India is one of the largest textile producers in the world however:
An app that helps users—primarily fashion designers and clothing manufacturers—envision and construct different up-cycled fashion designs using their own discarded fabric scraps.
Leveraging the built in camera, AR measure and some AI, users can generate designs such as shirts, pants or even a sweatshirt while being guided through the process of making them, all from the start of a single photo.
The concept for the app was what I always envisioned the next steps of LOTA retail would be. It was the precursor in which we manually designed the shirts using fabric scraps, marketed it using Branding, an E-Commerce website, 3D Campaigns and Communication Design.
Start by laying out your fabric scraps against a solid background and take a photo of it. Choose to either take a photo of each piece independently or take a single photo of all the pieces
Using AI recognition and generation technology, LOTA Cinderella generates a variety of colorful composites for clothing designs using our selected silhouettes. Browse from shirts, pants, sweatshirts — and get beautiful designs generated from those scraps. Choose to create it now or save it for later.
When you’re happy with a design, simply click onto the image to begin the making process. After choosing, you’ll be presented with an overview of the steps required to make it. This section also has a carousel feature that helps you to quickly swipe thru the parts in more detail. Additional information like the number of steps as well as the estimated time required is also provided.
After prepping the pieces and cutting any excess fabric, the user would start sewing the smaller scraps to form bigger panels. Additional features such as the ability to isolate and identify the required pieces from the original image would be available for each step.
Combine the bigger panels to form the major part of the design. A progress bar at the top monitors your progress to keep you on track oriented throughout the labour intensive process.
Add the finishing touches like the collar and the buttons and you've got yourself a brand new shirt!
LOTA was a start up I co-founded in New Delhi, India. It lay at the intersection of fashion, technology and visual identity. Over the course of two years we made shirts entirely out of fabric scraps and marketed it using innovative, metaverse based campaigns such as "India's first CGI influencer" while pioneering the use of digital fashion on the b2b and b2c side. Our collections were worn by people all over the world including the Oscar winning actor, Riz Ahmed.
how do we scale what we've learnt and make creating from waste accessible to other brands and manufacturers.
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I conducted interviews with each group to narrow down our focus and ended up deciding on the brands and garment manufactures as we saw the greatest scope for change here.
“Up-cycling? I dont find it chic. It seems hippie. I dont feel inspired by it but understand it’s value”
“There’s so much waste building up. I can show you a warehouse upstairs where you can walk on top a sea of fabric.”
I chose this method to identify the root of the scrap generation.
Fabric from the textile mills get sent as flat roles to the factories that then get cut and shaped into garments. The excess fabric scraps gets thrown away to the side.
This is the point at which the scrap is created. The flat roles of fabric get die-cut in bulk based on the patterns provided by the pattern master.
The excess fabric then gets tossed into an every growing pile like this. Some manufacturers have entire rooms filled with this waste. Most of it will end up in a landfill or other informal sectors. ( See the 'System Intervention Map' for more detail.) There’s no formal sector that deals directly with this issue of fabric waste.
By reflecting on the primary and secondary research, I narrowed down on the following key insights.
Up-cycling is a good opportunity to find the highest value for textile waste with relatively low cost by leveraging the existing capabilities and capacity of textile manufacturers.
There's no scalable solution that educates, guides or inspires the industry to create and monetize their fabric waste.
The application of the up-cycling model requires the initiative from the fashion brands who hold the power to order up-cycled garments and the fashion designer holds a key in championing collections that are made from waste.
How might we scale LOTA’s success in up-cycling and make it easy, fast and accessible for fashion designers to get inspired to design with their waste while getting buy in from multiple stakeholders.
Fashion Designers: Through our research we discovered that the fashion designer on the brands side that works with the manufacturing facility could hold the key for adoption.
They not only design and prototyping new collections but also can get buy in from key stakeholders to execute these potential collections made from fabric waste.
However altruistic, the users journey is ripe with challenges and constraints. How can we help them?
Visualize possibilities:
The user needs a way to quickly visualize the designs that can be created from waste that's generated.
Time Constraints & Opportunity Cost:
The user can't waste time in constructing garments that won't get stakeholder buy in since designing with fabric waste is extremely labour intensive.
Seamless creation (no pun intented):
The user needs instructions on how to create garments from waste as this isn't a commonly used skill in the fashion industry.
One of the leading software for fashion design is marvelous designer. It's optimized for importing single images to fit the patterns and not multiple smaller images to be pieced together.
I tried exploring a tool that helps design these designs without the need for a complicated tech stack but it had few issues. Firstly, it would be time consuming to design a shirt by manually piecing together images of the scrap together. This would eat into the time that designers don't have. Secondly, once designed, iterations for different silhouettes & styles would be tedious and there would be no function that acts as a source of inspiration to the designer.
Brickit: The 'Aha' moment for me was when I came across an article about Brickit. It's an app that allows a user to scan their old legos, shows them some designs that can be made from the old legos and instructions on how to build it. This not only validated my biggest concern which was the tech stack used to achieve this but also acted as a proof of concept.
I spoke to a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence at a big tech company and asked them if this workflow would be feasible and got a confirmation that it was possible.
Inherently, the value proposition of this app, is the ability to, at click of a button, create the motivation and a roadmap for the users to turn their waste into a profitable resource. ie. their rags to riches.
I started by breaking down our current process to understand how we could create a workflow that could function as an app within the context of the prototyping and manufacturing process.
The design and flow of the app was optimized for the context in which the designer would be prototyping these garments.
Considerations such as size of the font, amount of scrolling and fragmentation of the steps to be engaging while not being overwhelming was a key consideration.
Legacy Constraints: The branding as inherited from our previous work. It’s intention was primarily to make the brand stand out in a crowded marketplace but also function in a digitally native context.
As I was prototyping the app, I found it useful to use paper prototyping to scale down the experience of cutting, discarding and designing with scraps.
This helped me increase my rate of iterating as I used this to test the steps a fashion designer would take to make a shirt more easier & fluid.
The exploration part can be messy but there’s order to this chaos. Alot of time was spent in ideaing flows that helped the user through multiple steps, without it feeling burdonsome.
I A/B tested the scrap view functionality, progress bar, completion flows, micro feedback, way to reduce cognitive overload and how many steps were too many for each part of the process.
I created a version of the app to make a simple t-shirt to observe a user using the product as well as to receive feedback on their experience.
The aim was to test if the user would have an 'aha' moment after realizing what they could make out of the fabric scrap and if they could easily follow the steps to make it.
Presenting the user with scraps.
The prototype then showed the shirt that was generated using those scraps. This is the 'aha' moment and I noticed the user being taken aback by the fact that this shirt could be generated from the scraps.
Next the user follows the steps and prepps the scraps to 'fit' together seamlessly.
My test user didn't know how to sew so we used glue to 'sew' the panels together. Since I was just testing the overall flow and functionality to prep for my persona, this was acceptable for this stage of testing.
About 35 minutes later, they had successfully constructed the shirt.
They tried it on and it fit. The glue did stain but that would get solved once a I tested this on my fashion designer persona.
I validated a lot of the core functionality of the app and was glad to see that most of it worked well.
The 'aha' moment was achieved as they we're surprised they could make a shirt from those initial scraps. The flow was understandable without being overwhelming. The user felt empowered even though they weren't the target audience.
They were a bit confused in the 'overview' section, since it didn't mention it was an overview. The 'Start' could be more clearer.
The layout of the die-cuts could benefit from being more visually accurate to the process.
I should include a white background in the CGI generation section to contrast with black shirts
Create an on-boarding experience that educates the user on how to use the app.
Create a sharing feature to natively add multiple stakeholders to the design process.
Iterate the naming conventions for the scraps
I also noticed that creating an iPad version of the app could be beneficial.
Testing the concept with a fashion designer.
We started LOTA as a proof of concept but then it quickly grew. We were fortunate to have been featured about our work. Below is a snapshot of some of the brand language, products and artifacts we made along the way.
How might we re imagine ‘up-cycling’ for millennial while empowering brands and manufacturers to create rather than throw away their waste.
How can we make high quality, long lasting products that reflect the values of our customers both in the visual aesthetic and as well as the product.
How might we incentive's manufacturers to use waste as a resource instead of throwing it away.
This was our flagship online shop. It played a key role in connecting with our consumers, functioning as a sales portal and acting as our digital store front.
1. Year on Year Growth: We had a staggering bounce rate of 28% compared to the industry standard of 50%
2. Constraint
I Had to be made on Shopify using our design language.
All our campaigns for our collections were designed by me and were made entirely in 3D. They were set in the metaverse.
One of my main intentions for the campaign was to create truly unique characters. This can be achieved by using unconventional techniques to crete unexpected results.
I created this character in clay as a base mesh to create more unique forms. I then 3D scanned it and finished it in cinema4D and photoshop.
I created the base human mesh using Daz 3D. THe aim was to create diverse characters with more south asian features
I then explored the model into Marvelous Designer. Next, I modelled and fir the 3D shirt to the 3D human. I then animated the two and exported it to cinema4d.
Finally I tied it all together to create the final piece
