TG3D Studio Digitally Empowers the Fashion Industry With AWS

The fashion industry is ready for a makeover, from the design process to manufacturing to reimagining the retail experience. 2020 exposed many weaknesses in the apparel supply chain industry, including cross-border challenges resulting from apparel companies in the West relying on manufacturing companies in the East. There’s also a greater shift in consumer expectations, with an increasing number of consumers seeking convenience and faster access to the latest trends, also known as fast fashion.

 

Taiwan-based startup TG3D Studio is transforming the fashion industry with its 3D technology solutions, empowering the future of fashion through easy-to-use digital tools allowing brands, suppliers, and manufacturers to design and produce apparel that caters to their target customers.

 

The company integrates its Scanatic™ software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions into every step of the production process, starting with a 360 Body Scanner to optimize fit for ready-to-wear and made-to-measure clothing, 3D fashion design and fabric digitization, as well as digital retail solutions. Moreover, TG3D Studio’s solutions are reducing waiting times for samples with virtual prototyping, enabling on-demand manufacturing and helping fashion companies forecast future demands to reduce waste.

The startup’s Scanatic™ end-to-end SaaS solutions are also helping its customers avoid the nitty-gritty associated with building out an internal IT capability. “Much of the fashion industry is steeped in tradition and established ways of doing things,” says Jac Hsieh, cofounder and chief product officer at TG3D Studio. They’d prefer to avoid the expense of creating their own IT management and development teams, let alone the hassle of ensuring systems and processes are compliant with the latest data security and privacy regulations. “They focus on their clothes, and we focus on the technology, security, and data privacy,” Hsieh adds.

 

To deliver its SaaS solution successfully, TG3D Studio turned to the cloud and assessed several providers before deciding on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AWS has a wider range of services than any other cloud provider, offering infrastructure and services management. This meant we can focus our resources on software development versus IT administration,” says Jones Chi, chief technology officer at TG3D Studio.

TG3D Studio began building its AWS infrastructure internally without any third-party assistance. “The AWS documentation is very thorough and after envisioning what was required, we were ready to go,” says Chi. TG3D Studio’s applications are running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and rapidly scale workflows.

 

The startup also adopted Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to automate time-consuming management tasks such as hardware provisioning, patching, and backups. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) securely stores data from body scans and 3D designs.

 

A key benefit that Hsieh and Chi appreciate is how AWS continuously introduces services that deliver more value.  For example, as of August 2020, TG3D Studio is in the process of migrating to a microservices architecture on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Chi says, “With Amazon EKS, we save weeks on planning and executing Kubernetes clusters which enables us to spend 90 percent of our time focusing on product development and enhancements.”

One area of focus is on the algorithms powering Scanatic™ solutions. Scanatic™ 360 Body Scanner obtains data from millions of 3D points on the body surface and converts that data into a 3D scan in 3 seconds, and over 250 pattern-making measurements in just 30 seconds.

 

To address privacy concerns, the body scanner encrypts data and blurs the faces on every 3D avatar generated. It also separates data into untraceable packets with no links to personal information. Users also have control on the information they want to delete at any time.

 

The startup has recently started experimenting with Amazon SageMaker to train and deploy the machine learning (ML) models powering its mobile body scan solution. With Amazon SageMaker, the IT team finds it easier to setup and train code, as well as monitor the status of training jobs. Plus, by leveraging the range of Amazon EC2 graphic processing unit instances available, the IT team can reduce the time to train larger ML models.

 

Hsieh says, “We’re providing data and insights to our customers which, in turn, help them understand their customers.” TG3D Studio is looking to recruit more ML engineers and is launching its mobile scanner by the end of 2021.

And thanks to data gathered from the Scanatic™ 360 Body Scanner and by leveraging TG3D Studio Technology, bespoke tailors in Taiwan have more than halved the time it takes them to produce well-fitted three-piece suits. In addition, alteration rates have declined from 30 percent to 5 percent.

 

Furthermore, by using Scanatic™ 3D design software to create clothing in virtual fabrics that fit perfectly to an avatar, tailors and clothing manufacturers eliminate the need for physical samples—reducing waiting times and costs by up to 55 percent.

 

“This helps to speed up the pace at which new designs hit the market. Using our software, apparel brands can design and produce a complete collection in 2 to 3 weeks instead of 3 to 6 months,” says Hsieh.

Some of the apparel companies that have installed the Scanatic™ 360 Body Scanner include Weekday, part of the H&M Group, and Loro Piana, a member of the LVMH Group. Customers in Taiwan include bespoke tailor Facha and outdoor clothing brand ATUNAS. The technology is providing these organizations precise data on the shapes and sizes of their customers, which enables them to offer on-demand services.

 

More broadly, data from the body scanners are giving fashion companies information on how the body shapes of their customers are changing. Apparel brands can use this data to create forecasts for future demands and focus production on the sizes they know will sell well. This enables those striving for sustainability in fashion to move to a more on-demand business and operational model.

 

“Our body scanners have captured data from more than 200,000 scans so far,” says Hsieh. “With AWS, we can scale seamlessly to support digitization across the fashion industry, simplifying the production process, increasing sustainability, and improving the end customer experience.”