2023 Fashion Tech Review: Gen AI, Digital Passports, Virtual Worlds & more with Ben Hanson

Join Peter Jeun Ho Tsang and special guest Ben Hanson, a seasoned expert in the field and Editor-in-Chief of The Interline , in the final episode of 2023 as they reflect on the whirlwind of tech trends shaping the fashion industry. From the meteoric rise and sudden fall of NFTs to the potential impact of generative AI on design, the conversation explores the highs, lows, and uncertainties in the world of fashion tech. Gain insights into the challenges, opportunities, and the evolving role of AI in creative processes. Whether you're a fashion enthusiast or a tech aficionado, this episode promises to unravel the complex dynamics of Fashion Tech.

• Downfall of NFTs: scrutinize their actual relevance, and voice our skepticism on how they address challenges like policing digital creation and safeguarding intellectual property. 
• AI isn't infallible, but trust us, the future isn't bleak. AI's ethical implications in fashion, addressing biases, and promoting diversity. 
• Shedding light on the evolving consumer experience, we touch on the rise of mixed realities in fashion retail, exploring virtual stores and digital twins. 
• Highlighting the significance of interconnected supply chains, the vital role of technology and consumer demand in enabling it, the crucial aspects of transparency, the role of digital IDs, and the challenges brands face in achieving sustainability goals. 

Looking ahead Hanson predicts a surge in the adoption of 3D design in fashion, citing its potential to revolutionize the entire value chain. The forthcoming Digital Production Report for 2023 is teased, promising insights into why 3D design will be a pivotal factor in fashion tech trends for the upcoming year. 

Check out our Website for the downloadable PDF to accompany this episode!
www.beyondform.io/podcast
https://www.theinterline.com/

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Hello, I'm Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form. It's that time of the year again the Christmas and New Year's holiday and a time of reflection. A lot has happened in fashion tech during 2023 and in today's episode, I'm joined by Ben Hanson, editor-in-chief of the Interline, an online publication dedicated to reporting and tech shaping the fashion industry. Together, we review what's happened this year and where the fashion industry is heading. 2021 and 2022 saw the meteoric rise of the fashion NFTs, which only came tumbling down in 2023, with NFT prices and sales tumbling by more than 50%. Are fashion NFTs over, and with it, the metaverse? Nonetheless, the virtual space has full steam ahead, with digital fashion, ar, vr and mixed realities, ai fashion models and virtual stores all being deployed by brands, big and small. 2023 also saw tech such as digital passports and generative AI really coming to the forefront, with brands exploring what impact they could have on their core businesses. Has any of it worked?

Ben: 1:12

Even big brands who will say there's too much to do here, there's too much distance to travel, I don't have the level of visibility required for compliance, so I'm just going to pay the fines. I'm not naming any names, but that is a very real thing. That's something that external regulation absolutely external regulation that is to least to some degree anchored in industry reality is the solution.

Peter: 1:34

Let's get this chat underway for the final episode of 2023 with Ben on this episode of venturing into fashion tech. Are you ready for Christmas? Let's just ask our first.

Ben: 1:46

This is a very cliche and generalized answer. My family is more ready for Christmas than I am. I am not the one who does the bulk of the organization I'd like to be, but I think I'm focused on when does work finish? It finishes once we've got a very big report out of the way in a week or so, and then some other bits and pieces Ask me that in 10 days time and you get a much more relaxed answer.

Peter: 2:10

We'll check back in 10 days then, before we get stuck in into the conversation, just some of context for our listeners today, so we can't go through everything in the world of fashion tech. We have actually chosen some topics for us to talk about in this particular episode. We'll be talking about NFTs and the rise and fall of NFTs. I know that, ben, you have quite a lot to say. That not necessarily the best life for NFTs. Very interesting topic Buzzword at the moment Generative Design, generative AI.

Peter: 2:39

We'll be talking about how this may be affecting the fashion industry and is the industry actually ready for such a tool yet? And speaking on the subject of AI, where are we in terms of regulations, in terms of regulating how AI is rolled out, and actually do brands understand what are the ramifications of AI on their businesses? Moving on to mixed realities and digital twins and then, finally, connected value chains I'm sure we could talk all day about any of these subjects, Ben, but before we get into that, it's the first time we've had you on the podcast show. Can you tell us a bit about your life story? How did your adventures take you or get you into fashion tech?

Ben: 3:24

Yeah, in a bit of a roundabout way is the quickest answer. So I've always been candid and I always said my background is not in fashion. I've now been in the technology side of fashion for nearly 15 years. It probably is 15 years now so I think I've picked up enough industry knowledge in that time. But I've never worked directly at a brand, I've never worked in a factory, I've never sewn any garments myself.

Ben: 3:46

I come to this from the technology side, from the consumer's technology side originally, then the enterprise and technology side. It gives you some blind spots because there's some things about the industry that you've taken by surprise by, even after 15 years. But it also gives you more of an outsider's perspective and sometimes, yeah, I'm not an outsider anymore after 15 years. But sometimes an outsider's perspective is kind of handy because it allows you to challenge things and look at things a little bit differently from people who have. They have the hard job of actually delivering on a lot of transformation objectives, overall profitability, business direction, all that kind of stuff. I've got the much more privileged position of sitting back and commentating on it all and analyzing what it means and trying to make predictions for where it's all headed. I was part of the team that launched the Interline, so we launched in March 2020, which is like a bit of an inauspicious time to launch anything new because it's the exact time of the COVID hit but we've grown pretty quickly in the nearly four years since then and we cover the whole technology spectrum for fashion.

Ben: 4:50

We try to talk about fashion's biggest ticket issues through a technology lens and we're read globally. We're fully free to read and it's an interesting industry to be in from a bunch of different perspectives, because there's a huge amount of pressure on the outside of fashion. There's a huge amount of internal kind of disruption and upheaval within the industry, all of which is kind of creating a pretty clear mandate for technology adoption. So it's one of those things where, if you'd asked me 20 years ago, what are you going to be spending your days doing, it probably would not have been this. I wouldn't have foreseen a way that this was my day job.

Ben: 5:27

Now that I do it, I can't really think about being anywhere else, because you have an industry that has such a strong mandate for change. You have so many solutions and so many opportunities outside of it For me. I'm not like a blind technology evangelist. I think we'll probably get to that when we talk about a few of the subjects that you mentioned, but that's how to put it. What I am, and what I've kind of come to being in those 15 years, is somebody who is part of an industry that is driving cultures, tied to culture in so many ways, but has so much that it could do better, that it could do more efficiently, so many opportunities it could take advantage of. And that's what we want to do at the Intel Inters to make sure that that is something that happens productively, effectively, smartly, and the fashion brands, designers and retailers are able to make smart investments and smart choices when it comes to technology.

Peter: 6:17

I think the key word there is smart investments and smart choices, but from some of the activations that we have seen over year, I'm not sure smart is the right word to describe something that means activation.

Ben: 6:29

I think reactive might be the right word, or kind of a reactionary might be the right word to describe a lot of activations and things that are taking place in fashion. I will say like, on the whole, I do feel like the fashion industry is moving in the right direction in almost all of the areas that count. Some of them are hard to quantify, some of them are definitely behind where they ought to be. But when it comes to making use of technology to do things better, I think, slowly but steadily, things are progressing in the right way, even if you do get occasions, like I'm sure we're going to talk about, where you have an industry that gets very suddenly pulled in a direction that may not necessarily be the best one, but, like this course correction, there's pendulum swings. If you were to chart fashion's progress towards being more efficient or sustainable, more profitable, all that kind of stuff and using technology to do it, it's incremental steps in the right direction, I think.

Peter: 7:23

So, talking about activations, let's talk about our first subjects. Then NFTs, and fashion NFTs specifically. So last year, in a publication that the Interline released, you mentioned that shopping experiences and the fashion world in general would undergo a significant transformation due to NFTs. Obviously, we had the crypto crash at the end of 2022. There has seen to be a downturn in fashion NFT activations and, just in general, the talk and conversation around fashion NFTs. How have these predictions unfolded in the past year and what have your thoughts been on that?

Ben: 8:03

Yeah, sure. So let me give you a tiny bit of context behind that. So the report you're referencing is the fashion reset report 22, I think it was and that was written by a group of very smart people younger folks than myself, from within the industry, and we released it through the Interline. I wrote a foreword for it and the overall conclusion of that is that there was a unique opportunity for fashion to do things differently the reset of the title, the opportunity to say we've had all this disruption and there are all of these possibilities and options in front of us. Let's take a pause and let's figure out which ones are these that we run forward with and do things differently, of those options to take forward and of the ways to do things differently.

Ben: 8:43

Last year, I think, a lot of people had NFTs and Metaverse at the top of their investment agendas, discussion agendas, whatever you want to talk about. Go to go to a fashion event, talk to a fashion brand. Everybody would say to you what's the deal with NFTs? What's happening with the Metaverse? I'm on record as being quite skeptical about both of those things. So in May of this year I think it was we did a multi-writer, multi-contributor. Look at the fallout from the whole Metaverse idea, which is something I'd encourage people to go and read. I wrote a piece we had Jessica Quillen wrote a piece, sasha Wallinger. There were a few people who broke different perspectives on what actually happened with the whole Metaverse fashion side of things, but I think everybody knows that when you look at the Metaverse Fashion Week 23, there was a huge fall off in attendance and overall I felt it was something that didn't really work From a user experience point of view. From a kind of the execution of it was very lacking. That would be my kind of overall take on a lot of the Metaverse stuff, and that word especially has become a poison chalice. Now, if you were somebody who was responsible for driving a Metaverse strategy forward within a brand, people are going to be asking some hard questions of you about profit and loss and what this all amounted to.

Ben: 10:08

What I do think on that one and I'll circle around to NFTs in a minute staying on Metaverse is a bad label for a good idea, and I think the good idea is fashion should have a presence in real-time entertainment. Fashion should have its own real-time and immersive drivers. There is a huge creative and kind of equality and inclusivity opportunity and pure digital fashion that's untethered from making physical things. The core idea, the philosophy behind digital fashion immersive, real-time fashion is sound the idea that there was going to be a huge, universal, shared Metaverse and every company needed to have a presence in it and needed to nominate a chief Metaverse officer. All of that did not pan out the way that people expected it to any degree, but the core idea behind that, I think, is sound.

Ben: 10:59

I don't feel that way about NFTs. I don't think the core idea has ever been sound there. I don't think it's ever been necessary. I think it's a solution in search of a problem, because you can have supply chain transparency, product authenticity, verifiable ownership you can have all of these things customer loyalty, experiences with just database solutions, and the only thing that NFTs really get you is justification for the existence of NFTs, because when you start to talk about using them as certificates of authenticity and ownership almost always proving, that ends up back in the courts and ends up back with the traditional copyright system and everything else. And if that's going to be your recourse, then what was the point in having NFTs in the first place to begin with?

Peter: 11:48

Having said that, though, Gucci this year did announce their partnership with Ugalab, so the people that have created Board 8 Yacht Club in May 2023, which is a multi-year deal between the two parties. Why do you think that deal has come about? Do you think it's actually going to where? Just from what you've just said there, it's not necessarily working what we're seeing at the moment. So why has Gucci signed this deal? Do you think?

Ben: 12:14

I think in that case there's money to be made in the short term. You can have a bad central concept and still make money around it. You only have to look at the entire. You mentioned the crypto crash. How many people cashed out effectively from around all of that. There is money and if you're in a luxury brand especially, you're in the business of talking to high net worth individuals and finding opportunities for them to spend their money, so you do not begrudge any brand having NFTs, selling NFTs. There's money to be made from digital assets and that's perfectly viable. I just don't think any of the core experiences that NFTs deliver, including some of the Board 8 stuff, actually requires Web 3 fundamentals or crypto or tokenization to really deliver in the first place. I think a lot of it is achievable through more traditional means.

Peter: 13:03

I completely agree with that. I think the utility of NFTs and the use case of NFTs within the core business of fashion just hasn't necessarily been found there. A lot of brands have been trying to do things like power apps, a proof of access protocols, for example. They've tried various business models, they've tried various ways of delivering it from an experience perspective, but it all seems itty-bitty still and a siloed activation, and I think that is the problem there. In terms of the Gucci and Ugulabs partnership, of course, only time will tell whether that partnership is going to be favorable. For me, it's a big question mark. However, of course, when it comes to NFTs, there's still the whole notion of digital creation and how to police actually the creators and all of the IP issues and everything around there as well. There is, but I don't.

Ben: 13:58

personally, I don't see how NFTs solves any of that problem. I think those problems can be solved through the traditional, the pre-existing copyright and IP protection structures that we have, because almost invariably, when somebody take the Birkin bags or anything of those kind of high-profile cases, they're not getting litigated in a special NFT court, they're being litigated in the existing regulatory framework that is already in place for brand protection, and I will say that personally I don't deal in, but I can see why it would be compelling is the whole. So what Nike is doing with their Swoosh platform, where you have digital collectibles and the possibility of trading those, I like sneakers. I'm not a full-on sneakerhead, so I'm not immersed enough in that culture to know how that is shaping out.

Ben: 14:45

I think there's a viable application of some kind of tokenization there in that kind of trading and collecting of digital representations of physical goods. I don't know how popular that is. To the best of my knowledge, nike haven't released any statistics to say how many users that sort of platform has. I feel like there's maybe something there. Again, though, is it something there that you can do without tokens, without NFTs? The core idea of digital collectibles is sound. Does it require Web3 principles to deliver. Yet to be convinced on that point.

Peter: 15:19

It's a big question, mark. You mentioned the the Birkins specifically the Meta Birkins, just to remind our listeners that were released in 2021 by artist Mason Rothschild, and he was subsequently taken to court by Hermes, the brand. This particular case came to head in February 2023 and the judges were in favour of Hermes. They find Rothschild and his team $130,000 in terms of breach of copyright infringement and IP issues, which you were talking around there. I think that's very indicative of how NFTs just was really not very well thought out, shall we say, in digital assets and ownership.

Peter: 16:01

In terms of the prices of NFTs, these, of course, have fallen. So, for example, the Adidas collection that was released early this year they traded at more than $1,000 per asset. They then reduced by more than 75%. Sales have fallen as well, by more than 50% for pretty much all of these NFT collections. So I think, going into 2024, it's a big question, mark, as to whether NFTs will actually be still around, for fashion brings to even be taking notice of. However, so, from something that was very busy and has now died pretty much, to something that is now very busy at this moment in time, which is generative AI and design. What are your thoughts on this, Ben? Is it a hype, like NFTs, or do you think this is something that has potential utility within the fashion system?

Ben: 16:56

I think it's not the same kind of hype that NFTs was, because, honestly, if you have Microsoft investing billions of dollars in a thing, it doesn't tend to be a flash in the pan they don't always make the smartest investments but, generally speaking, you didn't have that same level of big technology sector institutional investment and NFTs that you have in generative AI at the moment. In terms of what role it's likely to play in fashion. It's the same question as the role it's likely to play in a lot of industries, with some extra considerations and context for hours. I think. Like a lot of people, I'm a bit conflicted about AI at the moment because when we talk about AI here, we're talking about generative AI. We're talking really about chat gpt, dallE, mid journey, those kinds of things. What you have are models that are good enough in a lot of areas, right, they have models that do a reasonably adequate job of quite a lot of different things Outside of programming, maybe another kind of pure deterministic areas. They're not really good and really kind of expert level in any specific domains. That's the opposite of where most people would have pegged AI as being at 18 months two years ago, when what you had was very specialized, very narrow applications of AI things like AlphaGo, which is the goal in playing AI which were effectively superhuman right. So you had very narrow AI's which performed at or above the standard of the world's best human beings in those specific areas. Now you have the opposite. Now you have something that is generally adequate at certain things.

Ben: 18:42

Now, as you can probably imagine, as somebody who edits a magazine does a bunch of public speaking, have you, I spend a lot of time looking at writing and I spend a lot of time thinking about storytelling. I spend a lot of time looking at visuals and things as well. I don't consider myself like a brilliant writer or the foremost expert editor or anything along those lines. I think generally, though, after doing it for 15 years, you get some level of being able to distinguish good from bad right, and I, at the moment, would say chatGPT is not a good writer. It's very obvious when somebody writes something, with the help of chatGPT, you can identify it a mile off. It's not good at structuring stories. It's not good at prose. It's not good at conveying an argument. However, gpt-4 is a lot better at all of those things than GPT-3.5 was, and it's to the extent where, if somebody sends me an article and I know it's written with AI. I'll probably be able to tell you whether it's 3.5 or whether it's four, because the difference is that pronounced between them.

Ben: 19:42

And those two models are separated by what? Six months, something along those lines. Right, a year of change into the whole generative AI journey. What that means is is there a time, could we be having this conversation any year? And I can't tell. Is there? Could we be having this conversation in two years? And I'm saying, actually, generative AI is doing a good job of my job.

Ben: 20:02

But if you imagine that you're a fashion designer or you're a musician or you're an artist or whatever you're a domain expert, right? The question you want to be asking yourself is the same one you'd be asking in any domain, which is is it useful, and where is it useful, to have a co-pilot, an assistant, whatever you want to call it that is good enough at your job, that is adequate at your job? Is that a thing that you want? Looking further down the line, is having a co-pilot or an assistant that is as good as you at your job or better than you at your job? Is that something that we as a society want? Is that something that we want to have and something that we need and I think the the clearest kind of slam dunk benefit to generative AI that's 100% is going to play out is better versions of the existing kind of voice assistants and things that we have.

Ben: 20:55

It's applicable in your personal life. It's applicable in your professional life as well. Having the equivalent of the Apple, amazon, google assistants which I won't name to avoid triggering mine or anybody else's having the equivalent of that that has hooks into all of your professional work. It has hooks into all of your business knowledge and data. It has hooks into your calendar and your messages and your emails, things that can do like agentic work on your behalf. That's a pretty clear benefit for basically any industry In terms of actually using it for fashion design, in terms of actually using it for the creative or technical development side of our industry at the moment.

Ben: 21:35

I would say it's fun to play around with and to different people, having an assistant that is good enough or adequate might be all you need. I feel like it's going to have to get to that really good, excellent kind of area in specific domains before we can really kind of answer that society wide question of what does it mean? But chat gpt is popular for a reason. They don't. They don't have 100 million users a week because it's a bad consumer product. It's a good consumer product. It's just a question of what do you want it to do and what do we as an industry think it means, as it gets progressively better at what it does?

Peter: 22:21

So we have a couple of startups in our portfolio, so, one of them being T-Fashion. So they're an AI Power Trend forecasting platform. They've also this year released their design tool, which is what's they call the studio, and it's essentially a design tool that allows the user to be able to create fashion designs based on prompts and also some pre filters as well. Another portfolio company is Swap. That actually does the same thing essentially, but they've actually taken it further, where you can actually swap in your face into that digital image, shall we say. Do you think these startups are going to be replacing traditional creativity? Do you think there's going to be a danger there of overlapping some of the things that you were just talking about?

Ben: 23:06

I think that those are going to be supplemental to traditional creativity, if there are anything, because there's a wider question of the data sets that those things were trained on, and this might be a deeper issue than you want to get into at the moment with your portfolio companies. Generally speaking, when it comes to the design side of things, I feel like there's a hard limit on how far that can penetrate, because a lot of the off the shelf tools and kind of diffusion models and things that are available to people are trained on copyright data from other brands and from a wide selection of brands. And, yes, you have people who are doing high concept window stuff and applying control nets and things to try and avoid situations where you end up with copyright infringing or things that look too much like other brands, but you're not gonna eliminate that as long as you're using those kind of off the shelf big generative models, you're never really gonna get to the stage of saying, well, there is no copyrighted data from any other brands whatsoever in this training dataset, and that kind of limits how far you can take it. I do think, though, for both of those applications that you mentioned, using it for quick visualization, using it for inspiration, using it as that kind of sparring partner, that good enough, adequate counterpart to say I'm out of ideas or I've had a creative block, or I want to visualize a wider, more inclusive range of people in my garments to see what that might look like.

Ben: 24:38

All of those are things that are time consuming for people to do. You hit the limits of human capacity and imagination and you're able to start to use AI to assist in that area. And I don't know enough about the companies that you mentioned to know for sure how they would work, but I would see them as being very much kind of it's that copilot thing. I hate that Microsoft really monopolized that as a word, because it's a very good word to use, I think. But it comes to this AI assistance.

Peter: 25:07

So then you mentioned that data sets and copyrights, so what does this mean in terms of AI and regulations? Then, one specific thing that does come in mind when it comes to regulations is that are we training the different models on what we already understand in terms of, like white Western fashion designed for skinny models? So, for example, there is the startup La La Land, who announced this year in March 2023, their partnership with Levi's, the denim company, and they faced a lot of backlash in terms of announcing that, because of the whole point was that Levi's was going to be able to roll out models that were my diverse and inclusive, shall we say? So, instead of using physical, real-life humans, they would then actually use AI models instead. So what are your thoughts around all of those ethics and regulations of AI?

Ben: 26:09

Yeah, it's a really tricky one in a bunch of ways, and one thing I'll preface this by saying is that it's a hard question for me personally to answer, because bias is not something that I experience a lot of firsthand. So if you're watching the video version of this, you already know, if you're listening to the audio version of this, I'm a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, average-looking white guy. I'm included by default in a lot of conversations and a lot of marketing, and it would be irresponsible of me to try and pretend that I had any firsthand experience or I knew what it would be like to be excluded. That's not the case. What I tried to do is to try to spend a bunch of time working with people and talking with people who do experience some of this firsthand, and also working on addressing it. So I wrote a piece with some heavy consultation from Mpahamurabi, who is a professor of AI ethics University of Toronto. I think he launched a startup there.

Ben: 26:59

We wrote an article together in 2021, which was about how ingrained biases in AI data sets can lead to a lack of inclusivity in experiences. His work was more focused on beauty kind of beauty, ai, air, tri-on, vr, tri-on stuff. I was looking at it more from the fashion lens, but the root cause of it is what you would expect, which is, if you have language models or generative image models and diffusion models that are trained on all of that copyright, preexisting brand data that exists out there, those models will internalize the broad trends that apply across that data set and, historically, fashion has done a fairly poor job of accurately representing different demographics in its marketing, in its communications and in a bunch of other things. Different demographics not just, you know, not just skin tone, not just body shape, but everything. There's a huge, diverse spectrum of people who deserve representation when it comes to what they were, they deserve to be included in the fashion conversation, because there's two parts to this right. One is the off-the-shelf models that we talked about. So you go and use chat, gpt, you go and use Dali or mid-journey or whatever All of those organizations. They've done a pretty good job of putting up guard rails and things that try and get around some of this, that try and stop you from generating things that are exclusionary in any way.

Ben: 28:24

When you start to talk about more bespoke models and some of that high concept window training and when you, as a brand, say I want to have my own in-house version of mid-journey for argument's sake. I want to have my own in-house image generated model which is just trained on my data. It's just trained on my historic catalog and my brand heritage. If your own historic catalog and brand heritage is not sufficiently inclusive, then you're going to end up perpetuating a future with any way. You're generating options and ideas which are not sufficiently inclusive and don't include enough representation for people. And it's a very real problem. Because people talk a lot about AI alignment in terms of values and making sure that AI generally does what we ask it to do and what we think it should do. There's not enough of a conversation. I don't think around how different perspectives, different lived experiences, different firsthand experiences, how those shape what you want AI to do and what you want it to present and what it should be.

Peter: 29:26

Yeah, I think it's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this entire conversation, especially for fashion. I don't think a lot of fashion brands are necessarily that equipped already to deal with such issues at the moment in time.

Ben: 29:42

And I mean the thing you mentioned La La Land and Levi is example. So if you put yourself in the shoes of somebody who wanted to break into modeling let's just say so, hypothetical somebody from a background that's traditionally not been welcomed into modeling for whatever reason, and let's say, in the last five years, maybe 10 years, fashion has started to do a better job of that and maybe more job opportunities start to present themselves, and maybe you start to think well, I can break into this. This is a door that has traditionally been closed to me. Now it's opening, only to have that door closed again because people and brands are choosing to use AI models to create and try to be diplomatic here to create or sets diversity as opposed to real diversity. That's a hard pill to swallow. To ask somebody to swallow in that situation is to say, ok, now you can be represented, now you can model for us. But actually it's a very short-lived window of opportunity because we're going to use AI-generated models instead.

Peter: 30:41

Yeah, I think we could do an entire episode on that, but we'll save that for another day. However, I do think it's interesting in terms of the investments going into AI. So, for example, goldman Sachs Bank they do actually predict that $200 billion will be invested worldwide into the category of AI. In terms of France, where I'm currently recording from Mistrell, was one of those kind of like French open AI basically, and they received $100 million this year, which a large portion of that money was, of course, training the data sets there. So there are things being put in place to hopefully mitigate some of that training and those digit sets feel a bit less bias, I think. Only time will tell.

Ben: 31:28

I would agree, and I do want to underline that, unlike NFTs, I'm pretty bullish on where AI is headed. I think, generally speaking, it's lowering barriers. It's helping people. I think we're only a year into the whole generative AI side of things and it's made a massive splash already. Do I think it's going to get to the stage where it does my job for me? Maybe, like it's not inconceivable. Are you shaking in your boots, ben?

Peter: 32:00

Are you?

Ben: 32:00

shivering. Honestly, no Part of that is because I would welcome a clone of myself so I could write more, but the other part of it is that I I think it's right to challenge what constitutes work. In some cases, I think people spend a lot of time on things that should not, in a sensible world, be where humans spend their time and where they assign their value. Do I think AI is going to exclusively be implicated Because the utopic vision for it is okay. Well, ai takes away all of the drudgery and freezes up to do the creative work. Weirdly, it's the opposite is kind of happening is that AI is being used to do the creative work and kind of taking people out of roles and things there. I think that will balance out to some extent, hopefully, but generally speaking, I would class myself as more of an AI optimist than a pessimist in terms of its utility. I think there's a lot of society-wide questions to answer around what that means for people's individual incomes and livelihoods and health, welfare and everything else.

Peter: 33:22

So let's move on, then, in terms of mixed realities and digital twins. As we are in the month of December, of course, there's a lot of shopping happening. Apparently, there's going to be 65% of the US population shopping online in 2023. So the question is, which reality is winning? We've already talked about the metaverse, but we don't think the metaverse is going to be winning. So what is going to be winning then?

Ben: 33:49

Sure, I mean, that's an interesting one because general e-commerce, I think, is pretty clearly one of the driving forces behind retail as a whole. It has contracted a little bit since the pandemic heyday where you could only shop online, and I've had a bunch of conversations with brands who have said actually physical stores perform really well for us. Now we sell a lot through there. They're great avenues for brand experience and they're opening more physical stores as opposed to rushing everything towards e-commerce. I think to your point and your question about metaverse right. I'm old enough to remember the very early days of the internet and Amazon and everything else when that all kicked off the web. If I'm going to use that, there were a lot of different opinions on what it meant to shop online. There's a lot of what that experience should be and a lot of different companies, a lot of different people tried a lot of different ways. Some of those were digital replicas and representations of physical stores. That's an avenue that's been tried, it's been done, it got tested in the early days of the internet. Over time, a lot of that experiential and replicative side of online shopping got sanded away and we ended up with what we have predominantly today, which is infinite scroll, infinite aisle, text and images. Path of lease resistance. If you want to shop online, what you want is that path of lease resistance. I want to just see the product. If I can do a virtual try on, maybe, but generally speaking, I just want the simplest and the most streamlined path to go and buy a thing.

Ben: 35:27

I think that is changing a bit now, though I think I don't think it's going to go fully back to where the only avenue for shopping online is having people step into virtual representations of physical stores. But I do think there's a place for that. That's not the metaverse. I would not call that any application of metaverse. A lot of those virtual stores are not even real time. A lot of them are technically they were rendered in real time engines and then they're stitched together out of static images and panoramas and things. But a lot of brands and a lot of retailers are having success with platforms like Obsess, where you have an actual virtual store for people to step in and to experience. Maybe they interact with a 3D representation of a garment, maybe they just get presented with a flat image or a flat render of it.

Ben: 36:12

Whatever it is personally doesn't appeal to me in a huge way, because I'm very much. I'm a busy guy, I just want that path of least resistance. That's me. However, it's very clear that some people do want that and some retailers and some brands are having a lot of success with offering virtual stores and that seems to be trending upwards. And I think there's two reasons for that. One is that the infinite aisle idea, the whole Amazon thing of you can get literally everything under the sun that you could possibly want shipped to you the following day.

Ben: 36:42

Some of the lustre has rubbed off that people don't necessarily want infinite choice. People want more curation, they want more brand experience. They want somebody to tell them hey, here's a narrow selection of what you want, of what appeals to you, and step into it and experience that. And the other is that the technologies got better. Like I said, they're not all real time. Maybe eventually we get there and some are pixel streamed, some are stitched together out of panoramas.

Ben: 37:07

But there's more compelling options and there's more compelling ways to present virtual stores now than there's ever been. Brands are creating more of the products in 3D and that means that you're able to stock those virtual shelves in a more streamlined way than you could before and present more of your assortment. I don't think virtual stores are going to take over. I think that's going to be the driving force behind holiday shopping. I do think you're going to start to see more of it. There's holiday season and I think you're going to start to see more of it beyond, and this is one of those, one of a couple of areas where it's not something that I would use personally, but I recognize that there's value in it and there's clearly a market for it.

Peter: 37:47

I think it comes down to the fact that many retail teams are still trying to play catch up as to how they are creating these virtual worlds and which reality they are going into. Digital twins are not. So, for example, another one of our startups out the world who does AR digital fashion they've been speaking to brands and they said that they're speaking to the marketing teams, but those marketing teams are still in those exploratory phrases. They know they want to do something with digital twins and digital fashion and virtual stores, but it's like how do you stitch all of these different elements together to make a compelling customer experience and customer brand story?

Ben: 38:25

Yeah, yeah, and I think from the brand's perspective as well, that's going to be a much easier sell to a brand that's already doing a lot in 3D and digital production to begin with, right, so it's a much shorter hop from. I have digital representations of a good amount of my products already that I use in house. I use them for virtual photography from my website, whatever it is. It's a much shorter hop from there to okay, I'm going to offer an immersive virtual store than it is to go from. I don't create anything virtually. I don't have any 3D assets, I don't have any digital materials. I don't have any digital avatars. I very limited kind of understanding of maybe you do some 3D store planning or what have you.

Ben: 39:05

There's different levels of digital production and 3D maturity that are going to quite heavily influence where people are on the on ramp up to doing that kind of thing. And there's the consumers, the kind of education as well. There's presenting that to people and making sure that it's something that they want to interact with and encouraging them to do it because it's going to give them a slightly different experience than they would get otherwise. So I think that's one of those areas where the execution is not fully there, but I think part of the reason the execution is not fully there is that the brand community is very divergent in terms of how the level of groundwork that they've got in place to take advantage of it.

Peter: 39:46

So just on the note of consumer education. So let's move on to our final topic then. So connected supply chains and, specifically, the impact of digital IDs and digital passports. We've seen recently, for example, tots, the footwear brand, joining the Aura Blockchain Consortium. Brands like Pangaya and Chloe have taken on solutions like EON, for example, to deliver digital passports. There's a huge buzz around digital passports and what it can do and enabling and flooding entire collections into the digital clouds there. Where do we think this is going? Do we think it's generally going to make and enable fashion brands to be transparent, and do the customers ultimately care as to how these products have traveled through the supply chain? I think customers do care.

Ben: 40:39

I think just to tackle your last option first, I think people do care.

Ben: 40:43

I think it's a hard thing to care about in the face of a cost of living crisis, because more sustainable options with more provable provenance tend to be more expensive.

Ben: 40:53

I think that will stabilize over time and some of the economic drivers that are forcing people towards more value oriented and opaque supply chains will stabilize and they'll go away and people will start to shop with their values more. When people shop with their values, they will have differing expectations of what transparency means, and how those expectations are shaped is going to be down to two different sets of stakeholders the brands themselves and how they communicate and what they choose to disclose to consumers and to the market, and the third parties, the technology companies and the intermediaries that they use to transport or gather that information. Because when you're talking about a digital ID or a digital product passport, it's going to have two things on it. More than likely. It's going to have the brand's name on it and then it's going to have the name of the platform, the standard, the methodology that they use to arrive at the carbon impact, the water usage, the provenance or whatever of that product.

Ben: 41:55

That's hard for brands to think about at the moment, and it's hard for a couple of reasons. One is you have the whole history of what took place with the HIG index right. So there's only been one real instance so far of a technology backed, objective method and methodology of presenting consumer facing labeling that proves quote, unquote transparency, that proves product provenance, and it got hit with very quick and very heavy regulatory scrutiny and it's been effectively withdrawn in those consumer facing scenarios. If you're a technology company and you're trying to approach that again and you're trying to say, ok, well, I'm, I'm or I'm whoever one of these, one of these routes to transparency, as soon as your name ends up on the consumer facing label, your subject to a huge amount of regulatory scrutiny again, and I don't think we've seen the end of that backfiring and that going wrong. And to me, what that means is that brands should be looking at technology partners like these. It makes sense for them to do that. They should also be making sure that they the brand owned as much of the transparency data as they can.

Ben: 43:12

There's no substitute for first party information, knowing as much as you can about your multi tier supply chain yourself, where you have the data, not a model of it, not a kind of closed book method that you get the output of afterwards, but the actual first party information on who your suppliers are across the tiers. What are they doing, how much, what are their policies? What, how many, what kind of resources that they using? What kind of pollution and emissions are they putting out. There's no substitute for first party data there, but from a technology perspective, I do think again like this is straight into NFTs and Web 3 a bit, which we've already got my position on.

Ben: 43:54

I do think blockchain has a role to play as a data transport solution. If what you want to do is say, ok, I've gathered that first party data, I want to communicate it downstream to my consumers, can I demonstrate that nobody messed with that information in between the point of origin and the point of the consumer? And can I use crypto, transactions, certificates or whatever to prove all of that? There's applications of blockchain there. What that doesn't solve is what information are you putting in that source and who's putting it in and who owns it, and so I do think there's a very strong future for that kind of provable traceability and transparency. I think in the long run, the brand ends up and should and has to end up owning more of it than the technology partner does.

Peter: 44:44

I completely agree, then, and, to be honest, I don't think it's going to be able to have that authority until the industry becomes more regulated. In a nutshell, yeah.

Ben: 44:56

I mean that's. That's very fair, like fashion has been left to self-regulate for a very long time, and it has not translated into an ethical and environmentally sound industry. So if that was going to happen of the industry's own volition, it would have happened by now. External regulation is unquestionably going to be the wedge that drives that kind of thing forward. I do think, though, there is I don't want to be a both sides kind of person I do think there has to be some measure of understanding as to where the industry is currently at when it comes to regulations, because if the gulf between the current state of supply chain visibility that you have as a brand and the level of disclosure that you're required to make is so vast that you can't see a way to even approach it, that's going to lead to noncompliance and that's going to lead to a huge volume of problems.

Ben: 45:43

What you have to have is more in the way of progressive legislation and more in the way of hoops that brands are actually able to jump through. They should still be hard to get to, but they should be things that are at least semi achievable in the short to medium term. You stack those, that translates into more collective action and more in the way of industry change. But I speak to a lot of brands and quite often you will hear in big brands who will say there's too much to do here, there's too much distance to travel, I don't have the level of visibility required for compliance, so I'm just going to pay the fines, like not naming any names. But that is a that is a very real sense and like that's. That's something that external regulation, absolutely external regulation that is to least to some degree anchored in industry reality, is the solution.

Peter: 46:33

So where do you think fashion sec is heading then in the new year?

Ben: 46:37

Bias, because we have the digital production report coming out in a week or so time. I think we're going to see a lot more of a push towards designing in 3D, creating digitally digitizing materials at source, because there are so many disconnected analog steps in the average fashion value chain that when you start to digitize the ones at the beginning, it has a pronounced impact on how you digitize the ones. That follows, if you're designing and developing in 3D and fitting in 3D and sampling in 3D, it starts to open the door towards a lot more in the way of Do I do on demand digital manufacturing? Do I like that? It's it's. It sounds like a small thing designing in 3D, having 3D materials, fitting and testing in 3D. It's a big wedge to drive much more in the way of digital transformation. So by the time this this podcast comes out, hopefully, the digital production report for 2023 is out there and there's a bunch of perspectives from different brands and different writers and myself and industry analysis and stuff in there, which will hopefully demonstrate why I think that's the case.

Peter: 47:46

Absolutely so, for our listeners. Keep your eye out on the Intel lines website for that report to come out. So I'm just going to finish off this episode, ben, with a quick fire round of questions. The first answer that comes to your head, you ready? Mm hmm, I am.

Ben: 47:59

Let's go.

Peter: 48:00

Do you have any NFTs?

Ben: 48:03

Okay, I we can safely say the answer is no on that one?

Peter: 48:06

I thought that might have been the answer your favorite tech of the year?

Ben: 48:11

My favorite technology of the year I don't personally use it because I'm not a designer but gravity sketch, which is the VR and 3D modeling and design platform. I think they've got some really smart ideas about what it means to create digitally and I know there's a lot of people in the design community, in fashion and footwear especially, who are rightly excited about that, and I think it heralds a change, because you can only go so far with flat screen representations of 3D objects before you start to think why are we not doing this in full immersive VR?

Peter: 48:47

One fashion brand that you think that did a fashion tech activation really well.

Ben: 48:52

Okay. So activations is one of those terms that I've never really understood. To be honest, this is one of those areas where a lot of people say activations and I've never 100% quantified what it means. What I will say is any brand that did a very good job of crossing over with video games or some other real time medium belongs up there at the top, because those two sectors converging is it makes complete sense. It's the most logical way for the fashion industry to go from here. It's a whole new captive audience, it's a whole new medium, and the more products that you have in 3D again, as we talked about before, the more you're able to capitalize on completely new channels and completely new routes to market.

Peter: 49:33

I could just imagine you now brand playing on Roblox on your iPad or something. Is that you?

Ben: 49:39

I don't play Roblox. I did grow up playing video games and I still do so. This is my personal and professional lives smushing together in a deeply strange way. I don't get a lot of time to play video games these days, and Roblox would not be my thing if I did, but it's an industry I know a surprising amount.

Peter: 49:58

And finally, one thing that you think is going to fail next year.

Ben: 50:03

Fail is a harsh word. But to our point earlier about some of the labels and opaque methods, some of the solutions that will say come to us and we'll tell you everything you need to know about your supply chain. We'll map your multi-tier supply chain for you. We'll give you instant access to your carbon footprint. We will make it so that you can put a label on all of your garments and it's instantly provable what impact these had.

Ben: 50:29

I think scrutiny from regulators and the market is going to put a hole in that in the near term future. I think still there is technology has a massive role to play improving impact measurement and everything else. There's nothing wrong with the idea of life cycle impacts. I think the model of saying we, as a technology company or a service company, we want to own as much of that as possible and we'll give you a turnkey solution to suddenly give you the ability to do all this disclosure that you need to do, I don't think that's going to prove to be viable. Thank you so much for your time, ben. Not at all. It's been really great talking to you, peter. Thank you for having me.