This is the transcript of a session given by Filipa Neto of Farfetch at PI Apparel Europe in Milan. The talk can be watched in full here.

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These experience where you can try for sneakers, watches and beauty in this immersive world and you can basically swipe and try on, let’s say, different styles and compare. There’s endless opportunities here. Right. The recommendations can be powered to suit your your esthetics, direct the list of products can be mono brand with just one brand featured on the carousel.

And we are seeing that people just continue to engage with more products and they really like to see the comparisons. And again, this is on top. The results we are seeing here are on top of the already positive results we shared with you on the AB test. I love this picture. I love this experience. I think it’s probably made me fell in love with this bag that I didn’t like it so much before.

So we also launched the 3D bag viewers. We’re expanding again the categories, the experiences that we are launching. So on the left, what you see is usually imagery when you go to a website, 2D and on the right, we’re not only giving a more immersive experience, but all our experiences are now solving as well for a size and fit opportunity.

So what you see in the first screen, you basically are able to see the measurements of the item and you can also see what items can the bag actually hold. So again, this is just very practical and from a user perspective is enhancing how this shopper feels about the confidence on purchasing this item. So right now, this is not in a B test, but we can share with you that 20% of the conversions that we see on backs are assisted by virtual trial.

So pretty much 20% of the purchases interacted with the 3D back viewer. When we look at a two week window before Beyonce talking about virtual fashion items, we also are digitizing 3D models. So as part, again of expanding the digital fashion opportunity, Farfetch has also tested and later on acquired a company called Allure Systems. What they do pretty much is they virtualize a model in 3D and then we no longer are leveraging human models in our shoots for part of our photography.

So this technology has been embedded in our creative operations studios is now scaling, and it also allows us to have a lot more diversity in model inclusion as well. We’ve been able to roll it to three studios and it really increases the productivity overall of the photoshoots we can do maintaining the quality. So once you scale these very, very hard to maintain the creative standards and what technology here is allowing to do is as we scale, we can maintain the quality standards.

So we will continue to develop this technology. We’ll continue to scale it as well. But what’s next? There are three pillars we’re focusing on. There are still challenges, of course, in scaling 3D assets production. It’s getting better and better and we are going to move faster and faster. But this is one of the things is making sure we move from the 10% catalog coverage into much higher.

I think what is exciting and also I wanted to share this with you is when we talk about 10% catalog coverage, we are not talking about 10% of sales. Luckily, we basically have 10% of our best sellers, which can translate into 40 50% actually of impact of revenue for that same category. The second one is new experiences. So there’s a lot more coming up.

A lot of the exciting categories that that we cannot share yet, but that I do think people are already looking to test and explore beyond the accessories and bags. What shoes make up that we talked about before. And the third one is we will continue to nurture and invest in the improvements and iterates and continue to measure everything through testing, which I think is very, very helpful because we can then share these outcomes to the industry and build better solutions for everyone.

Another big topic are the AI developments. So in general, AI developments will allow for digital fashion experiences to have more quality but also be cheaper. It will be incredibly important to use generative AI to create content and lower the cost of content. It will increase the quality and some of the physics of the materials that we are going to have yet today.

We’ll be able to be done tomorrow in an effective way, in a scalable way. And then utility. The more experiences there are, the higher the ROI will be, because with one 3D asset you can actually leverage it at multiple touch points. And this is one of the trends that we we are seeing.

So I want to thank everyone for coming and let me know if you have any questions.

There’s one question or we wait one minute.

All right. If there are no more questions, I’m also available outside if you want to reach out. Thank you, everyone. there’s how can brands that are already create their 3D assets leverage them on farfetch? Okay, I didn’t know. So you had a timer for one minute? No, this was all okay. How can brands that already create 3D assets leverage them on Farfetch?

So it depends on the 3D asset you have available. So for example, if you already work with if you’re a brand that already works, we want to it’s very, very easy for us to integrate in the Farfetch experience. And actually we have already some clients that started as B2B clients and then become B2B plus marketplace clients. That’s one of the big advantages is it just increases the audience and exposure.

It is very hard without knowing exactly what the 3D essence specifications because we have certain guidelines. But let’s talk outside and revolutionizing the luxury industry, the future of digital experiences. That’s a good question. We’re going to be able to share more soon, but I cannot share today around clothing and in apparel. And of course, that’s the big categories that everyone wants to talk about.

But it’s coming. How are you creating your 3D products in-house or via suppliers? It’s a hybrid experience. Okay. So pretty much we have played a lot in that space and we have analyzed what is the best way to create 3D assets for each one of the categories, because sometimes the best way to create a big is not the best way to create a watch.

So pretty much we have a category by category approach. We are more and more working with, especially for for sneakers, for example, putting some of these structures in-house. Having said that, we have an extended ecosystem of partners that we work with for each one of the categories, and this is just part of Farfetch DNA we will always partner.

I don’t see it as we will only do it internally. This is highly complex. There’s always great new companies emerging waiting for edible technology. So we will definitely, if there’s anyone in the room with great technology for three years of creation, please come and talk with us, because we are we are partnering across the board there as well.

What about denim in 3D? Is so an interesting one. I don’t have an answer for you yet. Maybe this can be connected with the clothing in apparel, depending on the use case. I don’t I don’t recall any any use case we have done with with denim. Not yet. You showed the example of the yoga. Would that be possible to also see the inside of it with the 3D technology, you have not yet.

But again, we are always evolving and we know this is one of the big requests and we are always talking with brands, We’re always talking with clients. So pretty much very likely in the in the pipeline. Thanks for that. Is Farfetch noticing any disproportionately interest across digital categories more interested in sneakers versus cozies versus watches? We have different levels of testing then, right?

We are more mature on the types of testing we’re able to do on the categories. Where we have more SKUs is a different testing approach. Then the testing approach we have when we launch something new. Okay, so it’s for us how we are comparing and what gives us a good, good sense of this is going in the right direction is the percentage of assisted conversions is not too dissimilar.

Okay. So it’s pretty much we are seeing the same levels of engagement in the different experiences. So people basically that used to the experience, they are converting it to at a similar rate in that two week window. And that’s it. All right. Thank you, everyone,

This is the transcript of a talk given at PI Apparel in Amsterdam by Rickard Lindqvist. You can watch the session in full here.

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I hope I’ll be able to bring a bit of punk into this conference here. You know, this talk. And what do you see? Right. Is this is you see is a tape tape recording of Dead Kennedys. I think this is one mid-eighties home taping is killing a record industry profits.

We left this site blank so that you can help. I think that’s brilliant. Part of this going to be about the the similarities between the music industry and the fashion industry and what we can learn from the from the music industry. But the the title of this talk here, this presentation is, as you might have read, Open Source Design Development How free access to digital design information will Transform the fashion Industry.

And I don’t know exactly how they will transform it, but there are some sort of qualified guesses or theories or thoughts I have about it that I will share with you here. It could also be called Listen to the Music. Or if we want to be a bit more punk and of fashion brands areas, then I my American linguist, I have a background as a tailor, a designer, a researcher at the Swedish School of Textile.

I worked in the industry sort of stretching from couture and bespoke tailoring to sportswear. I co co-created the label at the COC in 2016, sort of benchmarking the setup of how we can use work with digital 3D visualizations for fashion. Today, I operate a small factory, a dig, a physical factory in Sweden. We produce digital and physical garments and so we do all our product development in close 3D and the visualizations and animations.

We use close 3D also for all our production, all the grading, all the layout planning, everything is done in the same system. Today. We still have a and a traditional to a dickhead software, but I haven’t used it for two months to be honest. And so we are a team of seven people for working in the physical production and three sort of in, in digital and, and management and a industry is now.

Yeah, this is another example. This is another example of dig a physical things this, this is the thing we did for PUMA innovation a few years ago. It’s it’s sort of the concept for whom as first E sport collection you know companies like Puma, they they profit on selling merch. And the kids today, they don’t look at football and longer they look at e-sports, so they want to sell t shirts to the kids playing.

But there’s no sound coming out. And I don’t know if that’s intentional. We can live without the sound, but it’s quite a fantastic project for me to to work with where we because we combine the physical and the digital and then after these conceptual development sketches and this sort of became the first sponsored E Sports team e-sport team that Puma sponsored.

And, and basically this was a this was a remake of Puma’s T seven Tracksuit that was really comfortable to sit down and we a industry A is for it’s good to have a company starting with eight because we always get first had the first it first in line but it’s also since I’ve before had this fashion brand called attack and two years ago we divide the car into two parts so at the COC still exist as a brand, but the in-house production that we’re doing and all the consultancies I was carrying out is now done under the label a industry.

Just to give you some background, without the car, we sort of pioneered the sort of dig a physical things. We started on the car in 2016 and me and Jimmy together carried on then for I think four years and is one one of my favorite things we did. This is a hologram box showcasing 3D garments in scale. 1 to 1 in the physical room.

And so we’re mixing 19th century mirroring technology with modern 3D visualizations.

It is better with sound, isn’t it? We speed through that a bit. So. Yeah. And without Takac we were sort of pioneers in I think it’s 2016 starting actually settling arguments on rendered images because we were a bit we found out about clones, the 3D technology back then, and we were a bit kind of shocked that we couldn’t find an example of brands actually selling garments based on rendered images.

So suddenly on, we started an independent fashion brand, mainly with a motivation that if we start small, we can do anything because we can’t really fail or we can fail, but we want to affect us so much. If you don’t best look someone, it. So we did that and we elaborated a lot with different possibilities. We set up online fitting rooms where you could take we tested different try out for online fitting and we did a lot of animations and we went to paper apparel twice to speak and but the most important thing we did with other COC for what I’m speaking about here today is what we call shareware, meaning that every time when we released a new style for sale, we also released the to day pattern and the 3D model for free downloading because frankly, I mean, the whole fashion industry is built on copying, everyone is copying each other. So we have thought like if anyone want to copy what we do, I rather see and then doing good copy than a bad copy.

And then they don’t have to spend weeks for, I don’t know, tracing that pattern and everything. And this also created quite a following for us. Right. And, and if you downloaded a pattern, you got a cloud file, you got a dxf file, and you got a PDF file as well to print out. So we got a very nice follow some of homeschoolers, very cute people putting up pictures on Instagram of things that they did.

But, but the important thing for me, or like for the process of what I’m doing was that’s what happened, that we had a we had a client, a guy living in Luxembourg buying this green shirt and he downloaded clothes and our downloaded I want to play I guess he downloaded clothes, but he downloaded the garment and sort of redesigned it quite radically.

And then he came back to me saying that, Hey, I’ll redesign that shirt. I have some short fabrics. Can I send that over to you? Because I heard that you have your in-house manufacturing and use your factory as my 3D printing service for this. And I was like, Yes, sure, that’s brilliant. So we did him a couple of shirts and then we used his design for a new at the backdrop, and then suddenly there I was not, I think like what will happen with fashion brands if information is available for anyone?

And what about music then why? Why did I start with this punk type since. Yeah, that is since the music industry has already gone through what we are talking about here today. I don’t know. Has any of you gone shopping records now? All are being in Amsterdam. Find out the local Virgin Megastores. No, you haven’t, because they are not any longer.

Everyone is. We’re consuming our music through streamed media and all. So that’s a really game changer. And that change is not only for us as consumers, it’s also for artists and musicians. If your I can, I can create a song today, probably just downloading an app on my phone and in 10 minutes play a song. It, it will probably sound as shit, but but it would be a unique new tune that probably no one ever heard.

So, you know, it’s really, really changed the whole setup. And so then it’s everything from creation to distribution. And I learned that in Sweden, on Spotify, the majority of everything that is streamed is independent music. Now, the music that has been created and produced without any connection to any major record labels and record labels that used to be the main thing on the record.

You see here the the record label that is printed larger than the artist and and when I was buying records in the nineties, I was quite nerdy. But when I was buying records, now I moved to London only to buy records because I couldn’t find them in Sweden. The records I wanted then I always knew which record label the music.

The artist I was listening to was signed on. Who knows that today? And I know. And why was it like this? That was since it was super expensive to record and distribute music. This is supposed to have been the world’s most expensive recording studio. At least when I Googled the world’s most expensive recording studio, it was admits number one.

And it looks really extensive. But we’re going to listen to a very wise man being interviewed 20 years ago is David Bowie in Swedish television about the Internet and the development of the music industry. And now I see if from ThoughtWorks, I think that we’re moving into a time when music will be fully available in the same way that water or electricity is from the Internet.

When brought and becomes the order of the day everywhere, which won’t be that long. It can only be a few years away. When that finally happens, it will. I think it will obliterate the idea of the record industry at the moment, change it, and I think the emphasis on what music is to our lives will change some of the character, the nature of it.

And I think that artists themselves will find that they have to fall back on performance to provide them with incomes, because I don’t think the music will make them any. Yeah, it’s quite right. It was quite right. And imagine that he is talking about the fashion industry and he’s saying that a fashion I hear was he heard her have written down that yeah I think that we’re moving into music la la la.

And and if it would be fashion this would be I think that we’re moving into a time when fashion designs will be fully available in the same way as water or electricity from the Internet, and it will only obliterate. Right. The idea of the fashion industry and change it. And I think the emphasis of fashion is to our lives will change the character and the nature of it.

And this could sound a bit sad, and I guess it is in a way, because with change, things change and we some some things get lost. And I kind of I kind of miss those record stores. But on the other hand, I think it’s fantastic with the accessibility to music, but also music is something else to us today.

But this to me, may maybe it’s since I’m older, but I think I think it’s not only that and and so then let let’s have a look at what it looked like then when 20 years ago then we even more than that we went through all these different hardware, the music industry. And in two yes, 2000 we already had the technique for music streaming that I always talking about here.

Of course it wasn’t mainstream, but the technique was there. So then what kind of technique do we have today in the fashion industry and one thing that I’m going to sort of base this is on, and I use Cloe so 3D for my designs and Chlo released one year ago, what are they called this closet connect for an open platform online where users could share their designs or sell them or just put them up for show.

Here you can find then. But I think it’s right now, I think it’s about 700 designs that people agreed that you can use these for physical production. And, you know, that doesn’t really matter if they agreed to that as copyright protection for patents in fashion industry is almost none. So you can see if you get hold of the shape, you can quite, quite safe to use it at this 167 degrees.

Physical fabrics from the European fabric supplier Swatch on now we have the sun. Why we shouldn’t have it. I recorded this on the air court yesterday. so this means that these fabrics you can download and also order as physical and physical fabrics right away because they have all these in stock in Korea and WI with our industry.

We did a project last year together with with house Sandra’s sitting over here at house of you is is a print house here in the Netherlands for digital printing. So we took ten of their stock fabrics the sustainable stock fabrics and we digitized those meaning we measured all the, you know, physical properties and got a bunch of numbers and typed them into Cloe to get that the drape and the feel and everything.

And then we scanned the textures. You probably know how this works. So then one could, before ordering any fabrics or fabric samples, one can apply that fabric on your design. And I thought this was suitable from a conceptual level because this, this is fabrics then that is for digital printing. And here we had a link also to House of Use.

You could go in there and download the fabric order of fabric samples and then apply your print sketches on your 3D designs before ordering and if fabrics there. Yeah, you get it at what I’m currently what I’m currently doing is sort of version two of the shareware project that we did earlier, which with now called open source production patterns.

So I rereleased a lot of the carpets. I hosted workshops with a number of different student groups, and I also invited others to contribute to build like an online open source rock pattern archive because there’s more. There’s we have these 700 garments in Tulsa Connect and there’s more in different CC traders and this sites where you can download 3D models.

But a lot of those styles, they are not made for physical production in here. I set up a manual, a PDF, that sort of goes through exactly how garment are, how I think a garment should be setting up in clothes to also so that you can also print out the pattern to use it. So this is very dry.

You just go through everything with not sure seam allowances, fuzing grading, point on measurements, everything. And then I want to ask all of you to join in and be this catalyst of change because this is going to happen sooner or later. You like it or not, all this information will be out there, so we better together put together this sort of a good base to work from because this will help them like trade secrets for 200 years now, it will be open for everyone, the patterns, and we can let it take ten years or we can just pull it together and have a good base setting up in, I don’t know, two years.

And so, so then right now we can see this this jacket you see here, it’s size, it’s just three sizes. And this is on background information and then one can download it. And this this comes as the really interesting thing. Do you know what this is? Have you seen this? Yeah, this is close Cloud three, this latest software called Ginny.

They released it as a beta before Christmas. It’s it’s only the you can say is a simplified version of the 3D interface in club And they also tossed in some of these cute avatars for animation games and online metaverse things. And it’s probably that’s probably what is going to be used for first. But this is this is sort of the this is the Snapchat version of garment design.

So here you can pull in any avatar and adjust the size of it and then they have some predefined garments. But you can also pull in any of the designs from our open source library and it’s out the grates on that avatar. So changes in size automatically and if you change the avatar, the garment is all together again.

So here we pull in. This is a bit scan on me and now it’s off. So I’m going to be another one again. And then the garment changes it again. So we and we still have the pattern in the background. We never see it. And you can do all the a lot of you can’t do everything because it’s still a beta, but you can apply textures and graphics and different frames and you can even change the, the shape here and the lines and everything and, and the padding is there in the background and for being a beta version, this works fantastically.

It doesn’t work too 100% today, but I would say it works to like well 90 95% and this out the grading workflow released that two years ago, it was pretty crap. Now it’s now it’s very good. We use that for our production. We still oversee the result, but we use it for for grading things for, for production and

I obviously was going to come here and talk to you about revolution, but with the discussion of the post-truth world, it feels like a counter-revolution.

Now, and it’s been a very peaceful and quiet revolution thanks to smartphones, thanks to social media and thanks to the vast amount of information. Now available online to anyone. And this resolution has allowed the new fields to grow. And I like to call this field online open source investigation. I can use it to influence the powerful. We can use it to challenge the powerful and we can bring them to accountability as well.

Now, I started Bellingcat because I wanted to teach people how to do this. It used to be that the tools of media production were in the hands of the media, and with the rise of the internet, that is no longer true with blogging. Starting in 2000 and social media started in 2004, and YouTube, which I think started in 2005.

Now the tools for media production have been given to the people formerly known as the audience.

This technique is it’s fantastic, but it’s very hard, I suppose, to say something before this started. But you already see, this is Bellingcat, the independent group of journalists. They managed to pinpoint the the name of the commanding officer that ordered the shoot down of the plane in Ukraine in 2014 by searching on Google Maps and Russian Facebook, for example.

And they talk about that then, yeah, how the media at work has changed due to access to other technologies and then again, yeah, I see this this jimny tool, that’s the first step towards something, towards something that could be seen as online design, open source design developments. And the these tools that it’s been earlier been like very secretively kept within the industry.

Now almost anyone will be able to then download a a 3D style and a pattern, change it, apply a print of the like, bring in a fabric which is also available in physical life and then render those images and put them up for sale. And still today, I mean, this is still on the eve of the software. You need a bit of skills.

We can compare it to when I started my first online store in in, in in 2009, I think, but costed €20,000 today. You could have started an online store while I was speaking here for like, I don’t know, €15 nowadays. And, and that’s where we will be heading for this. And then we see the rise of new sort of marketplaces online or communities and says, this is me at a factory, such an online community which Winstone and some other guys are are operating.

And can you just tell us quickly what this is? So Metaphor Factory is a community built on blockchain, and it’s not fashion native at all. It’s a bunch of tech guys predominantly, but the ethos in tech of open source is almost natural now. And we were moving into so we our marketplace for fashion community built fashion brands and we were looking for our first cut and so manufacturing.

So we, we actually found Rikard and his open source patterns and it was the only really the only thing that we found. And we actually downloaded Cloe and started figuring it out. And I think the the shock of their not really being open source is one thing. But the second part of it is, is it feels inevitable and it’s an amazing new consumer experience.

When the consumer is activated to be creative as part of the entire design process. And I feel like it’s a service to, you know, we talk a lot about consumers making choices and what is a consumer want. I think involving the consumer in the creative process of fashion is probably the quickest and most sustainable way to really the evolution of the industry.

Yeah, I guess you could see me at a factory that’s that’s an online platform where the people at that platform together curates the what’s going to be sold there. Yeah. And then two years ago, one year ago, I don’t know Winston then downloaded a Jaguar. We’ll come back to that a jacket and made this joint and so so what we’re looking at the we have now that we have open source production patterns, we have bigger physical materials.

We also have online open source design development tools coming up. We have new kinds of preorder platforms and digital communities of sales for this. We also have we within this online open source design developments and also other softwares. Parallel to this, we have digital out grading through the UV mapping, meaning that if you change the avatar, the garment automatically change in the UVA mapping.

And then we have local micro factories. And yeah, I think I can’t tell exactly where this will be leading, but I think if we look at what happened to the music industry, we can start sort of trying to imagine where this will be. And I don’t know, it might not. Yeah. And this is sort of there’s this jacket.

Then there’s another jacket with a print design by Winston Solar Metal Factory sold on preorder of produce those with a cute US label I ever seen that Winston design which Winston to the left and me to the right holding a pair of scissors so yeah this is my sketch of what we might be facing then that we will have digital creators supplying us with open sourced patterns, print design, whatever it could be.

We have bigger physical fabrics. We might then have bigger physical curators picking things out of this and putting up things for sale in digital communities. Some preorder when we reached when you sold, say, 100 garments, then you could we can produce those and in a factory or small factory and there we have this automatic UV mapping engraving meaning that we can have 100 individual sizes and we can plot those out in one, lay on a single ply cutting machine, and we can have a production being almost as efficient as a traditional garment production.

And then I think if this should really work out, we should we should try to set up some sort of smart contracts here, meaning that when if a garment is created, is sold like that, part of that revenue should go back to the digital creators through some sort of blockchain set up exactly how that would work out. It’s someone would work that out.

And then before went back to Bowie and what he said, we listen to it once again. I think that we’re moving into a time when music will be fully available in the same way that or electricity is from the Internet. When broadband becomes the order of the day everywhere, which won’t be that long, it can only be a few years away.

When that finally happens, it will I think it will obliterate the idea of the record industry at the moment, changing, and I think the emphasis on what music is to our lives will change. Some of the character, the nature of it. And I think that artists themselves will find that they have to fall back on performance to provide them with incomes, because I don’t think the music will make them any like, I don’t know the question if is it smart contracts that the dishonest will have to fall back on?

Royce is something else and all the information is out there and is it relevant to compare fashion brands to record labels? And we’re probably going to see, you know, just as we’ve seen in the music industry, we have loads of parallel tracks in there. Somehow we still have the kind of old, old music is still out there. We still have commercial artists being being sort of set together by record labels and promoted in a similar way as they were earlier.

And then we have independent music and other types of music also from a esthetical point of view being created your section. And so yeah, thanks for listening. I believe we also have we have time for some questions

Echo Do you ever worry about big High Street or like fashion giants using patterns that you pop open source?

No. Why should I? I don’t know. Maybe it sounds nice to have, like, independent designers or like, the smaller community using it, but you don’t worry about it. I’ll bet everyone’s already been doing that for a long time. And it’s not only the big sort of high street fashions and also the the couture or the sort of the designer labels.

They buy things from H&M and knock those off to get basic basic fits. It already works all the way back and forth. So and everyone who’s claiming something else, they’re lying. Thank you. That was really inspiring is that I also think it always develops because you say, Well, this is the sketch for the future by then. Okay, we go that direction and then there will be another sketch.

So it’s it’s always developing. So there’s never an end to that. That makes it interesting. And also not a problem to copy, because then after that, there will be something new. Yeah, of course this is only one sketch and we will see parallel things developing. And of course what I’ve been outlining here is not replaceable straight away in an upscaled level.

But then the making of Tesla wasn’t either in the beginning, and a lot of people said that it would never be possible to make that car on an upscale level and we’re all going off and the end of the industry desperately needs to to be changed. And I didn’t go into the environmental facts here because I know you’re all everyone of you already know those things.

Yeah. I also thought it was kind of interesting with the artist part being more reliant in the music industry of concerts and events and started to think about what will the events and fashion industry go? What type of collaborations will there be like when everything becomes open source this then other parts will also be more important, I think.

And what is your thoughts about that? Like one ways and events in general and the other? That kind of that’s the question. What what will still be there to pay for if everything is available? And I think eventually we might only be buying into production capacity. That’s why I started a factory. But I know it’s it’s it’s a tricky question where we’ll be heading.

And I think one point of view from a creative point of view, it’s fantastic that you can have access to different things. And yeah, of course, from another point of view, I think that’s problematic. But then there’s a lot of things which are problematic that we need to handle and these things aren’t happening tomorrow, but we should be aware of all of those.

What is there and the pioneers of these movements, they are probably not sitting here, but there are some tech geniuses somewhere. And the the I would say that the successful players in the fashion industry or the future, that will be they will come from the tech industry and we will see, you know, we will have like at the Airbnb saw fashion or players coming in from from the side and several of the big brands will manage to make that transition of several others will be replaced by by other coming in with other other kinds of solutions that we haven’t seen before,

This is a transcript of a talk recorded at PI Apparel in Vietnam by Cameron James Wilson, CEO of The Diigitals. The full talk can be viewed here.

00;00;01;13 – 00;00;27;10
Unknown
Hi, I’m Cameron James Wilson. I’m CEO of The Diigitals and creator of the world’s first digital supermodel studio. I’ve had the pleasure of presenting at several different PR panels around the world before COVID and I’m really, really excited to be here today to present to you kind of just an introduction into the rise of Shudu and kinds of virtual influencers all together.

So who is shooting? Shudu, who is my creation, my baby, who came into the world in 2017? And at the time I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I was a fashion photographer for ten years and I wasn’t enjoying it. You know, I wasn’t was an happy with the work that I was creating. I felt fashion photography was an industry in decline.

You know, it was budgets were being cut, corners were being cut. Photography was no longer valued in the same way that it was when I started my career. So I was looking for something different, something else. And I fell in love with 3D programs like Marvelous Designer and a program called DAZ 3D and started to create little images, little pieces of art that went viral online.

So Shudu now has almost a quarter of a million followers. She’s been in every magazine you can probably possibly think of, and she’s done campaigns with the likes of Louis Vuitton and Ferragamo. She just recently did something with Charles and Keith. So she’s working nonstop, which is amazing. As a supermodel should. When I created she to, like I said, I didn’t have any idea of what I was getting myself into.

But little did I know I was kind of stumbling into the world of 3D fashion. But also I found myself kind of in the center of a lot of controversy. People had never seen a virtual influencer before. What did this mean for the future of modeling? Is she going to replace models? You know, is she going to replace makeup artist, hair stylist?

What does this mean for the future of the fashion industry? And little did I know I sparked kind of this huge conversation with this image here of shooting. So this was the first image I ever created of shooting. And I posted it online and it became a viral sensation. It was shared around the globe by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks.

And it was just an incredible feeling at the time. Again, I was just starting out in 3D. This was only after three or four months of learning 3D programs. I had created this image, so I knew that I was on the right track after starting shooting and kind of running her page for a while, I thought about how we could collaborate with brands.

So using virtual models to collaborate with makeup brands and what that could mean for the future of fashion visualization. So I chose the brand Fenty and recreated kind of like an advertisement for them, which they then reposted and got over a quarter of a million likes on their page before they realized she wasn’t real and shut it down.

So it didn’t last very long. But people seem to love the image. It was very, very engaging and had tons and tons of comments underneath people trying to figure out what is shooting. Is she real? Is she not? And we were starting to see that digital models and virtual influencers were incredibly engaging characters on social media. People reacted very strongly to that imagery and it has a very high quality of post compared to real influencers.

So they were outperforming by a long, long way. Real people. This was the first collaboration between Shooter and a real model. So the model on the right is an Australian model called Aja, who I never met before, and I was thinking about creating real models in 3D and how that could mean that their career could be worldwide and global without ever having to leave their house.

Aja, who is in Australia, you know, she’s she’s never really modeled before, could then travel around the globe as a 3D model and pose wherever she wanted to in campaigns with she do or whatever she wanted to do. So thinking again about the future of modeling, what would this mean for models would erase them or would it open opportunity for them?

I think it really, really depends on the intent behind the creation. This was our first collaboration with an editorial for WWT, and we worked really closely with Harlow 3D to produce this editorial. They did an amazing job recreating the garments extremely faithfully, and then we dressed Chuter and put her in this kind of desert situation, and it was the first time that anyone would have ever done a fashion editorial in 3D completely without leaving, leaving a computer.

You could have a model that was in the middle of a desert somewhere. And it really, again, just presented what were the possibilities of the future of fashion if you didn’t have to fly around the world to create these beautiful, beautiful visuals? You know, this is an incredibly unsustainable way of producing imagery and this showcased the possibilities of what could be done with 3D programs like Flow, 3D.

We’ve also worked with makeup artists. So again, thinking about careers, how will they change? How will they develop? Working with famous makeup artist Sir John, who’s worked with Beyonce. So thinking about what is what will his career look like in the future. So he provided us with a face chart and we put that face to recreated that make up onto shooter, showcasing that creatives still will have a place within this industry.

It’s not going to erase anything, but it will change the way we work with them. And it’s important that people understand this because there was a huge fear of anything technological. As soon as something technological comes along like this, people back away and think this is going to take jobs away, this is going to remove opportunity. And it’s important that we reassure people that this is actually going to create more new new opportunities, new positions, new jobs, and also remote positions as well.

For makeup artists, you have to live in London or a city or something to be working constantly. But this presents the opportunity of actually being able to work anywhere in the world and produce incredible editorial and fashion imagery. This was another shoot that we did, this time with Tiffany and Co and Vogue Australia, and this was the first time that we blended shoe with a real model.

So we actually did a real life photoshoot with a model and we layered a shoe over the top to create this incredible mixed reality, kind of hyper real photo shoot. Here’s the real model, and I wanted to showcase again what is the future of modeling? Where will models be positioned in this new future of virtual and 3D? You know, will they be completely erased or actually, do we still need them?

Do we still need that human element to kind of brings you and characters like shoot to life? It’s really, really important in shoot Use case where there is a lot of criticism of shooter due to the fact she is a dark skinned woman in fashion and for dark skinned women in fashion, it’s very, very difficult for them to have opportunities for modeling and and things like that.

So it’s very important that we reassure people that this is presenting new opportunity and not taking anything away from the community that she represents. So I had the chance to work with Baumann very, very early on in my career, and they approached me and said that they wanted to create their own virtual influencers. So up until this point I’d really just been doing it for myself, you know, just creating these characters here and there for me.

And this was the first time that I’d worked with a client to create two characters for them, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about the way that other people see beauty. You know, when you talk to somebody and you say, you know, I want a smaller nose or this or that, their idea of what that means can be totally different to yours.

So that was a huge learning curve when it came to creating these two models for Baumann, you know, learning about how to describe to someone different, different features, you know, eyes and nose and lips, you know, how to describe to someone, how to visually communicate what they want and, you know, how how can I deliver that? But Margot and C were very successful, and this is one of the very, very first fully CGI campaigns for a high fashion label.

There was also Louis Vuitton several years before, but that was with a character called Lightning from Final Fantasy. And this was just when we were starting to see 3D being picked up more and more around this time, you know, people were really starting to utilize 3D in the design process and think about the potential that it would have for gaming and the metaverse.

You know, this is way this is years before the metaverse, but people were starting to see the potential of where these 3D assets could go. Could they monetize these 3D assets? You know, how how can we actually utilize 3D itself without any physical garments at all? This was to do at the on the red carpet, which she was actually the first virtual character on a red carpet ever in the world, which is incredible as a hologram, this project was something of a real passion project as well.

They approached us. They wanted this done in a month. The turnaround was crazy. We had to transfer Shooter from 3D into Unreal and then project her on the red carpet as a hologram. So this utilized something called hollow gauze and people could then stand next to her pose and get their photo with her, which was something really, really incredibly ambitious, but also something that I was so confused as to why nobody has done this before.

You know, you would think that Elsa or the Minions or something would have appeared on a red carpet many years before. But actually this was one of the very first times you can see here that we worked with a fashion model channels to provide the motions for shooter, which again highlights just how different modeling will be in the future, you know, the different ways that models can be involved in this project.

And that is still reliant on humans to generate these motions for the future. However, once you have these motions, you can then apply them to any digital model after that. So you only have to capture them once and then next thing you know you can use it on on every model. So it’s all about building a bank of assets.

This was shooting for a and again, we were working with a real fashion model. However she turned up to the shoot. They the client absolutely loved her. The celebrity talent had kind of let them down and they were really unhappy with them. So instead they chose to use Shooter and her muse is what we call them Misty for the campaign, which was awesome.

We actually saw Tutu for the first time posing alongside the model that played her. So a really, really great campaign. Misty went on to have a really great relationship with Alice, again, showcasing opportunity, how we can create opportunities for models. This was a Samsung campaign that we created, and this this concept is all about showing the people involved in the project.

So the models that you see next to shoot you on the left, on the right are what we call muses. So they are the models that stand in a shooter. So they would actually usually be shooter in the image. But here they play themselves and they’re all kind of together. It’s a really, really sweet concept that I really, really loved.

And the results were incredible. This was one of the first times we used a video with shooter. We actually used a technique where we kind of almost deep faked shooter’s face onto the model, which at the time was kind of a little bit ahead of its time. It was very, very difficult to do. So It was a bit of a challenge, which is why it’s so short.

But again, just kind of like pushing the boundaries, trying out different technologies. You know, how is machine learning going to affect virtual models, you know, trying to kind of mix everything together, everything that’s kind of going on. This was our first full fashion show. This was for Operation Miami Swim Week. This was all done digitally and it was an extensive undertaking.

It was a lot of hours of rendering and simulation. We created this entire kind of catwalk scene, all of the lighting, the environment details, obviously the models. And it was just a huge, huge project. You know, we didn’t really realize when we were getting into it just how long rendering it would be, let alone, you know, everything else that goes into it.

You know, the computers whirring 24 hours a day, trying to produce all of the images to make an animation like this. And that’s something that people need to kind of understand as well as it’s not just about kind of creating the images. It’s about producing them, you know, having the computer actually spit them out in a way. So the power of the virtual influencer, so all of those projects and all of the projects that we’ve done since then have taught us so much about the potential that these virtual influencers have.

You know, how are they going to how are they going to be in the future? You know, are they going to still be just as entertaining? What we’ve seen is that the area has become extremely competitive. So being a virtual influencer now is just not enough. You know, before, when there were only a few, you could you could start an account as a virtual influencer and you would see thousands of followers come just because it was a virtual character.

Now there are actually thousands of these characters on social media, so you need a viewpoint, you need a position, a voice, something special that makes your character stand out. This is all of the media. We’ve been in tons and tons of media and done tons and tons of PR, but as I said, this was kind of more at the beginning, you know, at the beginning you literally had to do any project and people would pick it up and write an article about it.

Whereas now there’s so many kind of virtual models, it really needs to be something specific. You know, there needs to be an edge to it. There’s still a lot to be done, but it has to be thought about, it has to managed well and, you know, really kind of considered about what the kind of point of the character is.

So just a few kind of interesting facts about the engagement, the post quality, four times the post quality, so that actually outperforming real influencers four times over, which is incredible. The audience is incredibly young, so it’s people who are interested in technology, people who are interested in fashion and kind of targeting those who are also interested in things like the Metaverse and Web 3.0.

So again, I mentioned the muses and the importance of the muse shouldn’t be shouldn’t be kind of, you know, dismissed at all. These muses are incredibly important to the narrative of the characters and kind of having a character that actually is successful because these virtual influences are very still very controversial. We’ve seen recently with the Lens, the AI app, lots of people from social media having a backlash against artificial imagery and generated imagery.

How can we show showcase that actually there is a human element behind these artificial creations? So here are some of the models that we’ve worked with, and they all stand in a shooter. When shooter is booked, they get paid, they get credited. And this is really something that I think should be the standard for virtual influencers throughout the industry, Unfortunately, isn’t a lot of virtual influencers.

You see will pretend to be real. They will pretend to be AI, which they’re not. They will not credit the models behind them and they kind of tend to keep everything secretive, which is something that I don’t believe in. I believe in transparency and being open and kind of educating people about this space. I fear that it has the potential to be misleading.

You know, I fear it has the potential to damage beauty standards even further. You know, and I think this is something that we have to be incredibly responsible with. You know, the know every technology is just amazing. And wow, you know, we actually have to think about the repercussions this might have. And if you want to get involved in something like virtual influencers being responsible and thinking about how to make a positive impact, using virtual influencers.

So it comes down again to authenticity. You know, how can a virtual character that is fake be authentic? And it’s really about having an authentic voice, having an authentic point of view, having a having an authentic intent. And we do that, which you do by by working with a writer called AMA Baidoo, who helps us to kind of see shoot you from her point of view, her community’s point of view, engaging with her community, having someone from her community represent her, having that voice, that’s incredibly important.

If you create your character all of a sudden community, it’s incredibly important to engage with that community, not just project your image of what that person looks like or what their voice would be like. So this is something that we’ve actually created a couple of times this year. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Unilever Magnum to create our who represents a community of female cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast.

And I also had the pleasure of making Kami, who is the world’s first virtual influencer with Down’s syndrome. So I created Kami with Down’s Syndrome International and Fortnum, Fortnum and HBOS and forth in Singapore, and we really, really wanted to challenge gaming the metaverse to be more inclusive. You would think that something as futuristic of the metaverse was very diverse and inclusive.

But what we found was that actually it wasn’t, you know, there aren’t options to create characters with disabilities, characters that are bigger, you know, characters with Down’s syndrome. They were completely excluded from this space. So anybody that wanted to kind of be a part of this space, you know, they weren’t being represented. And I found that something is incredibly problematic.

This is something that I learned during this process. So to create Kami, we actually utilized over 100 different women with Down’s syndrome. I was sent all of their photos and I compiled them into one face. So I laid them on top of each other to create an image that represented all of these women. And I thought that that was incredibly powerful.

I didn’t just sit there and imagine what Kami would look like, you know, or create what I saw a person with Down’s syndrome looked like. I utilized real metrics, real people to create Kami in a way that removed beauty bias because no matter what, if I was to create Kami, there would be some kind of subconscious beauty bias that led me to make certain features or do certain things.

And I, I think it’s really important that we recognize that within our self and remove ourselves from that process. So here are some of the incredible women that are represented by Kami, and it’s a project that I absolutely fell in love with during the process. The incredible stance that Kami has is something that I feel like people shouldn’t back away from.

When I get asked to create a virtual influencer by clients, they often want somebody that represents everyone you know, they want somebody who is a little bit Asian, a little bit black, you know, a little bit ambiguous, you know. And I find that incredibly problematic because you end up with a virtual influencer that has no point of view.

You know, it doesn’t really represent anyone. Nobody can relate to that character. But actually creating a character like Kami, who has a very strong stance, really, really says something about about your character and about the point of view of your kind of company. So here are some of the content I would create with Kami. Again, it was really, really fun.

We had a model with Down syndrome pose as Kami, and the day was just just really, really incredible. You know, they had lots of fun and it was supposed to be something that involved the community and brought the community together and showcased the real people with Down’s Syndrome so that people could start to relate through social media to these people and kind of understand the diversity behind, you know, what these people are up to, what they’re doing, the kind of careers that they have, just improving awareness all around.

This is Kami with an artist, Charlie French. Again, just just raising awareness, profiling and being a great kind of spokesperson for the community. And it’s really, really amazing to be able to produce kind of a character that can really stand for the community by representing them in a really positive way again. So like I said before, you really, really need a stance if you’re producing a virtual character right now, it’s it’s not good enough to just be virtual.

You know, you really need to be saying something about the metaverse, about Web 3.0, How can we make a positive change? And there is still so much change that is needed within this space, within the metaverse, improving diversity, bringing more people of color into this space, bringing more people with disabilities into this space. So really utilizing this technology now to represent underrepresented people.

So hopefully I didn’t go through that too fast. There wasn’t a timer, so I don’t know. So I don’t know if we have some time for some questions. So can you apply makeup and clothes? Really? So my process, I actually use clay 3D for what it’s good at, which for me is cloth simulation. So I actually don’t use clay 3D for rendering.

I think there are many other programs that are great for rendering and I think we should be utilizing the programs that are best for what they do in the movie industry. You need to learn about ten different programs and plug ins and all kinds of things to produce the kind of images that you see in the movies. But for some reason within fashion, people are very, very scared of learning new programs.

You know, they they want a program that does absolutely everything, you know, avatars, class, simulation, rendering. And that’s just unfortunately not the reality of it. You can apply makeup, include 3D, I think, through the texturing and things. It’s just not how I would do it. I wouldn’t render enclosed 3D. I’m sorry if you guys are in 3D class.

I just wouldn’t I wouldn’t recommend. Do you for a character life behind the virtual model, how do you maintain the level of engagement and influence that she has on the community? I absolutely put character behind the characters that I create. However, I try to keep shooting just a little bit more mysterious. Try not to give too much away.

It’s just the way that I like to look at it. But to me and the people that I work with, we all know who shoot, who is you know, we know how like a good friend. And she she’s kind of has this personality that we all know what it is, but we like to keep it a bit mysterious, keep people guessing when it comes to shooting with other characters.

Of course, we don’t mind sharing their personality a bit more. The shooting special is the studio easy to use? I think it has a learning curve, but once you kind of understand it, unfortunately that studio, it’s an incredible program for creating avatars, but it has this very, very complicated system of kind of utilizing plug ins and shop bought content and marketplace content.

It really overcomplicate things, unfortunately. But I think it’s an incredibly useful program that I think people should think of when they’re creating avatars. We also have character creator and we also have metahumans, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend them. I personally, I’ve tried everything. I still think that’s the best way to create custom avatars. What’s next after making so Studio so famous and influential?

Like I said, we’re working on projects like Cami, so projects that have a real intent and purpose within the space. I feel like the metaverse has a long, long way to go before being as inclusive and representative of the real world as it should be. I feel like people’s focus when it comes to the metaverse is making these weird and wacky characters, but completely forgetting about the real life people that should be represented in the process.

You know, it’s all well and good creating these fantastical characters. But actually we should focus on on creating characters that represent us and and make people from certain communities feel included in this space. Because the people who are creating the metaverse, unfortunately, aren’t that diverse. You know, this is a space that is overwhelmingly white and it shouldn’t be you know, this this is a space that should be inclusive to everyone so that we hear all of their voices and see all of their influences within the space.

What does the digital company do? Do you have a big team? So we represent seven different virtual characters, which we then license out to brands to do kind of social media posts and things like that. We create all of the artwork around that. Depending on the post, we will hire 3D fashion people to kind of create clothes and things like that.

And then we also create virtual influencers for brands. So if anybody wants virtual influencers to represent their brand, we can handhold and take them through that process. It’s a very in-depth process. It’s very long process, but it is an incredibly rewarding one. Once you have a character that you can invest in for years to come. My team is very, very small.

It’s just me, my best friend and my dad, and we actually have achieved all of this just as us. But I also have a management team in L.A. who help with the contracts and all of the licensing because with virtual characters there’s a surprising amount of IP being shared and licensing that needs to be done. So it is a little bit more complex than you might first think.

Any time you go to Asia, any specific criteria you’re looking for as a partner brand while I’m here. So and I’m exploring here as well. And it’s very, very interesting the difference that we’re seeing between what, you know, Asian brands want from models and what Western brands want from models. So we’re seeing in the West, in the West, we’re seeing brands that want models that are really outspoken and quite controversial in terms of maybe their stance, Maybe they really stand for something like, you know, love is love or something like that.

Whereas in Asia, what we’re seeing is it’s a much more kind of a facade for a model, you know, something that is just very commercial, very branded with very little kind of outspoken voice. So so it’s quite a different kind of criteria for the modeling here, but definitely interested in the space and how we can kind of interact with some of the already established models here.

You know, I have friends here, Rosie Ikram, who is amazing in South Korea, Imma Dot gram who is based in Japan. They are two great friends of ours. Nothing to do with me. I didn’t create them, but we’re great partners with them all. So are you taking requests from lots of fashion brands? Can an unknown brand request you?

Absolutely. This is an open space for anyone to approach. Nothing is too too small if you want to say it that way. Nothing. Yeah, nothing is out of the question. It really depends from the brands as well what they’re aligned with. Maybe they have some messaging that’s really interesting. It’s not just all about kind of selling product as well.

What’s your plan of shooting or any virtual cats as we old I get asked this a lot, How do virtual characters age and they kind of age in their own way. You know they they develop over time so shoot you. When she first started, she was very, very smooth, you know, very wrinkled and not very much detail. But over time, she’s she’s actually gained a lot more detail.

We’ve upgraded her model several times. She now has a realistic human purport. When I first grade her, she was like some kind of Barbie monstrosity with, you know, four foot long legs. But now she’s much more human and her proportion so they age in their own way. They develop, they become better over time. And whether or not they get kind of wrinkles and creases, who knows?

You know, it’s really for them. They can they can age, they can go younger, they can go any direction that you want. So. So yeah. So if that’s the last question, then it’s been great chatting to everyone. I’ll be hanging around, so come speak to me if you have any other questions that you didn’t want to ask on the on there.

So so yeah. Thank you very much.