Burberry morphs its gaming tech into a tool for fashion design, sustainability

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Oct 20, 2020

Burberry continues to burnish its reputation as a technology innovator within the luxury fashion space. It has announced a new initiative to “revolutionise fashion design  and  engineering” with the first products resulting from the tech (for pre-fall 20) now dropping in-store.

The company linked up with Koffeecup, a London-based-but-global digital production agency  specialising in AR, VR, XR and other immersive tech.

The new application the two have come up with merges gaming technology and design "to significantly speed up and simplify the process of placing prints onto garments”.

Senior VP of digital commerce Mark Morris said the firm’s internal 3D development team that built the B Bounce and B Surf games “saw an opportunity in how their technology could streamline  a part of the product design process”.

So how does it work? It places a two-dimensional print onto a 3D product template, “immediately showcasing how the finished product will look and providing real time instant feedback”. The company said the use of 3D is now embedded in its merchandising model, “enabling a more sustainable, creative and efficient process, and has become a staple tool in the process of print engineering”.

And it has other good side-effects. Using the application has reduced paper usage at  the design stage by two-thirds. Reaching an accurate sample with fewer iterations “also has the potential to cut factory waste”.

Koffeecup MD Thomas  Michelou said the project has “allowed us to move towards generating a real-time visual experience that resonated well with our creative audiences. We are very excited about the software’s potential for development. Looking to the future, we see the possibility to incorporate artificial and virtual reality to extend the software, which is a very interesting prospect”.