SaaS company Unmade announces strategic relationship with New Balance

Unmade, the London based SaaS company that enables apparel and sportswear brands to realise on-demand manufacturing, has confirmed a strategic technology relationship with global athletic leader, New Balance. This collaboration between the two companies will see New Balance Team Sports provide a unique customisable experience for its Team wear business.

Unmade’s end-to-end digital solution, UnmadeOS, enables New Balance to translate customer design into production data, ready for manufacture. The relationship with Unmade enables New Balance Team Sports to scale production, promoting efficiencies and removing manual processes, according to a media statement by New Balance.

Customers and Team Sports sales reps in the USA will be able to customise kit across a range of sports on the New Balance Team Sports website, using UnmadeOS’s configurator to get a true-to-life visualisation of a product before it’s been made. Brand integrity is preserved with predefined templates, and new agile products unlock garment variation potential for a fast, efficient rollout of any changes, New Balance said.

UnmadeOS was designed with th intention of establishing a direct link between customer design intent and the data and files needed to produce that garment. The data can be translated to any factory partner and sent directly to specific machines within the factory environment, the companies said. This new system for New Balance is powering custom products for all major sports including track and field, baseball, fastpitch, American football, soccer, lacrosse, basketball, as well as team apparel, according to New Balance.

“We wanted to create a best-in-class digital experience for our customisation programme and to solve for challenges unique within Team wear ... (This collaboration) has opened the door to innovative and digitally-led opportunities,” Cara Hardy, New Balance digital lead, e-commerce and direct to consumer, said in a statement.

“Leveraging Unmade’s technology gives us the ability to drive scalable, fast product planning for the future, driven by consumer demand,” Raymond Rey, New Balance’s director of enterprise applications said.