Powering designers with speed and innovation in creating winning fashion designs, customizing products as per customer needs and demands, and making design alterations and adjustments, AI in design has indeed become a one-stop solution for brands, helping brands gain a competitive edge.
Emerging as a mainstream trend in several industry verticals, AI is firmly establishing its position in today’s rapidly changing digital world. The transformative role of this incredible technology has excited almost every sector to heavily invest in researching, experimenting, and developing innovative products, powered by AI. One such sector that has seen drastic and seismic shift in terms of innovation and sophistication is fashion retail.
While it might be too early to declare that the traditional way of designing, merchandising, and selling clothes to users has completely gone out of fashion, but it is also undeniable that no brand would want to follow an archaic approach to business. With the aim to dominate the market and stay ahead of all their competitors, brands today are swiftly redefining their business strategies and embarking on the journey of digital transformation. And in this revolutionary journey to innovation, AI has been a constant supporter, allowing design companies to speed up their production, focus on fashion requirements, and satisfy customer demands. Right from designing to manufacturing to marketing to sales, the promise and potential of AI in design are indeed mesmerizing and worth discussing.
Understanding the role of AI in design
As the fashion and design industry is huge, understanding the impact of AI in design might be confusing for some. To avoid discrepancies and have a clear comprehension of the overall concept, let’s first have all the stages involved in fashion retail outlined. So, the sector involves stages, ranging from creating exceptional designs to manufacturing products on-time, understanding customer expectations and accordingly providing them design services, and staying updated on all the market trends. That boils down to the fact that the fashion and design sector has to focus on all the areas, right from designing clothes to its production to marketing to sales. Now, let’s have a closer look at the transformative role of AI in all the mentioned stages.
Designing
Given the constantly changing trends, designers are under immense pressure to come up with unique, appealing, and high-quality designs for buyers. To match the trend-driven nature of the fashion industry, designers have to anticipate designs by assessing prior sales and customer information data. However, the guesswork done by these designers cannot obviously be accurate, to be honest. Sudden changes in people’s clothing requirements, buying patterns, or needs can negatively impact a designer’s anticipated work. Instead, with the help of robot-assisted design software, designers can benefit themselves with altogether new designs, while they sit back to decide which of the newly created designs will be happily accepted by the fashionistas. These AI-powered algorithms, having the ability to learn from past records, analyze prior design styles that earned high revenues, identify popular colors, and understand customer recommendations can help develop a completely new design that goes with the current market trend.
With AI coming into the picture, a designer’s tricky and challenging job of creating designs from scratch goes out of the window. With designs already lying ready on their desk, designers can make required adjustments and modifications (if necessary) while also delivering more work in less time.
Fabric fault detection
Inspecting low-quality fabrics can be time-consuming, but it is one of the most important tasks of the fashion and design industry. The concerned inspectors have to check the fabric of every garment being manufactured. Apart from being time-consuming, manually testing the fabric is prone undetected errors. Besides, employee involvement could result in fatigue and boredom, causing negligence towards work. And if this happens, a company will not be able to meet its efficiency and productivity standards. With AI, round the clock design inspection with never-ending energy levels will help the segment detect faults with a fabric quickly, thereby speeding up the overall manufacturing process. Literally, the long-term goal of the fashion and design companies is to produce tons of products in lesser time and at low cost, which can now be accomplished with the help of AI.
Transportation
Once the clothes are designed and produced, the next step is to transport the garments to the retailer’s warehouse. The concerned executives can leverage AI not only to automate all the back-office logistical processes but also to detect fake products quickly and easily. By inputting the pictures of the product, AI algorithm can analyze whether the item is legitimate or counterfeit. With AI taking up so many mundane and prone-to-error responsibilities, businesses will encounter a spike in their productivity. And while AI handles cumbersome back-office processes, employees will get more time to prepare customer-centric strategies for business expansion.
Customer experience
Becoming increasingly accustomed to personalized ad notifications, the new-generation shoppers demand more ease and convenience today. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that trends that are cutting-edge today will become antiquated tomorrow. Similar is the demand from customers. With technologies advancing at a breakneck pace, expectations of customers are changing at a pace like never before. The traditional way of sending recommendations tailored to a customer’s taste has now become outdated.
To stay ahead of the competitors, forward-thinking brands are vouching by the potential of AI in design. It is impressive to check out the role of AI as a personal fashion stylist. As poor fitting apparels are a big no-no, tech giants have come up with new ideas to solve this problem using AI. With customer details, like body measurements and preferred fashion statements, fashion retailers predict the right outfits and accessories for the right customer. Firstly, customers will be asked to input information, like sex, age, height, and weight.
The AI-enabled app will then analyze and study the measurement details with the help of training data to get the perfect fit for the user. Providing satisfying customer experience will help fashion brands attract more people, generate more leads, and retain old customers. In result of this, brands will create revenue benefits and increase the likelihood of sustainability in this trend-changing competitive market. Now that’s what is called a ‘win-win’ situation for both, fashion brands and customers.
With AI, the traditional picture of the fashion ecosystem with clouded management, slow and prone-to-error processes, inaccurate predictions are getting replaced with more transparent, innovative, and great ROI – promising business processes. Besides, from hyper-personalized notifications to now recommending to fashionistas the perfect outfit to wear, AI in offering enhanced customer experience has indeed come a long way . While leveraging AI in design and fashion keeps increasing productivity, agility, and sophistication levels in design creation and production, it also offers compelling customer experience and satisfaction, while achieving operational excellence and cost savings.
