Revive Business in covid-19 pandemic

COVID-19 – Things to focus for businesses to stay afloat and revive to normalcy during and post lockdown

COVID-19 Disrupted the global markets and we might be heading towards a recession. What should Businesses Plan for the times ahead?

The current pandemic, COVID-19, has disrupted the conventional methods of business transactions, and left the entrepreneurs brainstorming on fresh strategies to continue their operations. The retail and textile industry of India is no different and it is high time to relook and re-organize the strategies for manufacturing, operations, and sales.

Right Time to Move from Offline-2-Online and Omnichannel models?

Digital workflows definitely found its significance after the COVID hit the world. Businesses now can understand how important it is to have digital workflows – especially the front end sales through an e-commerce storefront. Even during the current lockdown times, online groceries, food deliveries, have been considered essential. With the vaccine for COVID-19 a good year away as per WHO, we would probably see a shift in the behavior of consumers, to do more online shopping rather than physically going to the markets or malls. It could very well be for the essentials, to begin with, but would apply to even for non-essentials over time. Safety might trump convenience as the main drive for this behavior change in the short term, followed by long term habitual change. Offline shopping could become more of an experience rather than being a way of life. I strongly believe that this could be a good time for people to re-think on investments, strategy, and plan to have an online front for the business too.

Survival is the key

While the above-mentioned shifts are important for long term, survival is the most important thing for the short term. Keeping the costs to a minimum, keeping in touch with the customers through this time, could be very important to bounce back slowly once the restrictions start to relax.

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Keep your ears wide open to Customers

All said and done, at the end of the day, the entire eco-system is driven by customer behavior. Any prediction is capable of going for a toss. It is important to stay close to your customers and observe what is running in their minds. Align the teams on being customer first, and grab as many insights as possible.

Most of the thoughts are personal after following the markets, reading up some articles and observing our current customers. But here are some sources I would recommend for further reading

  1. https://www.indiaretailing.com/2020/04/21/retail/covid-19-crisis-20-25-pc-retailers-wont-be-able-to-survive-3-months-of-closures-lockdown/
  2. https://rai.net.in/images/insights/RAI%20Survey_Impact%20of%20COVID-19%20on%20Indian%20Retail.pdf
  3. https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/covid-19-ecommerce/#changes-in-revenue-across-ecommerce
  4. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/covid-19-impact-consumers-move-more-towards-digital/article31337127.ece
Visualize Fabric

How to visualize a fabric for apparel and garments to your customers?

How to visualize a fabric?

Basics first.

Do you get a lot of customers who would shop for running fabrics with the intention of taking it to a tailor or a designer later for stitching ? What would they make the fabric into ? A dress? Gown? Suit? Furniture? Pillows? Home furnishing? What is their thought process while buying a fabric in a retail store? What would be their thought process if they had to buy a fabric online? Did you try stepping into their shoes through their journey of buying a fabric?

There is a lot of technical help when it comes to what all things a customer needs to know for buying a fabric, or rather while deciding to buy a fabric. Let’s assume they know all of it, or they have done enough research and finalized their criteria, like, what kind of a fabric to buy, budget, and the use case. But once they are in your store, how do they shop for fabrics? How do they know what colors and prints to look for?

I found this method most common, where in the customers would have a lot of reference photos, and have a fair idea of what you are going to do with the fabric. They start looking for fabrics similar to what is there in the photo. Or they come to the store with an open mind and the seller starts guiding and helping them with the shortlisting.

Based on your immense experience of selling fabrics and following trends from the area and globally, you also start filtering some good alternate options. Here comes the tough part, where they would now start imagining and visualizing in your mind, beyond what is available in their reference photos. How these fabrics would look like once they are stitched. This is potentially a huge space where in the seller and the customer might be on different pages. You might lose the sale, because the customer is not able to imagine it the way you are able to. In this new times, the customer might try to find more images with similar fabrics, but it is very rare that they would find an image on their phone of the exact same fabrics you are showing. All this, can happen virtually, even if you are an online seller.

The ready-made market combats this problem by running photoshoots on good looking models and cataloging those pictures. But this could be a very expensive process for fabrics! There is an additional investment of converting the fabrics into garments for doing that!

But what if I told you there is an easy and a more effective alternative?! 

This is where TRI3D comes in! You can visualize your fabrics in various different trending garment styles instantly, just by clicking the photo of the fabric. The images are extremely realistic and the customers would be awestruck by the visualization. This video shows how we do it.

TRI3D fabric visualization app would help your sales person to present the fabric easily to the customers and reducing their decision making time, and helping you sell more to a customer beyond what they walked into your store for. Good news, we have some live examples. Regal fabrics from Dubai is one of our happy customers!

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Check out website for more details and drop us an email or call us if you’re interested!

PS: While we are on the topic, we thought it would be fair to lead you to . Here are some interesting posts on what are some good places to buy a fabic online

https://www.heytherehome.com/best-places-to-buy-fabric-online/

https://improb.com/best-online-fabric-stores/

https://www.housebeautiful.com/shopping/g26813260/best-online-fabric-stores/

https://mellysews.com/7-great-online-fabric-stores-buy/

Fabric Draping in TRi3D Visualization Software on PC and phone

How TRI3D Technology is helping in the Visualization of Garments and hence easing the sales?

TRI3D technology has garment visualization as a core value proposition which has multiple use cases:  

  1. To create catalog images for garments to showcase on print or digitally on an e-commerce page.
  2. Help the imagination of a customer with a bare piece of cloth in front of them.
  3. Judge how a design could be when manufactured in different styles.

We take this opportunity to showcase three cases that we have implemented in recent times, and how our customers got benefitted from our visualization and draping technology.

Case 1 – Saree Draping Software

Most of our initial customers are traditional Indian retail brands who have a rich collection of Sarees. We enabled our technology with them and the way they have utilized it has boosted sales of e-commerce businesses. Our saree draping software converts a flat picture of a saree into a model draped image, without actually going through the hassle of running a real model shoot. This saves more than 90% of the time, 50% of cost and days of effort. Using our software, they uploaded more than 50 new products every day, more than 1000 garments every month! (that is at least 2X compared to conventional process). You can checkout Prashanti Sarees for one such example. There is a handloom cooperative society, which moved from a 100 sarees listed on their website, to more than 200 products added in just under a month. Not only such big brands, we also have a number of small and medium saree retailers, who upload just 5 – 10 products a week. They get to upload sarees as and when they have fresh stock. 

Case 2 – Fabric Visualization

The second interesting use case we stumbled upon is into fabrics. We see today, that there is an increasing trend, to buy a running fabric(s). They’re stitched as per customer’s choice, inspired from various styles found on social media like Pinterest, e-commerce, etc. Especially in the female category. So we helped the brand to visualize a running fabric in various different styles. Like a dress, a skirt,a jumpsuit, a coat, a blazer, a suit, etc, and it really helped their customers visualize a fabric very quickly in the style they would want. This hybrid bespoke designer wear concept is growing not only in India but outside India too! This solution was applicable for both their online and physical retail stores. In thier retaili stores, it was a perfect assistant to their sales guy. The customers could then download the image of how they want to get it stitched, share that with their designer / stylist / tailor and ease out the communication. Real handy visualization!

For example, in the below case, we are showing how different running fabrics look like as a kurti

Case 3 – Design Visualization and Validation

Another use case we came across was that of a design cycle. One of our customers design their own fabrics, manufacture them to garments, and sells them to end consumers. They have a pool of designers and wanted to understand how a design would look like on a garment before even the fabric is manufactured. This would basically help in judging a design and optimizing fabric munifacturing. So the time period of their design cycle is reduced. Also, since there won’t be any physical sampling required for fabric and garments, it saves lot of costs too! We still don’t have any quantifiable data here, but I’m definitely looking forward to collecting some data over time and checking how much it actually made a difference!

Check out more interesting use cases of TRI3D at TRI3D Gallery

Thanks for reading these stories and we’re very excited to look out for more use cases where our visualization technology can make a difference! 

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How to explore E-Commerce Cataloging with Photoshoots and Digital Clothing

Money, effort and time! It is what is spent on typical model photoshoots for a brands to represent their clothes. How much do they spend on a single model shoot for about 50 to 100 products?

An estimated 35,000-70,000 rupees, that means they are typically spending about Rs 500 – Rs 1000. A few certain e-commerce platforms won’t allow to put some ideas onto the table directly. They got specific guidelines, what models, what poses and what backgrounds to have on a photoshoot. This would only invite more cost into the garment photoshoots.  But why and what are these expenses spent on?

Models, draper, make-up, photographer, a studio to shoot, editing, etc.The whole thing of getting all these people together to get a simple shoot typically takes more than 1-2 weeks, which is the time added to taking a ready garment to the online market. 

Check out more about traditional e-commerce cataloging here

Rather than spending so much time and effort, here’s an idea – get your garments digitally cataloged through the magic of technology. Move forward into the future instead of breaking your head scheduling a basic setup. 

So what’s the solution?

You can reduce redundancy, get a cost-effective solution, no hassles in planning or wasting time on a shoot, no more waiting time for a perfect model. Products can go to the market in a matter of a day. Come into the next step of Cataloging 2.0

 
 
TRI3D presents a new innovative technology where clothing brands don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on modeling and photoshoots. TRI3D simply takes the flat pictures of garments or running fabrics and presents a photo-realistic digital draping of the garments on the models.This way, the brands can expect a clean, premium and toasty representation of their clothing material on a beautiful model economically and TRI3D expects a smile from their clients. Technology is what brings this cataloging and draping software to life.

You can check out different types of garments covered by our visualization technology here: TRI3D Gallery

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