Digitizing the fashion value chain: SVP of Digital Ventures, Hatch and Stitch

This month,
FashionUnited interviewed Anne-Christine Polet, the SVP of Digital Ventures
at PVH Europe’s corporate start-ups, Hatch and Stitch. The ventures combine
technology with fashion expertise and commercial thinking to create digital
solutions that help brands reinvent their value chain.

“What drives us is to digitize what is ‘under the hood’ for fashion –
the value chain. Historically an underinvested piece in the fashion
industry when it comes to digitization, but the opportunities are immense:
reducing waste, streamlining operations and truly reinventing the way
fashion works,” Polet wrote in an email to FashionUnited. Read on to learn
how Polet is pioneering the digitization of the fashion industry with Hatch
and Stitch and how she made the two loves of her life-fashion and
tech-a shining career.

Can you tell us about Hatch and Stitch’s missions? How are the
start-ups transforming the industry?

Stitch focuses on the core of it all: the creation of collections. Our
mission here is to digitize the design and development process for brands,
bringing a new kind of craft back into fashion by scaling 3D design
practices, reducing manual work, enhancing creativity, speeding up the
workflow-all while creating less waste and making the process more
sustainable.

Hatch tackles the next step in the chain: how brands sell to retailers.
Our mission at Hatch is to digitize wholesale selling completely; releasing
dependency on physical showrooms, samples and physical meetings to tell a
brand story and sell collections. Hatch’s product, the Digital Showroom,
allows high quality branded storytelling (or ‘storyselling’, as we call it)
in-showroom or remote-empowering sales teams to connect to their retailers
in a unique way. Digital Showrooms continue to support our customer’s
ongoing sustainability missions, reducing the need for sample production
and impacts of shipping.

Did you always want to work in fashion and technology?

I started in tech first, at Google-that’s where I first experienced the
power that technology can have in creating value for users and
organizations alike. When I moved into fashion, I was really craving that
digital mindset: tackling difficult problems, reinventing how you work,
challenging the status quo. Luckily, Tommy Hilfiger embarked on their
Digital Showroom journey soon after I started there. I feel very lucky to
work in this beautiful combination of fashion and technology.

You also mentioned job roles within Stitch that specialize in
supporting the digitization of the design process such as Transformation
Specialist and 3D Design Expert. Do you foresee these roles expanding and
how?

At Stitch, we believe that the power of 3D really comes to life when the
designers and the product teams learn to work in new ways. While there are
definitely new kinds of job roles emerging that guide the digital
transformation for brands, it’s really the role of the designer, product
developer and merchandiser that will evolve. And it will change in two of
the following ways.

Move from physical to digital: moving from paper hand sketch to 3D.
Visualize collections, instead of pinning it on boards. Doing fitting and
design changes virtually instead of pinning on a fit model. Conducting
design reviews with markets and other stakeholders digitally, instead of
large in-person meetings. Leveraging digital prototypes instead of shipping
them across oceans from a factory. And much more!

New design process and cross-discipline collaboration: the design
workflow changes when it’s done in 3D. It becomes faster, more efficient,
with less room for error. In addition, the collaboration between the
different disciplines in the design community becomes more instantaneous.
Instead of waiting on each other to finish a part of the workflow, they
collaborate simultaneously, in small iterations. It’s a very agile process
that allows for flexibility and change.

The reason why digitization hasn’t scaled across the entire fashion
industry yet, is that there’s a large human element to the work that’s
needed.

What are the biggest changes in fashion you have seen over these past
few months?

With the major curveballs that Covid-19 has thrown at the world and
especially the fashion industry, there is a silver lining, the need for
digitization in fashion has greatly increased. Brands have realized that
the traditional process of creating and selling garments isn’t made for an
unpredictable world that requires constant course correction.

This has really increased the industry’s focus on 3D as well as
digitizing the wholesale selling process. And the latter has always been a
process that was difficult to change: it just worked so well for buyers to
come to beautiful showrooms, see all the samples, connect with the sales
teams and place their orders. These buying appointments have always been
important from both a branding as well as a relationship point of view.

It has always been Hatch’s mission to digitize that in-showroom
experience, but now buyers couldn’t even travel! So we’ve worked really
hard to adapt to the new circumstances and have launched features like
fully remote selling so brands can continue their wholesale selling in the
same beautifully branded and guided way they’re used to in-showroom.