California Apparel News: What challenges within the fashion community does the OPTINEDCloud address?

Frank Maeder: OPTINEDCloud is a digital asset-management platform. It’s based in the cloud and enables you to store and share assets among users. Our customers are everywhere around the Globe and they need a powerful collaboration tool.

This worldwide teamwork is very analog right now and it’s very fragmented. We know that we’re enabling this collaboration in real time among different people within the same team or different teams across different geographies.


CAN: What are the specific features and some of the details of the features that support streamlining communications among supply-chain partners?

FM: OPTINEDCloud is almost like a merge between various tools that we edit.
OPTINEDCloud is basically centralized file management. It’s real-time collaboration. You can do annotations and file sharing that is secure right across different places.

We’ve also released a two-way sync with this new version of the OPTINEDCloud. You can work on your desktop and it updates the cloud and vice versa.


CAN: How does the OPTINEDCloud help reduce costs for apparel businesses?

FM: There are a lot of physical samples being done and shipped around the world.

We are helping our customers to digitize what we can to save time and material. We know this is an industry that likes to touch, feel, and see samples, so we never claim that they will get rid of all of this, but if they can even start to reduce a little bit and optimize some of those cycles, that’s already massively valuable.


CAN: How have NedGraphics and Optitex made the OPTINEDCloud accessible for brands at different stages, from emerging labels to established fashion houses?

FM: We have every size of customer. Both Optitex and NedGraphics contracts with a single person using these solutions and very large production sites with thousands of people working. It’s very important that we are able to scale the solution. And the way we do this is by being very modular.
There are different packages that we can offer with different price points. And this tends to be based on how much storage you need and how many assets you think you’re going to have through this system.


CAN: Why will OPTINEDCloud grow in importance over time? Why is this type of solution becoming more important?

FM: Most new functionality we are working on need centralizing for flexibility and performance, for example licensing or artificial intelligence assisted features, and this is where the cloud makes practical sense, therefore we will keep building on our OPTINEDCloud platform which becomes the backbone of our solutions going forward.

It goes faster, it’s distributed, and it enables everyone to connect to one place. It’s an important launch for us because it merges a lot of the technology that we had from both brands.


CAN: How does this help support the sustainable missions in the fashion business?

FM: The way we can play our part for sustainability is through digitization.

Digital sampling is obvious: We’re not claiming that you can replace every physical sample, but the point is for us to try and reduce the volume by providing tools to accurately visualize samples on your screen instead of having a multiple cycles of physical samples.

This process also helps reduce errors before going to production. This is not even sampling waste, this is real production time and material waste.

A digital workflow allows you to visualize, check and correct on the screen, and ultimately be reassured that by the time you actually go to production, you minimize the risk of very costly mistakes.