N.I.O. x Shavatar collaboration
When we met the Shavatar team for the first time, in 2018, founder Femke Danckaers had just invented a way to predict someone’s 3D body shape without a 3D scanner. It was part of her PhD research and she was just about to turn the algorithm into a service for fashion brands, helping them reduce size-related returns and enabling on-demand production.
At New Industrial Order we had found out that avatar measuring is one of the tools we want to add to our Fashion on Demand Toolkit. We were attracted to Shavatar by the fact that Femke's system combines the best of anthropometrics and hand-measuring - and that it is accurate up to 7 mm. It’s the most accurate remote measuring tool we have seen so far. Plus it generates of actual 3D avatars of real people. We spoke with Femke about how we could help each other and decided to team up for the Worth Partnership Project to do a virtual fitting experiment.
It’s one thing to be able to extract someone’s measurements. But the aspect of emotional fit is considered elusive. Being able to show someone what the garment looks like on his or her body would be a real breakthrough. The Worth Partnership project provided an opportunity for us to develop a 3D knitwear design template from scratch, with the entire on-demand supply chain in mind, including virtual fitting. The new design is to become part of N.I.O.’s modular 3D knitwear collection and provides proof of concept in the knitwear domain for Shavatar. Shavatar's motto is "Size matters, yet fit rules!" and we couldn't agree more.
