years ago), the technology infrastructure just wasn’t that great—cameras only faced in one direction, the resolution was relatively poor, and customers would have had to get a friend to help them take a full-body picture or video that could be used to capture the body’s dimensions. And how would the team be able to accurately craft a 3D avatar from a 2D image or series of images? A few other companies were attempting to solve this same problem, but none of them cracked it, and so the Perfitly team decided to go back to the R&D board to create something entirely new. And by new, we mean math.
After gathering data on tens of thousands of bodies and using CAD technology to create algorithms capable of accounting for hundreds of common body shapes and sizes, the Perfitly team narrowed down their body design to just five crucial measurements: height, chest (for men)/bra size (for women), waist, hips, and inseam.
With those numbers, the Perfitly computations can create a 3D avatar with 95-97% accuracy for any adult body that falls in the 4’9” to 6’6” range. Yay, math!
But accuracy is only one part of the equation—people want to know that such incredibly personal data will be safe and not floating around for any hacker to steal. So, the Perfitly team made the decision to keep the avatars generic—today’s avatar has no face, and the “skin” of the avatar is silver. There’s also no option that would allow anyone to see a body avatar “naked;” it always comes dressed in the chosen garment (shirt, dress, pants, etc.) and a neutral cover-up. So, if you’re trying on a shirt, your avatar would always be wearing neutral black pants, or vice-versa. And, for security, there are no images of the avatar stored anywhere. Instead, each customer’s body data is represented in the system by a 247,000-point data cloud. When the customer wants to use the avatar, the Perfitly system pulls those points from an encrypted database in real time, and then creates and dresses the avatar in 1-2 seconds. When the customer is finished, the data is deconstructed back into the multi-point cloud, so that even if a hacker were to steal the data, they would have no way of interpreting it into accurate avatars, or figuring out which avatar cloud was assigned to which customer. There’s simply nothing for them to see or distribute, so the system is highly, highly secure. Even Perfitly technicians can’t see the avatars—they’re only accessible to the individual customer.
Step one: accuracy and security. Check.
The challenge of creating a virtual wardrobe also comes in two parts: the first of which is to account for hundreds of fabrics that all have unique texture, thickness, weight, and stretch (heavy-weight wool does not hang in the same way as whisper-thin silk). Perfitly had to innovate a smart algorithm that would allow fabric and material properties to be infused into every smart garment—the system knows how each fabric moves, behaves, and drapes.
The second challenge is that fashion companies constantly change their clothing lineup. So, the Perfitly team needed to apply the database of fabrics to the actual designs created by their fashion partners to rapidly create their unique database of specific clothing designs (representing every individual size and color) on a rolling basis to account for new seasonal designs. Today, there is an entire Perfitly team dedicated to collecting real technical designs (the clothing blueprints sent to actual clothing manufacturers) and virtually stitching together every garment released by each Perfitly brand partner.
Step Three: The Avatar and the Outfit
Step three required the delicate technical challenge of combining the two technologies: the static topography of the body and the dynamic drape of the fabric. The system has to account for all of those properties, accurately gauge the optimal size, and use smart algorithms to place the virtual garment on the avatar.
The trick isn’t just in the sizing, though, it’s in the interaction between the fabric and the human body—the system has to account for skin friction, surface tension, gravity—all of these real-world attributes have to be applied to the virtual garment before you can realistically see how your cotton shirt or silk jacket will behave on your avatar’s body, and Perfitly tech allows you to see that difference.
The result is a full, 3D simulation that’s totally new because isn’t just a picture stretched on a body—it is the exact garment replicated online, with the fabric draped on the body in 3D.
And now the technology is available to scale—hundreds of thousands of customers can try on garments at the same time, in the same second. Each avatar can be rotated, and you can zoom in and out to see the fabric details or the effect of the outfit as a whole—how low is the hemline? Does the garment fit at the waist and the shoulders? You can see front, back, and side views before you buy.
Today, any customer can go into any affiliated store online, and then click a button showing your avatar wearing any garment in the store in the size that best fits your body. Want it a little tighter or looser? That’s the next challenge…
Everyone has a signature style, and some garments look better when they’re completely fitted or a little loose. Although Perfitly technology will choose your optimal size automatically, you can also choose to size up and size down. Combined with the 360° view, Perfitly takes all of the guesswork out of sizing.
You can try dozens of garments, in multiple sizes, in minutes—no stress, no waiting, no hassle. The virtual fitting room is seamlessly integrated into the shopping flow, where the shopper can just click “add to cart” from within the fitting room, and then either try on another garment or proceed to check out.
But that’s not all!
Photo Assist: While the five measurements can be used to create accurate avatars, the Perfitly designers want an even simpler solution, and they’ve found it. Soon, Perfitly users will be able to create an avatar on any smartphones. You’ll prop your phone against the wall, then a series of audio instructions will tell you how to stand for a portrait and profile, and the phone will automatically snap the photos once you’re in the correct position. Three minutes. No tape measure. This tech will be released before Christmas, as soon as it passes App Store certifications.
Custom Mannequin: Part of choosing a perfect garment involves matching the color of the fabric to your skintone, and our future technology will allow shoppers to apply their choice of skintone to the mannequin, and eventually to apply a 3D image of their own face. For security purposes, the image of your face will only be stored in your personal device, not in the Perfitly cloud. When you want to use the avatar, the Perfitly data will stream the garment specifications, and combine it with the image data that’s already stored on your phone. But whether you want the silver mannequin, the skintone match, or your face layered onto the avatar—it will all be up to you. All of the specs will be in the user’s control.
Whole Outfits: Right now, the system is only designed to handle one garment at a time, but the system will soon be capable of assembling ensembles so that you can see how individual garments will pair with other garments or accessories. Right now, the system is only designed to handle one garment at a time, but the system will soon be capable of assembling ensembles so that you can see how individual garments will pair with other garments or accessories.
Founded in 2018 in Boulder, CO, USA by Steve Villanueva and Brett Lawrence, Otero Menswear is a men’s fashion lifestyle apparel brand. Otero Menswear seeks to make a positive difference in the world by offering apparel that fits the height, size and body type of the man who is 5’4” – 5’9”. Otero’s style is fashion-forward and professional. Each piece is designed using texture, cut, styling and findings that empower the wearer’s specific body type by visibly leaning and lengthening his profile. Otero Menswear: redefining the measure of a man.
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Staff: Thanks for meeting with us, Kash. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to work with Perfitly?
Kash: I’ve been in the technical space for more than twenty years. I got my degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and immediately realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. So, I moved directly to Wall Street, where I started working for an investment bank doing financial modelling and building tech systems to support financial trading, and I did that for about 10 years before deciding that I wanted to try something new. That’s when I met Dave Sharma (the guy that would eventually go on to found Perfitly). At the time, we were working together to create a startup called iRail, which facilitated business‐to-business transactions for the rail industry. We successfully developed that business for 6 years, and it helped me grow from a technologist into someone with exposure to sales and marketing, but we eventually wound down the start up and went our separate ways. I went on to work with companies like Amazon Web Services and Comcast, where I was focused on solving problems with online media (video delivery, management, scaling, that sort of thing). Mostly big media and business accounts. Over the years I’ve worked with industry giants and tiny companies, and I learned a lot from all of them.
Then, one day, about four years ago, Dave started looking at how online shopping works. How are people and businesses able to sustain selling clothes online when people don’t really know what they’re buying or how it will fit? Accounting for 30% returns, the free shipping is a huge waste cost for any online business, but online shopping is still clearly the future. Brick and mortar stores are closing right and left because people don’t want the bother, but there still aren’t truly simple ways to shop online.
The fashion industry is the most difficult to market online because customers never know how a garment will fit, so it’s all a guessing game. Men especially tend to either buy the same things over and over, buy nothing, or go to the physical store. Women are more likely to order many sizes of the same garments, and then either return the rest or forget and eat the extra charges. As the industry has changed, merchants are conditioning shoppers in the wrong way, and that results massive waste cost on both ends. Today, 30‐50% of clothes purchased online are returned due to fit, and that phenomenon eats into profits—you have to sell multiple garments to make up for the cost of every individual return. And all of that is on top of the environmental waste of shipping packages back and forth, product damage, and discarded packing materials.
Dave realized that there was a play to be made here, and so he brought the band back together from the prior startup. Together we identified the big market, the big challenge, the lack of solutions—and then we all decided that we’d only pursue the technology if we could come up with a realistic, 100% solution. And that was the beginning of the virtual dressing room. After four years of unprecedented research and development, we can now create 97% accurate avatars using only 5 simple measurements; we can create virtual fabrics, stitch them into virtual garments, and imbue them with real‐world properties like friction and gravity; we can layer those garments over the avatar so that they stretch and hang realistically; and we can offer customers the option to size up and down, to see how any single garment fits in multiple sizes and colors.
We’ve seen a lot of success and a lot of interest in passing out this solution for different companies like Otero that are interested in maximizing the online consumer experience.
So, what is your current job description?
I am one of the co‐founders, and the current CTO. My role here is to build and deploy the technology and make all of the tech work so that we can offer a better service to the market, onboard customers, make sure that their needs are met, and their sites are serviced appropriately so that their shoppers in turn have a fantastic experience.
What does that mean in day‐to‐day terms?
Some parts of my job are predictable—I’m in charge of technology development, and our long-term technology strategies, so I work with both the Montreal and the New York teams.
But, day‐to‐day, I wind up troubleshooting problems that I would never have imagined when we first launched the company.
For example, we are always working with a number of different brands to onboard their collections of clothing on an ongoing basis—as one a season is ending, there will be new collections coming out. One of the challenges that we run into is to make sure that we’re scaling appropriately and that we’re managing the work schedule for new collections (both new customers, new collections with existing customers); we have a pretty tight turnover for creating new virtual garments.
Well, a few weeks ago, we got a pattern from a brand that we’ve been working with for a while, and our first review of the files looked great, and we started on onboard the patterns. But as we started creating the fourth garment, we noticed that the pattern had three sleeves.
Our system was designed to cope with a lot of variables, and we had created several asymmetrical garments with one sleeve, but it never occurred to us that we would get specifications for a garment with three. We started by calling the manufacturer to make sure that we had the correct specifications, and they claimed that we did. So, then we had to call the designer, and it turns out that the pattern wasn’t a mistake. She had been experimenting with an optional, removable sleeve overlay that could be fitted over one side to create a different look for the same garment.
That was a challenge. We had to scramble the tech team to create internal modifications to our system that would accommodate for the possibility of a variable garment and monitor for the third sleeve. I had to juggle input from our internal designers, the original designer, the factory, and our technical designers to create an appropriate model for the third sleeve—and then had to modify our internal process so that it wouldn’t kick the design out as an error.
Odd little hitches like that come up all the time—the collections and different types of clothing we model sometimes boggle the mind. But they keep us on our toes, and we try to accommodate as much as we can.
Other than that…my day‐to‐day job is to go home, box all of the returns that my wife has shopped for online, and try to get my money back as quickly as possible. But hopefully that will stop soon, once Perfilty has rolled out to more and more online retailers.
Thank you Kash—for the innovation, and for sharing your story.
Founded in 2018 in Boulder, CO, USA by Steve Villanueva and Brett Lawrence, Otero Menswear is a men’s fashion lifestyle apparel brand. Otero Menswear seeks to make a positive difference in the world by offering apparel that fits the height, size and body type of the man who is 5’4” – 5’9”. Otero’s style is fashion‐forward and professional. Each piece is designed using texture, cut, styling and findings that empower the wearer’s specific body type by visibly leaning and lengthening his profile. Otero Menswear: redefining the measure of a man.
About PERFITLY
Founded in 2015 in NY, by Dave Sharma, Perfitly is an AR/VR, cloud‐enabled visualization solution that recreates the fitting room experience online. Perfitly allows the shopper to see exactly how clothing will look and fit via the simulation and real‐time visualization of a true‐to-life engineered e‐garment on an accurate body avatar of the shopper. This is delivered completely in‐home and visualized on a shopper's devices. Perfitly is a solution that creates value for both consumers and brands alike and has the potential to be a true game‐changer in the world of ecommerce. Online shoppers make more confident purchasing decisions, especially when it comes to size, fit and personal style of a garment. Brands and retailers reduce return rates, associated costs and better manage inventory, purchasing and design decisions, among others. To learn more, please visit www.perfitly.com.
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