These days, everywhere you go, you’ll hear fashion label cries around “sustainable” and “eco-friendly”. As consumers become increasingly more aware of the negative impact fashion has on the environment, the meanings behind those words have been a driving force for brands to overhaul their core values in order to be more in line with Mother Earth.
With the focus of sustainability mostly being fixated on post-consumer waste, the general perception is that sustainability equals added cost. Whether it’s sourcing more expensive eco-friendly materials or putting extra resources into sustainable initiatives, brands are limited by their budgets to do more.
But Voor, a fashtech startup geared towards designers and fashion brands at wholesale level, begs to differ. Leveraging 3D technology and virtual reality, founder Tracy Wong hatched a solution to help brands achieve their sustainability goals while cutting costs.
The Voor solution is placed right after the design phase to digitise most processes downstream through its mobile VR app, which offers a number of benefits to designers and brands. For example, designers can significantly reduce the number of samples by presenting their designs in virtual reality and fit their styles digitally instead of back and forth fits with the factory. Another main use-case is the ability to shorten production lead time as designers can digitally fit styles and patterns and send them straight to the factory, ready for pre-production.
A fashion designer and product developer with over 10 years of experience seeing how old-fashioned the fashion process is, Wong is aiming to disrupt the process and believes that sustainability and the bottom line shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Now her startup, Voor, is doing just that by digitising and optimising the process along the value chain. In challenging the status quo, she is betting that in the near future, brands would be able to sell to buyers without samples and without traveling to and from, effectively lowering fashion’s carbon footprint.
At the moment, Voor is in its pre-launch beta phase but has already garnered attention from some of the biggest brands, including Melissa Shoes, Avia, and Everlane.
“We’re in the midst of a seismic change in the fashion world. Sustainability is not the only big talk at this moment. From consumer values to the spillover of tech, brands need to be brave to self-disrupt. It’s either you stay as a Blockbuster, or you become a Netflix,” says Wong, in reference to the way fashion brands need to adapt to the now and next in tech.
Written by Team Voor
---
Have a story you want to share or partner with us for an event? Get in touch at info@interlaced.co
To keep up to date with our activities and upcoming events, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or sign up to our newsletter.
-1.jpg)
