Why is sourcing fabric so challenging? Today, apparel designers have little exposure to the complexity of fabric manufacturing and most mills don’t understand what drives apparel product design. The way we design, source, and manufacture garments is disconnected and archaic. Many companies will witness extinction and be rendered obsolete if they ignore the Black Swan event that is happening in the apparel industry. The digital standard is here…BlackOPS The idea of a swan in a color other than white was considered absurd until a black swan was discovered in 1697. It demonstrated that new facts undermine certainty. A “Black Swan event” is defined as an occurrence in history that was unprecedented and unexpected at the time it occurred. However, after evaluating the surrounding context, domain experts can usually conclude, “It was bound to happen.” Apparel digitalization is a Black Swan event that will be exploited by applying technology to change development processes across the entire industry, regardless of location, product grade, or price point. Black Swan Textiles accepts the mission of reimagining product development, sourcing, and manufacturing processes in the apparel industry. Our software platform, BlackOPS, is a design-for-manufacturing software platform that digitizes subject matter expertise between fashion brands and suppliers. We solve complex supply chain challenges by combining innovative applications, intelligent algorithms, and technology integrations in an easy to use toolbox. The initial BlackOPS application, Fabric Digital Twin, is the world’s first searchable fabric store that digitizes the ~$750 billion global textiles market. How much time and resources go into fabric sourcing allocation? The fabric digital twin simplifies this task. Conventional labor-intensive and analog processes are made irrelevant by enabling a global materials database that is searchable on key fabric criteria, locating the material in seconds rather than days.
