Ep. 50: The future of apparel lies in 3D technology Ankit Podcast

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 50: The future of apparel lies in 3D technology

In this episode of The WTiN Podcast, we talk to Whitney Cathcart, co-founder and chief strategy officer at 3DLOOK.

Jessica Owen
Hello. My name is Jessica Owen, and I am the Deputy digital editor at WTiN, and this is the WTiN podcast, the fourth industrial revolution is underway, and the world of textile and apparel is just one industry that is benefiting from new and innovative technologies. With this in mind, for this series, I'll be talking to companies across the textile and apparel landscape about their new technologies, the benefits of digitalization, and the advice that they'd give to others who are trying to implement such solutions.

This week, I am joined by Whitney Cathcart, who is the co founder and chief strategy officer at 3d look. In this episode, Whitney talks about the company's fit technology, how there are not enough 3d designers, and what the future of the industry might look like in next 10 to 20 years time.

Well, hello Whitney, and welcome to the show today. How are you? How's everything? Where you are?

Whitney Cathcart
Good morning. It's great to be here. I'm doing great. I'm in San Francisco, so it's bright and early. That's 7am we've got good weather and lots of COVID so, but I'm good mucking through it all.

Jessica Owen
Good, good. I'm sorry. I didn't realize it was quite so early. Actually, over there, I'm not very good with the time zones, so no

Whitney Cathcart
problem. I'm used to early mornings. I've got a large team in Europe, so we tend to start pretty early, which is it works well for us.

Jessica Owen
Oh, good, great. Well, you have joined me then today to talk about your company, 3d look, which I understand you sort of co founded back in 2016 so do you mind just telling me a bit about your background and your co founders background and so on?

Whitney Cathcart
Yeah, sure. The company was founded back in 2016 and I'm one of four co founders. We're pretty interesting and diverse co founding team in that all four of us have very different backgrounds, so I bring the subject matter expertise. I spent almost 30 years in Fashion and Retail, specifically on the business and manufacturing side, so I had a kind of a deep knowledge and experience with really understanding sizing, fit problems, and I've got, you know, many decades of experience in garment manufacturing. My co founders, so my co founder, Vadim, is our serial entrepreneur. He's CEO of the company, and he's got a background in mobile tech and ad tech. And then Alex is our chief product officer, and he manages our R and D team, which is about 65% of the company. We've got about 60 people now in the company, so we've grown quite a bit over COVID, and I know we'll get into that. And then Ivan is our research scientist and Chief Technology Officer. He's got a background in he's got a PhD in computational applied mathematics, and he's kind of the the deep thinker and builder behind our neural nets. And so the four of us have been together since 2017 Alex Vadim and Ivan founded the company back in 2016 and I joined them about a year on the journey. So we they were just, I don't know, five or six people back then. So together, we've grown the company into what we've got today, which is just about 60 people. So it's been a very exciting last couple of years. Yeah,

Jessica Owen
gosh, it sounds here, and you seem to compliment each other so well. So, so how did you actually meet each other? Did you know each other from previous work or university? Or how did that all happen? Yes,

Whitney Cathcart
it's interesting. Vadim and Alex had known each other, and Alex had brought in Ivan. He had worked with Ivan in the past. Ivan was a research scientist at Intel Labs for about a decade, and he's actually based out of London, so near your neck of the woods, I had, interestingly enough, left kind of the you know, my corporate roles. I'd always worked in large companies, and I left my corporate role back in 2015 I was president of a manufacturing company, and we built private label brands and did a lot of celebrity licensing and work with big companies like Walmart target, Macy's and Coles, and I, quite honestly, I was just kind of burnt out by the lack of innovation in the. Fashion industry. And I live in the Bay Area and surrounded by technology, and I spent a couple of years doing a deep dive into, you know, a immersive computing, spatial computing, AR and VR technologies and AI. And I was really looking at a 10 year horizon on kind of where I felt that the fashion industry was going to be, and I was looking at kind of that whole ecosystem, really starting with the life cycle of a garment. So where were we going to be in terms of how we design, how we create products, how we manufacture products, how we sell products, what would the consumer experience be like. And through this journey, I was looking at, you know, 3d software, you know, pattern making technologies. I was looking at FIT technology. I was looking at kind of what was happening in robotics and manufacturing and such. And along that journey, I spent several months researching fit technologies. And this was back in 2016 2017 shortly before Amazon acquired body labs, and there had been an article in venture heat about 3d look, and I reached out to them. And Vadim happened to be in San Francisco at the time, and he and I met and have coffee and spend some time together. And I really loved the technology and the idea behind it for two reasons. Number one, it was a mobile first technology and having my own, you know, then I guess they were, you know, early, 20 year old kids, but really understanding our future was getting built on, you know, mobile tech. That mindset around the company was a mobile mindset, and so that was really important to me, and I would say as importantly, was really looking at it from a data play, and understanding that, you know, we had never, when I say we, I mean the fashion industry in general, had never had access before to consumers body measurement data. And so when you're making products, you make and this is part of why fit is so complex. But when you're making products from brand to brand, you are designing to you know, almost an image of what you think your end consumer is going to look like. And this is why every brand has a different fit, and why consumers wear this size in one brand and another size in another brand. And you know, back in the day when we were still going into stores and we found an item that we liked, and we picked three different sizes off the rack and went into the dressing room and tried it on and bought the one that we felt fit us best, that replicating that experience online just hadn't been done. And so the more we were shopping, the more we were returning, and so that this new business model is just not going to be sustainable for brands and retailers. So for me, when I really understood what it was that Vadim was going for and how was he was going to go about doing it, even though it was a very early MVP, barely working back in 2016 or like I said, was late 16, early 17. When I met him, you know what I said to him was, if you actually can build this, do you really understand the implications of body data on the whole manufacturing supply chain? So for me, it was exactly where I wanted to be, which was working with a company and building something that was going to be able to move an industry that I'd spent so many decades in and loved so dearly, kind of into the next century. And so I joined them as a as an advisor, and then pretty quickly, came on full time, and we that's kind of our story of how we met. It just

Jessica Owen
sounds like everything fell into place for you. I guess

Whitney Cathcart
it's, I would say, for sure, serendipitous. Yeah, yeah,

Jessica Owen
definitely. Now we'll talk more about your technology and sort of the benefits of it in a little while, but just tell me, then, essentially what 3d look does then, I mean, it's to do with fit, as you said,

Whitney Cathcart
yeah. So you know, our mission is really around personalization and customization. So our goal is to enable the apparel industry to make better fitting clothing for their customers at its most simple form, and create better shopping experiences by enabling a simple exchange of body data between the customer and the places that they love to shop. And so our everything that we do is really built around we kind of look at it as a two sided approach. One is, how do we how do we create a better experience for consumers when they're shopping online around fit. So how do we remove some of the complexity of what size do I buy? So that we stop this habit of using our bedrooms as dressing rooms and buying two or three of a size, try them on at home and then return it, which is really terrible. Terrible for businesses, and it's equally as terrible for the planet. So that's the first piece of it, and then the second piece of it is, how do we use this body data to actually create product that fits the consumer? Because now we have access to understanding what the actual customer of this particular brand looks like. And so when we collect enough of a data set, we're able to segment all of this data by geography, by height, by measurements, by body shape, and really be able to overlay that rich consumer body data on top of a brand's current fit and grading rules, and look at the white spaces of opportunity. Are you making too many sizes in in in a garment that is actually never going to fit your actual consumer base? Or do you have opportunities to maybe cut less of the sizes that you're cutting and add one or two different grading sizes there, and be able to capture a customer base that you just didn't even know that you had. So it's really around using this anonymized consumer body data in a way that helps brands become more efficient in the products that they're making, which is a much, much better way to create products that is better for the planet, because there's less waste. There's less waste in sampling, there's less waste if you can imagine putting inventory closer to consumers that are actually going to fit into it.

Jessica Owen
So talk me through then the users experience. How do they go about using this? Is this sort of a tool, so say, if you're shopping online, and then you go to choose a product and choose your size, does a little pop up thing come up, and that's how you go about it? Or how does it work? Exactly? Yeah,

Whitney Cathcart
that's a great question. So our goal from day one was to create an experience that was as simple for the user as possible. So we wanted to ask as little as we could, so that they didn't have to go through, you know, a series of 20 different questions to figure out the right size. So if I go onto a website and I'm shopping on, you know, whatever brand that I love, and I come on to a product, we have a widget that sits on that product page, and it says, Get your fit. And you click that little widget, and it opens right up into our experience. So there's no downloading of a separate app. We it was very important for us to make sure that we weren't moving a consumer from the place that they were shopping so off a brand website. So this widget is a cross platform, web based widget that literally will open right up into their mobile device. If they're shopping on their laptop, if I'm say, shopping in bed or at my desk, there'll be a little pop up on your laptop and there'll be a QR code, which you can scan or you can enter your mobile device, and we'll send you a text message, and that's experience opens up right in your mobile device. So you don't have to go to the App Store, Google Play and download a separate app. It just it happens right there. It's very simple. We instruct you to take a front photo and a side photo, and within about 30 seconds, we will give you the right size for that product from the product page that you landed on. You know what we're doing on the back end. Most importantly is we're taking your body measurement and body shape data. We calculate over 70 different measurements. We also turn you into a 3d model. So our technology, our core technology, recognizes the human body from just two photos taken by the consumer on her smartphone. And what we're doing is we're detecting key points and body contour, and our proprietary statistical model then builds a unique 3d model of each user. From there, we delete those two photos, so all we're doing is take using the 3d image that we're creating from those two photos and all the measurement and body shape data, and what we do on the back end is we map that against the brand product data so that now from the two photos that you just take one time, any product that you go to on that website will give you the right size based on Your actual personalized body dimensions and that brand fit. So there's no one fit that works for every single brand, because I said earlier, every brand has a different fit. They have different grading rules, they have different fit models, and so on and so forth. What we're looking to do is be able to map your product, your your body data, with the the brand fit product data so that we are giving you a simplified experience, and you're buying one size instead of three sizes. Gosh,

Jessica Owen
it sounds so impressive, and naturally I was going to ask you how it all works in the background, and you've explained it really nicely, but on your computer, on your computer. On your website, it talks about artificial intelligence, and you've already mentioned your statistical modeling and other things such as machine learning. I mean, do you mind just telling me a bit about each of these things and how it plays a part in this process?

Whitney Cathcart
Yeah, absolutely. So our technology, and it's a patented tech, or it's a patented technology uses a combination of computer vision, machine learning and 3d and so basically, what we do is our computer vision algorithms are able to detect the human body that's taken by the end consumer of herself, front and side photo. And our CV algorithms are able to detect the human body on any background in tight fitted clothes. So again, it was really important to us, from day one to build a technology that was going to recognize the human body in tight fitted clothes, so that somebody didn't feel like you know, privacy is obviously a big topic and very important to us, and especially because we deal with photos, we didn't want people to feel like they had to get undressed. So our technology recognizes the human body in tight, fitted clothes. And from there, our technology we detect key points in body contour, and those key points are trained on a data set that we collected very early on, of several 100,000 proprietary data set, and we then detect key points on the human body. And from there, we're built building an avatar. We build a 3d statistical model of the human body. Once we do that, we delete those photos. And if you think about it, once we have that accurate 3d model, we could hypothetically compute hundreds of different measurements in our API. Today, we're computing a little over 70. We add measurements as customers need them. So for example, certain customers have different measurement key points for say, waist. So we've got, like, an actual waist girth. We have an abdomen measurement. We have certain customers that measure their waist at where we measure our high hip. So one of the first things that we do with customers is we calibrate where they're measuring and where we're measuring, and that's, you know, I mean, I'm kind of simplifying it. It's very complex. It took three and a half years for us to build this core tech that was even accurate enough to come out of beta and begin to deploy it with customers and be able to test out the consumer experience. And

Jessica Owen
so you've already mentioned about how a user would go about using this. But how did brands go about implementing your technology? Is it just a case that you they go to you say, we'd love to use your technology. Do you just add it to your website? I mean, what's that sort of relationship like?

Whitney Cathcart
Yeah. So we have a couple of different products that we build on top of that core technology. Our product for E commerce is a fit widget called your fit. And it's a simple integration. It's it's integrated onto a product page on an e commerce website, and it enables the consumer to again, land on that product page, click into the widget, upload two photos and get their fit recommendation. What we're doing when we work with a brand, the first thing we'll do is we'll calibrate their measurements with our measurements, we collect their fit data, and we build algorithms so they're customized algorithms for each brand, because no one brand has the same fit specs. And again, our goal is around customization. It's not around standardization. The industry is not moving towards a standardization model, or moving more and more if you look at beauty, if you look at furniture, really, it perils. The same thing, it's more and more around serve me as a consumer, something that is made for me, that fits me. One of our goals from day one, that I always believed, was we have the capability at 3d look to create in an industry rules where we're no longer relegated to like a letter or number sizing. I want to be my size, and I want you to be your size, rather than, you know, a size small or medium, or whatever size you are. And with, with the capabilities of what 3d look is building, I believe will, you know, we have the ability to get there over the next 1020, years.

Jessica Owen
And clearly, your technology hasn't been overlooked. Because I think I understand that you Well, you've grown a lot in the time that you've been around, and you've also won quite a few awards. So I mean, tell me about those and tell me about the feedback that the rest of the industry has given you. Yeah,

Whitney Cathcart
we were the very lucky recipients of the LVMH award. Which was a really big deal for us. That was the Viva tech award in Paris, and we won the IEEE digital grand transformation Challenge Award that same year. So both those awards, you know, were really from a kind of a PR standpoint, a really a great validation of, you know, both the mission, mission and the vision of the company, but also a validation of the core technology. And again, you know, one doesn't exist without the other. The core tech needs to be accurate and the consumer experience needs to be great. So, you know, I always say, used to say to my teams that work for me when I was still, you know, really on the other side of the fashion industry. But fashion is an iterative thing, right? It's it's always changing, and software is the same way we can always do better. So our experience is a constant reflection of what we hear back from our customers and, most importantly, the end consumer. Because we want end consumers to love the experience to it's been really important us to make sure that the end consumer feels like the recommendation that they're getting is something that is customized to them, rather than just baked in. You know, this is based on, you know, what sizes I'm buying in different brands and or what size, you know, what is kind of my historical transaction look like. Sometimes I buy things and I have to keep them because, you know, I had to get pre COVID, I had to get on a plane and fly to New York for a meeting, and I didn't have time to return it. Or sometimes I get it and I keep it and it didn't fit me, but you know, my 21 year old daughter loves it. So we were really all about, how do we use body data and create these experiences that are based on me and you specifically? We have a product that we launched over COVID called Mobile tailor. And mobile tailor for us was really an an effort for us to support small businesses who found themselves unable to physically measure customers over COVID. And we have seen even before COVID, this kind of growth in these smaller direct to consumer brands that are really focused on creating customized products, they're focused on sustainable materials, they're focused on creating kind of this thinking around less is better, and if and This is where the consumer is going, Gen Z's protect you. Particularly, are environmentally conscious. They're socially conscious. And so mindfulness is something that's really important to them. And there are these. There are these companies that are being born in and some of them are our customers, even before COVID And so mobile tailor was really born out of a way to support these customers, and really taking our enterprise product and creating a product that was more affordable, simple to use, and it's a true plug and play SaaS product, so these companies can come to our website and literally click on mobile tailor, they can set up their own account, and they can send either by via text message or via email to their customers, the end consumer, our fit and measurement widget. Or they can put a widget on their website. And that was something really important to 3d look for us to be able to support these, you know, young customers who really needed a tool to be able to measure the end consumer.

Jessica Owen
Well, I mean, you've brought me quite nicely onto talking about the benefits, such as customization and fit and experience so on that I wanted to talk about. So if we just stay with customization and experience. I think, I think there was a report, actually that's just come out today, by McKinsey and Company. I think they're like a market insight specialist company, and they said in their report, post COVID, this idea of sustainability and customization is really what's gonna what people are demanding more of, and it's gonna help. It's going to help brands, you know, recover better than those that are just, you know, carrying on as they did before COVID. So that's really interesting. And have you had quite a lot of interest in mobile to either then since COVID? Yeah,

Whitney Cathcart
absolutely. I think we've got just over 60 customers that have signed up for it over the last couple of months. So it's been really excited, exciting to see. You know, there's 10s of 1000s globally of even tailors and designers who, you know, have small customer bases. But. They needed a digital way to measure their customers. We had calls early, you know, I'm going back to March and April. We had calls from companies who had been in business for 3040, years, and they maybe, you know, they were mom and pop shops that really had no digital presence, but they had this amazing customer base of clients who were dedicated to their to their fit and to their garments and to their customer service. And they've been clients of this, of these companies for, you know, many, many decades. But these companies literally didn't even have websites, and so that's why we created mobile tailor was to give these guys the digital tools so that they could still support their clientele, and that was really important to us when you think about customization. And this is really where the industry is going over the next 1020, years. I'm not suggesting overnight that you're going to have companies that manufacture say, you know, a hundreds of 1000s of the same garment are going to go to a customization model overnight. You know, we're not going to all of a sudden start customizing one off T shirts for everybody, but in general, we are in, and you see this also in manufacture, we are definitely moving towards a system that is more on demand, and you don't need to customize, even on one off, but you can do a better job than we've certainly done it in the 30 years that I've been in the industry. And if you think about personalization and mass customization, these require large amounts of data. They require smaller production runs, they require shortening development timelines, and they really require new factory business models that are focused on single ply production and on very small production runs, where you can where you can create products and make it work for you in a business model, and so a lot of these interesting enough, a lot of these brands that we're working with, these smaller brands, are at the helm. They've been founded by CEOs who don't necessarily come out of the fashion industry, so they don't have these preconceived notions about how to build a cost card or a business model that is kind of baked in old thinking, and that's part of the problem with the fashion industry is that it's never moved fast enough. It's frankly, part of the reason that I left an industry that I love so much and stepped into the technology side, because I wanted to be part of building something that was going to help an industry that was moving just way too slowly, come into the next century and be an industry that we could be proud of, that wasn't contributing so much waste. And so when you think about kind of this, it's almost like the perfect storm has happened right now. You've got COVID Sadly, which is, you know, really facili facilitated and accelerated something that was already happening. But you also have a generation that is in buying power right now that, you know, has been left a world that is in so many ways, in terrible condition. And so if you think about kind of the role that this generation is playing in food, in beauty, apparel just feeds into it. It's a we are, you know, one of the largest contributors to waste in the world. And and this generation is more aware of it than any generation. There's also a bigger conversation around that in fashion today. This conversation was kind of like a hush hush you know, if you were spending a lot of time traveling overseas, as I've done over the last couple of decades, you saw it firsthand, but most of the world didn't really realize it. So I'm really happy to see that we have a generation who is, you know, really going to drive this industry into a much more sustainable industry over the next 10 and 20 years. It's important for the industry, it's important for the planet, and it's going to be a much better way to make clothing. I

Jessica Owen
have to admit, I speak to quite a lot of people, obviously being in this job, and everyone's saying exactly what you're saying, that it's these younger generations are really pushing it. And COVID 19 has actually accelerated this movement. And a lot of the companies that don't want to move to digital tools or become more sustainable, they're going to be left behind because it's they're just people aren't going to be loyal to them. They won't trust them. They won't think they're transparent or, you know, in it for the right reasons. And so it's going to be really interesting to see. So you, you just said a little while ago that you think. Um, the industry up until now has been just moving far too slowly. So do you believe that they're going to pick up the pace now and we're going to see a real, sort of significant change?

Whitney Cathcart
I hope so. Um, I, you know, I, I see it. Has it happened even in the last couple of years, as fast as you maybe wanted to see it, no. Has it accelerated with COVID? For sure, I think it's really been an eye awakening to how important becoming digital and really and look, it's hard. If you're a giant company, you're a billion dollar revenue public company. You know, becoming a digital company is not simple. It just isn't. It's a new way of thinking internally. It's a new way of hiring. There's so much more that goes into it. It's really complex. I do believe we're going to get there. I do believe that we are moving faster. You know, if you think about it, the word agility, which is something that you know, in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, were kind of baked in this kind of thought process that, you know, try if you're going to fail, fail, fast, move on. The fashion industry isn't really baked in that. And so what excites me is seeing a move to bring technologists inside kind of retail. A lot of these companies have, you know, spent a lot of time and money hiring people out of Silicon Valley, building engineering teams and data teams and thinking about, how do we use data? You know, the industry is so siloed, and in many cases it still is siloed. It's less siloed today than it was, but we still have a long way to go. But one of the biggest shifts over the last decade has been the consumer is in the driver's seat, and brands and retailers need to understand as much about the consumer as they can in order to serve their needs. I grew up in the industry where we made the decisions right. We told the consumer kind of what they would be getting from month to month or quarter to quarter, you know, we would deliver X color. You know, we deliver red in October, getting ready for holiday, things like that, but it was the brand that was in the driver's seat. Today, consumers have so much access to data, and they have so much access to trend, and businesses like Instagram have enabled anybody to build a brand so easily, and that's been one of the biggest disruptors. And I think the industry just wasn't peeking around corners, and they didn't understand how impactful mobile computing was going to be back in 2007 and 2008 and 2009 and 2010 and you had all of these incredible companies, which today are in themselves, billion dollar companies that were built on top of mobile compute, and they completely flipped fashion upside down. Now I think as we move into kind of a 3d world over the next decade, and we see the amount of money, billions of dollars, that have been funneled into these, you know, kind of the big four, right, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, you think Google, you think about the amount of money that these companies have spent on 3d technologies over the last, you know, half a decade or so. And I'm really, I'm talking billions of dollars, VR, AR, XR, where we're going on this spatial computing. We are, over the next 10 and 20 years, likely to see the biggest disruption that the fashion industry has ever seen. It's going to make the last 10 years look like a picnic, and that is because these 3d technologies are going to enable these digital experiences that are partly in our world and partly not in our world, that are going to be so real, and these experiences are going to give us these this ability to to engage in commerce, and this intersection of Fashion, of entertainment in a way that has just never been possible. And I think we are going into the most exciting time that I will have seen in fashion and certainly my career. So I'm very excited about what the industry is going to see over the next couple of years. Well,

Jessica Owen
it's funny, you say that because. Just in the last year alone, I've reported on, I think there's one company that are looking at 3d showrooms, virtual fitting rooms, and helping companies sort of work out, you know, how they organize or show their showroom or their shop, for example. And then there's others looking at, like, 3d catwalks and runways. And so it at the moment, it to me, it seems all like futuristic. And I'm like, Are we really gonna, you know, adopt that permanently? So we knowing all that you know, can you sort of paint a picture of how you think the industry might look in, say, 10 years time?

Whitney Cathcart
I think it's gonna look completely different than it does today. You know, if you just, if you take E commerce for a second, right? Our websites more or less look no different than they did 10 years ago. We go to a website, we have to sift through product, and maybe there's some sort of, you know, recommendation technology and personalization technology that's behind it that is maybe saying, you know, based on what you just looked at, we're going to recommend this. But still, more or less, you're really sifting through a lot of product. Then once you get to that product, you're guessing what size you need to be. So like in its most simple form, that experience it first of all, you don't even need to do it today. So that experience is is going to be disrupted very quickly. But this whole idea of virtual try on, of trying on an AR, all of these things which today seem so futuristic are going to be normal in a decade's time. I'm not suggesting that this is an overnight thing. This isn't something that's going to happen in the next year or so. I do believe it's accelerated. I really did put it on more of like a 10 year horizon. In fact, I gave a talk on this back in late February, right before we kind of really knew that the world was going to change so much, I do think that horizon could be a little bit closer. Half of it, though, is, is brands needing to really build digital assets, and that is not an overnight change. There. You have to build a pipeline. You have to hire the right people, and it that is a commitment on a brand. And by the way, there are not enough 3d designers in the world, so there's huge opportunity for young designers to be educated in 3d i always tell young designers that come to me, you know, if there's something I need to learn in order to be hireable, I always say to them, you need to understand 3d because in a matter of a couple of years, you you won't be hireable without having an understanding of 3d and how important 3d technologies are going to be. I happen to believe that, you know, when you have a big tech company like Apple release a consumer facing 3d product that hasn't been released yet. It's been pushed off year after year. I do think you know that eventually they'll get to releasing some sort of AR glasses. And I think when you know, normally when Apple gets behind something, if you begin to see the adoption from a consumer, most consumers today don't understand the difference between AR and AI, for example, right? They're two totally different technologies. I think the beauty of technology is not even knowing what the technology is, right? Like, we don't need consumers to understand that 3d look uses AI and that we can actually take your avatar and put you into AR, we actually don't need a consumer to understand that. We want a consumer to understand that our technology is just this simple little tool that makes your life better, and at the end of the day, that's always been the vision of the Dean from day one was to create a technology that simplified everyday tasks. And one of our goals has always been to kind of flip our current business model, which is a big, you know, we're a B to B enterprise company, but is to eventually flip our business model and enable what we call a mobile digital passport that would have inside it your body measurements that you could use in fitness, in health, your 3d avatar, your your model, right? And you would be able to use this in gaming experiences. So it goes well beyond even the fashion industry. But when I think about the future, I think about, you know, how do I put my avatar and I'm able to dress it in 3d digital clothing? And this is already happening today, right? I imagine an industry, and we are going to get there where I as a consumer, am, and I am in control. Control of the garment, right? I get to choose from digital assets that have been created by these incredibly creative designers from all over the world. And you don't have to be a designer that is employed by this big brand. You're in control of your own design. I as a consumer, get to pick the design that I think looks best on me, and then I get to pick the factory and the and the fabric that it comes from, because certain things are important to me. I want to pick a factory that, you know, is in Africa, and I want to support a Third World, world country, or I want to pick a factory that is in my backyard, in the US, because I want to support Made in America. I want to know where the fabric is coming from. So it goes into this whole traceability, which is so important to this younger generation, and in many ways, it breaks down all of these traditional ways of how we make product, it decentralizes it in many different ways, and I think that's really exciting. Now I'm talking about an industry that's probably 20 years out, but I believe we are 100% going to get there. And all of these advanced technologies, whether they're immersive technologies, whether they're AI technologies, whether they're blockchain technologies, as all of these technologies begin to work together, and you build these digital supply chains that are traceable, that enable consumers to better understand where the products that they love are coming from, and that they are actually playing a role in the design of it, in the manufacturing of it. You will eventually get to this kind of new business model, and I think it's going to be really fascinating.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And from my standpoint, I think it's so exciting, and is sort of anxious to see what it will be like. You kind of want it to happen now, because I'm just so interested to see how it's all going to play out. But I guess, for example, the one question I do have is, there are always going to be people who are skeptical, or, you know, they just don't know how to use this technology. So, I mean, you've got the people in, for example, though, you know you mentioned those tailoring businesses, some of them didn't have websites before, or you might have consumers. Take my grandma, for example. She's actually pretty savvy, but I'm, you know, that generation in in general, they do struggle still with iPhones and computers. So, I mean, what would you say to those people who are skeptical or who just don't know where to start when it comes to adopting new things such as this? Well, again,

Whitney Cathcart
I think if you're talking from like a consumer aspect, really good technology, the consumer doesn't even know a tech. Technology, it's our job to create an experience that is really simple for a consumer, right? Like when you use Uber, they've part of the reason that Uber is so addictive is that they built a technology that just makes our life more simple. It makes getting around simple Airbnb. It makes staying in different homes around the world. Simple, simple. It's all baked and great technology, right? So if we do a really good job, the consumer is just having a super simple experience getting fit, and it's just a click of a button and two photographs from a brand perspective. Here's what I have to say. Surviving and Thriving means leaning into technology and getting rid of this idea around fear. Because if you look about, if you look back over the last 10 years, and you think about, you know, the retail apocalypse, right? And, oh, we didn't see it coming. I would say, Are you kidding me? Were you not looking at the way 10 year olds and 12 year olds and 15 year olds 10 years ago were into interacting with their mobile devices? Were you not looking at some of these early platforms? Were you one of the people that were saying, Oh, nobody is ever going to shop on Instagram because we have seen disruption. It's not only because we've been over stored. It's because we weren't peeking around corners and looking at the opportunity. I think it's amazing to look at that mom and pop shop in Main Street America who figured out a way to find 3d look call us up and say, I. Need a tool, because if I don't lean into it, I'm going to go out of business. And whether you're a small company or you're a large company, there's going to be the next COVID. It may not be COVID, but there's going to be the next thing that makes companies go out of business, unless you're leaning into technology. Technology moves forward. It moves forward at quick paces. It doesn't go backwards. We're not going to go backwards. We're only moving forward. So I would say to companies, look at those companies who have leaned into technology. Look at what happened with direct to consumer companies, right? Oh, nobody's ever going to buy online, really. Look at look at what has happened just in online over the last couple of days. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday, even with COVID, you have enormous increases year over year. We're not moving into a world where we're going to do less shopping on our mobile devices. We're going to continue to do more shopping on our mobile devices. It doesn't mean that when stores don't open up and that we have a vaccine and we, you know, go back to, I don't believe we'll ever go back to life as it once was, but we'll go back out again. And what is the value of a store going forward even more so now it's around experience, right? Experience is around, understanding who your customer is, understanding who your customer is, is around, under is around, is all baked in data. And so how do we use data in a way that respects the consumer, but creates these amazing experiences? And those companies that do that, that embrace all of these different types of technologies, whether it's 3d look or other different companies out there that are building these amazing experiences on their technologies, coming together, using technology in a way that serves the consumer. That's those are the types of companies that will survive and that will thrive over the next decade? Yes,

Jessica Owen
definitely. Well, I mean, I would love to explore some of these questions and even more questions further, but unfortunately, we're running out of time. But before we go, do you mind just telling me a bit more about maybe 3d looks, plans and objectives for the future? Have you got any sort of aims for 2021, and beyond? Yeah. So

Whitney Cathcart
interestingly, one of the sectors that really was struggling as a result of COVID is the uniform sector. So you know, apparel companies that manufacture uniforms, and whether it's work wear, whether it's public safety, you people, and 50% of the workforce is in the uniform end, wearers of uniforms need to be physically measured. And so we actually saw quite a bit of inbound interest and ended up building a product specific to the uniform industry that virtualizes that measurement experience, so that the sales rep who is having to manage some of these fit events, which could be, you know, it could be a fit event of 10 people, could be fit event of hundreds and 1000s of people, which is very time consuming and entails people actually showing up in rooms and being manually measured and trying on the clothing. We actually have taken that entire process and virtualized it, and we've seen real opportunity there. So while the world is still, you know, kind of reeling on the fashion side from the lingering effects of COVID and store shutdown. And you know, maybe we're not dressing up as much as we were. The uniform industry really has a deep need to support end wears who wear uniforms and need to be sized. So we're really focused on that. We're very, very excited by some of our recent press announcements there, and some of the work that we've done there, we're going to be very focused on continued growth in 21 in the uniform industry, some of the things that were and we've got some big announcements coming up in 2021 around that. So we're super excited about that, I would say, on the longer horizon, you know, we're still very excited about, kind of where the world is going in avatars and 3d and virtual try on, where we very much believe that there's a big future there. And you'll see more coming from us, kind of towards the end of 21 and moving into 22 there, where, you know, we we've got a fit lab now in our HQ. That's something that we did over COVID. We actually invested in a large 3d body scanning hardware, and that enables us to extend, expand on our data sets, add new measurements quickly. So we're really excited about some of the work that we're doing there, and develop. Developing some really interesting measurements and expansion on some of our data sets. So lots going on at 3d look, we're super excited about 2021. We've seen tremendous growth over COVID, we've doubled the size of our team, and we've got just some really amazing initiatives that we'll be announcing as features to our current technology and some of our core offerings. So we're super excited about 2021 and what it has to offer, both to us and also to our current customers, and excited by new customers.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, I'm not surprised you're excited. I mean, for some people, COVID has just been an absolute disaster, but for you guys, it's actually been something like a blessing in disguise, I imagine, and the future is clearly very bright, so I'm not surprised you're excited and looking forward to seeing what the future has to hold. Yeah,

Whitney Cathcart
we've we feel very lucky and certainly very grateful. It's been a terrible way to see so much acceleration. But, you know, I think one thing we've been good at doing is kind of embracing this, and, you know, looking for the opportunity and the white space, and, you know, again, really being there to support brands that we're going to have to close their doors if, if they didn't have a digital tool, exactly,

Jessica Owen
it's been really good that digitalization can help these people, for sure. Well, I think that's all we have time for today. Whitney, unfortunately, but thank you so much for telling me about a look and your thoughts on how the fashion industry is changing. I'll have to ring you up in a few years and see if your predictions came true. Well,

Whitney Cathcart
thank you. It's been great to be here with you this morning, and I thank you for having me, and our company has joined you this morning, and great way to start my day.