Ask HN: Where are the clothing industry disruptors? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are the clothing industry disruptors?

1 pointaustinjp3 comments

Genuine question. Why do we often trawl high-streets and online vendors for clothing that is badly cut, of unreliable size and quality, and made by sweat-shop labour?

Are any clothing industry disruptors aiming to automate the clothing industry to provide affordable, decent quality, well fitted day-to-day clothing for the masses?

I don't mean just custom fitted formal attire. I mean anything that you'd normally buy for daily use that isn't a t-shirt. Trousers, button-up shirts, dresses, skirts.

Why can't I pick a style, a fabric, a colour, a finish, submit my details, and receive a robot-produced hand-finished item of day-to-day clothing that fits me perfectly?

Understood, there are technical problems regarding measuring, cutting, tailoring. Understood, there are logistic issues around fabric, machinery, and labour. However, these all sound like great opportunities for innovation.

Is there anyone doing this that I'm unaware of?

There's a company at Georgia Tech trying to automate sewing[1]. Although it's hard for non-technical people to believe, sewing is one of the most difficult AI challenges and is far from being totally solved. We don't even yet have robots that can just fold laundry.

In the US, the military is only allowed to buy American-made products. That means they spend many fortunes on sewing that's done domestically. This company thinks that if it can automate sewing, it'll have an instant, massive customer (the US government) and can take over the world from there.

For people watching for the global automation apocalypse, this is perhaps more dangerous than any self-driving technology. If it becomes widespread, it'll likely cause a few countries to collapse economically.

1. http://softwearautomation.com/

The economical collapse of small countries that rely on sweatshop labour is a genuine and serious problem here. I can only hope that whoever solves the technical problems that are hindering automated clothing production are mindful of this, and work out a means of giving back to those affected. I won't hold my breath, though.

Edit:

It seems that softwearautomation.com is attempting to solve a "hard" problem here, namely a highly generalisable solution. Is there scope for a scrappy small-player to produce a cheaper technology that operates within a narrower scope? A single product, perhaps. How many variations on a button-up shirt does a specialist shirt tailor have to consider? It seems that shrinking the problem space might produce faster, cheaper results.

I think that even if you could automate some of these things, you'd have an inventory problem. Clothing has higher rates of returns (as in sending the item back) than many other categories of products. If everything coming off your assembly line is unique, it's going to be expensive to take apart and rebuild those products, and you're going to be in for a logistical nightmare.

Other than that, I honestly think human labor is so cheap, it's not worth it for these companies to innovate that way. Margins on clothes are astronomical, and people seem to happily pay those margins. There isn't much incentive to shave your $1/shirt cost down to $0.30/shirt when you're attacking a market that will pay $70/shirt.

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