Why Manufacturers Should Treat Digital Product Infrastructure as a Long-Term Business Asset, Not a Marketing Expense

The cost of taking a picture of a piece of clothing for placing it on the site is regarded as a marketing expense, but reconstructing the same item into a digital product that will allow draping, sizing and redesigning it again and again each season comes out as a luxury, and it costs companies a lot more than they can think of. 

The fashion and textile industry has been treating its digital content the way it has treated its advertising campaigns for many years now – a budgeting line item to be reduced when the pictures of the season have been posted. This approach might have been justified in the past when being “digital” meant just taking and uploading pictures, but not anymore. The digital product infrastructure, high-quality 3D model, AI-generated product images and virtual try-on capabilities play a little bit of a role as marketing investment, and a lot as tooling. Once you create an exact 3D representation of your garment, you don't use it for a single advertisement campaign. This model allows putting the garment in various colours and backgrounds, adjusting its size to different body types, and using it in e-commerce, marketplaces and kiosks, without taking new photos. The initial expense is high, but there is another factor - multipliers: one digital replica may stand in lieu of dozens of photoshoots throughout the life cycle of the product. 

And here comes the importance of asset thinking. Marketing investment has to give you returns right away, by driving sales. Assets have a much longer life cycle, and the way how they will be reused is vital for their value. Those companies that invest in the creation of reusable digital product infrastructure not only save money in the long run, but also gain the ability to respond to retailers' needs faster, launch on new platforms and implement try-on and personalisation capabilities. 

Yet there is a reason why this is good for the supply chain. The textile manufacturing sector relies heavily on lengthy lead times and approval through physical samples crossing borders. Digital twins make this easier. The buyer can look at the fit, drape, and different colours of the designs on the computer even before a single physical sample is made, thus reducing sampling costs and making the process from designing to selling faster. This is not an advantage of marketing. 

The textile manufacturers that are going to do well in the next five years are not the ones who spent the most money on campaigns. They will be the ones that will treat their digital data, 3-D models, pictures in their catalogues, and simulation of the fit and drape as valuable assets to be owned and managed like machinery and ERP systems. These assets accumulate. Every extra asset makes the designing process faster, and every try-on gives more knowledge about the fit and preferences. 

With the shift in perspective from cost to asset, there is a shift in the ownership of the internal conversation. Marketing budgets are cut when it becomes tough financially. But in the case of infrastructure investments, it is analysed not for a quarter because of a spike in sales but for many years ahead. For an industry facing higher costs of inputs, lower margins, and expectations for online discovery, this can be the difference between effective scaling and repeated payments for the same piece of content every year. 

The technology exists today. The only remaining problem is that of classification.