Digital Fit Passport
The EU and other nations are directing efforts to develop 'Digital Product Passports’ toward realizing more sustainable manufacturing practices. A two-factor approach to fit provides consumers with sufficient garment data to make informed buying decisions, thereby reducing apparel product returns. Including this data in passport technology would offer consumers product transparency while protecting proprietary brand data.
The advantages of a digital fit passport, driven by engineered product development, ripple across the entire apparel ecosystem.
Immediate Benefits for Brand & Manufacture – Fit diagnosed and controlled ‘prior’ to product sampling reduces associated costs.
Immediate Benefits for Product Development Teams – Improved product fit and engineered fit tolerance.
Immediate Benefits for Retailers – Improved size selection, reduced product returns, and an engineered perspective on customer buying habits.
Immediate Benefits for Consumers – Fit transparency explains why size selection may vary across brands, thereby improving size selection choice and leading to product satisfaction.
Future Industry-Wide Benefits - Parent-child pattern practice must transition to a logical, linear workflow to realize fully digital apparel product development. Heuristic practice that is not logically grounded provides poor training data for machine learning algorithms. Generative design built only on machine-learned heuristic practice will produce random results that are not conducive to customer satisfaction.