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Will The Web-Native Playbook Work For Digital Product Creation? · The Interline Podcast

• speaker-0: Hey, welcome back to the Insuline Podcast. Now, I've made no secret over the years of the fact that I like 3D. Computer graphics were a really formative part of my childhood and my teenage years. And as long as I've been in fashion, I've been interested in how a 3D representation of a garment, a shoe, a bag, or what have you can enhance and transform the way that product gets planned, conceived, made, marketed, and sold. And while I'm also pretty interested in AI, you'll see that. In our AI report 2026, which will be out by the time you listen to this show, the rapid rise of generative image models has actually really solidified my opinion that technical engineering and accurate simulation are more important foundations than ever for basically everything that fashion says it wants to accomplish as part of digital transformation. But as bullish as I might be on the outlook for 3D, I don't think there's any denying that it's been a specialist discipline for a while. As well as being reliant on costly, beefy local hardware and a reasonably complex kind of set of software, digital product creation, DPC, has really targeted and really been used by a pretty narrow pool of scarce talent. And when we talk about scaling DPC, which we often do in that kind of community, we rarely mean get more direct users into 3D design and into the applications that 3D designers use. Instead, we mean Enable a wider audience to take the outputs of 3D, either rendered out or as objects, and use them for other upstream and downstream purposes. I don't know if I quite go as far as to say that 3D teams have ended up being gatekeepers necessarily or bottlenecks on product creation in general, but the industry at large certainly hasn't seen 3D as a user growth segment in the last few years. Especially not since AI has offered a quicker shortcut to simple, low-stakes idea visualization and communication. But a decade ago or so ago, I could have said most of those things about 2D design as well. Not in fashion necessarily, but certainly in web design, graphic design, desktop publishing, etc. I'm definitely old enough to remember when any kind of layout work or mood boarding or Pixel or vector work was done in dedicated desktop apps by people with very specific and narrow job titles. Now that might be set to change for 3D. If you're keeping tabs on 3D scanning, which is a very different idea but shares something at the output, you'll have noticed recently that it suddenly got a lot easier to show good-looking 3D objects on the web. But just as platforms like Figma and Canva shifted the actual creation activity into the browser. There's now also a lot of interest in doing the same for 3D design and simulation for garments and accessories. Taking what's been a pretty isolated activity and exploding the distribution for it away from the desktop and onto a much wider user base in the web browser. Today's guests, plural, are Luke Grana and Gloria Yu, who are two of three co-founders of Fabra, which is a web-native 3D design simulation and collaboration platform. That they say is intended to cover the full spectrum from initial idea to what they refer to as production ready specs. It's based on the new Web GPU standard, replacement for WebGL, and it has some interesting ideas, I think, about who 3D and DPC are actually for, and how far 3D can follow that playbook set down by the likes of Figma, Canva, Miro, and so on. I first chatted to Gloria and Luke a couple of months ago. And I came away interested enough in what they're building to want to quiz them further. I think whether you're in 3D already, or whether you're part of the extended user base that Fabra's targeting, you're gonna be interested in what they had to say. So let's get rolling. Okay, Luke Runner, GloryGu, welcome to the Intelligent Podcast. speaker-1: Thank you for having us. speaker-0: Not at all. It's a pleasure. I'm glad we got the opportunity to do this. I'm glad we've found the time to do this. Now, we open these shows with two things every time. ⁓ the first is an overview of what the guests' day-to-day lives and working lives in particular are like. And the second one is a definition. We usually try and get somebody to define something that seems simple, but that maybe ends up being a bit more slippery and revealing in practice. So let's start with the everyday stuff, which is A bit trickier to do sometimes when you've got two guests, we'll make it work. ⁓ you're both co founders of Fabra, and we will get into what Fabra is over the course of the next hour. Tell me how each of you got here to become founders, and tell me how you divide the time and the labor of running a startup or a scale up. speaker-2: Yeah, yeah. So Luke Graner here, the CEO of Fabra and also Gloria, ⁓ Chief Product Officer of Fabra. ⁓ Fabra is a new 3D product design tool. ⁓ and you know, Gloria and I, we both ⁓ come from the fashion industry. We've both been working in it for the past 15 years each. And you know, we you know, we're building a a design tool to really make product design accessible to everyone. It's it's web-based, ⁓ there's templates, it's it's 3D. And it's really our our mission is to make product design accessible to everyone. ⁓ you know, a bit of my background. So I I grew up in in Sydney, ⁓ and then ⁓ back in about two thousand and twelve I I learned about the the new direct to consumer business model. I got very excited by that. ⁓ My brother was living in Peru and I I learnt about Peruvium Pima cotton and started sampling ⁓ with ⁓ a producer in ⁓ Peru and then thought, okay, I'm in Sydney now, but where's the best place to set up a a global distribution hub? And actually bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong ⁓ and was living in Hong Kong for about eight years, ⁓ building an e-commerce ⁓ DDC brand, just selling basics. ⁓ it was it was a great journey living in Hong Kong and ⁓ you know learnt a lot about fashion and product design and production, ⁓ commerce and and really selling on on the internet. ⁓ and we we built revenues up to about 20 million. We had a warehouse in Hong Kong and shipped to 60 markets. So and learnt a lot through that process. But one thing that I really learned is that product design and the tools are are are fantastic, but it's really hard and you need a lot of training and as a steep learning curve Curve for product line, and we had a a product team was about 10. And there was only two people out of that team that that could really do technical product design. ⁓ and I just thought it was a very slow process and the sampling was slow with with producers. And I was very lucky to meet Gloria, who is now my my business partner but also my fiance. We're getting married later this year. speaker-0: Congratulations. speaker-2: Thank you. ⁓ and ⁓ d during COVID we actually moved back from Hong Kong ⁓ to Sydney and we kept coming back to ⁓ the same thing that product design is really hard. The tools out there are amazing, but they're really built for experts. You need pattern making experience, you really need to know how to to to create a 2D pattern. And we got very excited by the likes of Canva and Figma and and the whole new web based ⁓ design movement. ⁓ and we kept saying, like, why doesn't ⁓ physical product design ⁓ exist in the web? ⁓ and this was back probably three years ago. ⁓ and I think the technology's come ⁓ quite far since then. So that was the original thesis for Fabra. And ⁓ you know, how how we split our time, like I'm very focused on the business side, the the team management, you know, fundraising and you know, really looking after the strategy and the direction of the company. ⁓ and Gloria ⁓ is really fixated on the product and the user experience and ⁓ r really in into the details of of how the product works. speaker-0: Gloria, quit quick rundown of your background. What brought you here? speaker-1: Yeah, sure. So I come from more of a design and craft background. So I grew up in Hong Kong and for university I went to New York City in the States, study at Parsons, ⁓ study my degree in fashion design. So really learned pattern making, garment making. And after university I had my own brand, which was sold at retailers like Neta Porte, Lane Crawford, Modo Operandi. So with that process learned the whole gamut of running a brand from design to production to sales to marketing. I did eventually pivot my career more into tech and the product space. And that's when I met Luke and we eventually started Fabra together. So I think like what really drew me to building Fabra, aside from making design just accessible to anyone, even someone without technical fashion design training, is also simply making the user experience of getting a product from idea to Sampling to production more intuitive. Right now, like I'm a trained designer. I know a lot of other trained designer friends. We know how to use all these tools, but we're not singing praises about them. We think there's still a lot of room for improvement for making the whole process of designing and bringing products to market more collaborative and more intuitive. And that's what we're here to solve. I also want to say we have a third co-founder called Nick as well. He's our CTO and he's really ⁓ the backbone of our whole software and engineering and brings that part of the ⁓ he he he's responsible for that part of our company. speaker-0: Cool. That's a good gives a good overview. Now I want to hit you with a definition of something, and I'll let you split this burden up however you see fit between the two of you. Tell me what you think digital product creation means. So for longtime readers, listeners at the Interline, ⁓ DPC is the acronym that we settled on and the industry largely settled on as A way of referring to not just 3D design, simulation, visualization, but the whole extended software and hardware ecosystem that grew up around those core capabilities, as well as all of the jobs, the roles, disciplines, and things that came from that. Now, you position Fabra as a 3D design tool and as a way of collaborating on, and I'll quote, creating production-ready specs. So This is a question of I think market positioning as much as anything else is do you see Fabra as part of that existing DPC ecosystem? Is it a play for something different entirely? Because when I look at it, when I scroll through the website, when I talk to you, I see the combination of material library, tech packs, fabric simulation. And even though the whole thing lives somewhere very different to what we're used to, which we'll get to, I think to myself, this is familiar. I understand what this is. I it feels like very kind of it feels like space we've explored. That space we've explored though, the whole DPC ecosystem comes with some baggage. You've hinted at some of it, Gloria. ⁓ and not least the idea that it's the domain of specialists and steep learning curves and so on. So what is DPC under your definition? And does that definition include, Fabro? speaker-2: Yes, I think this is a great question. I think you know we see DPC as 2D, 3D design, material simulation, the tech packs, and and then getting the product ⁓ you know, within the team and collaborate collaboration right through to production with your manufacturer. ⁓ and I think, you know, the the way we see it is that we're trying to broaden the uptake of DPC. I think there's some amazing tools out there and they're expert grade and they've been built upon for a long period of time. But I think what we're trying to do is broaden the market of who can actually interact with DPC. And I think we are trying to bring on ⁓ untrained, non-technical designers, designers who who don't have pattern making experience, ⁓ and you know, solo entrepreneurs building a brand, small small businesses, communities into the DPC space. So We we see ⁓ you know D P C as a fast growing space, ⁓ which is gonna continue to grow in a really big way, ⁓ especially with the no democratization of commerce that we see ⁓ also on demand production and small batch production, which just continues to to drop the barriers to ⁓ you know, building brands. But ultimately we just wanna broaden the market and make it more accessible to everyone. speaker-0: Do you do you think there's a pathway where somebody starts their sort of three D D P C journey in Fabra and eventually graduates to one of the big desktop suites? speaker-2: that's a great question. I think ⁓ you know, what we're building at Fabra is a browser based version. and our our vision is to make it as easy as possible with, you know, drag and drop and sliders. ⁓ but eventually, you know, Fabra will have the minute detail of being able to edit products and 2D patterns and material simulation and and the full soft body physics ⁓ that we're building into. And ultimately we believe in ⁓ Fabra, but even other ⁓ players in the industry moving online. So we believe that 3D on the web is definitely the future. Now whether they stay at Fabra or they move to another platform, I think that our assumption is that they will move to an online version. speaker-0: Fine. And that that does bring me to my next question. So ⁓ you're making a bet on achieving feature parity or something like it in in a web native environment. And it's the web it's the web environment that got me the most interested in having this conversation with you. This is why I wanted to bring you on the show. Fabra, as you mentioned, runs in a browser, not as ⁓ a visualizer or a product configurator with baked parts or a a viewer applet inside PLM, but as web native 3D design and simulation tool. For anyone listening to this who's not already immersed in 3D, that's not how it typically works. If you think about the main kind of 3D pioneers and mainstays like Clow and Browseware, they're heavy desktop applications, at least in their essential design and development forms. I know they have web applications for other parts of it. But now that desktop architecture stems from at least primarily, I guess, the requirement for local processing power, mainly but not exclusively, GPU. So 3D designers, along with kind of marketing teams doing CG work and so on, they've been the people within brands who had the biggest IT overheads and needed the beefiest rigs for that reason. They were the people with the heavy PCs. I guess maybe that's less true now because there'll be somebody listening to this who's got a 50 grand cluster of Mac Studios on their desk award for AI purposes, but it's been true for a long time. Now, when we first talked, you mentioned that the big unlock behind what you're doing, this move from the desktop to the web, is Web GPU, the Web GPU standard, which is the follow-on ⁓ from I forget I've temporarily forgotten the name of it, but there is a follow-on from a a a previous standard. ⁓ and Web GPU gives browsers, I think it's all the major ones now, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and so on, direct access to graphics acceleration APIs that exist in Windows, Mac OS, and so on, like Metal and Vulcan. Tell me what you think this changes this shift from desktop to web. What do you think it actually changes about the way we think about 3D and graphics? Because real 3D on the web sounds like a big deal, but it doesn't magically give you access to graphics horsepower that you don't already have. It still needs local power to draw it on through Web GPU, the same way a desktop application does. So why why the bet on 3D on the web and what do you think it changes that desktop applications don't? speaker-2: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think, you know, if we tried to build a Fabra a few years ago, it would be very challenging. ⁓ but I think with the accumulation of multiple aspects coming together, ⁓ like like you mentioned, G G P ubiquity ⁓ on on devices, on ⁓ mobile devices, on laptops now, ⁓ and that the chips ⁓ the the are getting so much ⁓ faster and stronger, ⁓ then the the new ⁓ w web standard that you mentioned to W Web GPU, which is the predecessor, ⁓ WebGL was was the path. speaker-0: That's the one. That's the one. Thank you. speaker-2: ⁓ so w w Web GPU I think, you know, there's there's different ⁓ terminology out there, but it's you know, it's it's ten X ⁓ at least ⁓ faster than Web Web G ⁓ GL. ⁓ and that can really ⁓ utilize the full GPU of the the laptop, for example, or the mobile phone, ⁓ and and really render graphics in a in a high quality way much, much faster than what WebGL could. ⁓ and then, you know, matching the the internet speeds ⁓ just increasing in every year. ⁓ so you know, trying to build a Fabra or or a web based three D design tool ⁓ that is of high quality, that can, you know, e edit two D patterns and simulate into three D and have full softbody physics and material simulation ⁓ wouldn't be possible in the past. But like you mentioned, the the web GPU standard now is is live on most browsers and all new computers and devices have these strong GPU chips and and they're only gonna get stronger. So You know, w we believe our our assumption is that you know w web-based product design will be on parity with desktop-based ⁓ product design in the next few years and and it will j be just as powerful. So, you know, we're obviously like you know trying to build into that space and and we do believe ⁓ you know down the line other tools will be moving into the web as well. ⁓ but what it actually does, it really just unlocks ⁓ so many new users into DPC. ⁓ it's not just the technical designers or the garment techs now, you know, doing you know th two D pattern making and and three D simulation. You're bringing in the the planners, the buyers, the merchandisers, the creative directors, you know, the person creating the ads. So you just bring everyone just through a easy clickable link into one workspace for them to to to really collaborate and move move forward. So we think it's a really exciting time. ⁓ and you know We we we we believe it it'll really open up the market to to many more people. speaker-0: Fantastic. And and I do have some follow-up questions actually about that kind of distribution and that side of things. Just before we move on from a pure kind of you mentioned ⁓ like on device GPU cores and stuff and so on. breast tax, if I want to use Fabra today, what's the base spec? You could give it to me in ⁓ kind of Apple Silicon Generations or or PC parts. Just just just give the listers an idea of what they would actually need to go and play around with Fabra today. speaker-2: Yeah, so actually V one of Fabra that's been live with our ⁓ public beta for the past ⁓ six months has been ⁓ really the the first version of our product, really just the MVP. It's been quite a basic ⁓ version of Fabra. The the products have been quite modular, but we've been really been using it as a testing ground and all the users would need is a a laptop. ⁓ and and depending on their speed of the the graphics ⁓ card in their computer, we will ⁓ change the the the rendering based on that. ⁓ and I think that's also why you know we've got a pretty good uptake in the past six months because it's been so accessible. We can just easily get get users into the editor as quickly and frictionless as possible. and soon, ⁓ by the time that this recording goes live, we'll have our V2 ⁓ live. ⁓ and and that's what we've been working to ⁓ Towards the far the past six months. And this really ⁓ unlocks a lot more. So you can do ⁓ 2D pattern making in there, you can choose a base product and edit ⁓ the the pattern, you can do ⁓ material simulation, softbody physics. ⁓ and it really ⁓ you know moves Fabra from a you know modular design tool to really a custom ⁓ custom product design design tool. And ⁓ we have been building with Web Web GPU, so if you're laptop, for example, has a web GPU card, then it will actually be able to to use that and and the performance is night and day. It it's really amazing, ⁓ the the the V two ⁓ browsers that have the the Web GPU enabled. speaker-0: All right, thanks. Now the other thing that the web being web native gives you is what you've just alluded to and what you talked about at the top of the recording, which is distribution. So I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that most people the browser is their application environment. ⁓ I'm one of the last holdouts on the team here who insists on having everything in my doc, insists on having everything as a desktop application where I can. ⁓ everybody else I know personally, professionally, Figma, Slack, Linear, Canva, Miro. They live in the browser. And nowhere else. I suspect, like you said at the top, Figma, maybe Miro or Canva are the most relevant touchstones for you because those are the most famous like distribution and democratization stories. They those products took environments that have been single player, one-person desktop tools, and by putting them on the web and calling them multiplayer, they extended the user community for them way beyond what traditional kind of designers and collaborators would have been to across. effectively the entire enterprise. I can guarantee you there'll be people listening to the show who have paid seats for one or more of those services who would never have been customers of a desktop design or whiteboarding or desktop publishing ⁓ suite. It's just i it's a massively expanded market. Are you following the same playbook? Do you see Fabra as really expanding the audience for product design beyond that existing cohort of designers? speaker-1: Absolutely. I think we get a lot of inspiration out of the softwares you mentioned, such as Figma, Miro, or Canva. We really we really appreciate how they have expanded, who gets access to the design process. Not necessarily particularly doing the actual design work, but but at least like collaborating in sense of commenting, ⁓ giving feedback. And be really keeping track of the changes without having the designer to export something and take it outside of the platform. So ⁓ we we really think what we're doing is expanding who gets to access the design process. speaker-2: Yeah, just to add to that, I think, you know, if you look at Canber or Figmar or or Miro and you look at how they operate, ⁓ there's ⁓ similar elements. So they're web based, ⁓ there's templates, so easy jump off points, ⁓ they're very easy to use. So anyone doesn't need training on on how to use them. ⁓ and they're very collaborative. So you can invite your whole team and collaborate together. ⁓ so we obviously take a lot of inspiration about that business model. However, obviously the the key thing to say is that Designing a physical product with tech packs and grading rules and bills of materials and ⁓ all the details that a ⁓ manufacturer will need is a lot more complicated. But I think that still allows us to standardize a lot. ⁓ but I think we're definitely taking the playbook. ⁓ and and our, you know, our vision is really just to make it ⁓ always have a free version available of Fabra. ⁓ so anyone can just come in there and design. The the goal has always been to make it as frictionless as possible. ⁓ and I think, you know, that's definitely learning from Canva a lot there. I also speaker-1: think you know the few references we mentioned Figma Mural Canva another thing we took from their playbook is just their user experience and the intuitive nature of of how they have designed their software. So as Luke mentioned, creating products that are ripe for production is in some ways a way harder technical challenge and you need complex tools to get to that finer, fine grained details of these designs and and specs. But ⁓ the challenge on our side is to still keep that experience intuitive and not intimidating to someone who is less technically trained. speaker-0: Yeah, I think that's right. So let's be a bit more specific and granular if we can. Which roles do you think have been locked out of the design and development process under the traditional like single player desktop application paradigm? And what do you think are the benefits of letting them in? You talked about collaboration. Like tell me tell me what that collaboration actually delivers, what the the net output of that is. Because I think I the the downside I would maybe point to with your figure on your camera and Miro is you will have a lot of companies who say, We've got hundreds of licenses for this and I don't know if we actually need seventy of them. ⁓ I don't know what the value of this person being in this space is. So tell me what you tell me how you feel about that. speaker-2: Yeah, I think we we definitely see ⁓ unlocking users into D P C on the web ⁓ in two different aspects. The first one is is brands that are, you know, currently operating that have teams of ten to two hundred ⁓ and and then as well as this this new breed of brand which we call ⁓ you know a a new ⁓ new modern brand or new S and E brand, ⁓ that that you know, didn't have access to product design before. So I'll I'll start with more of the the bigger brands now. ⁓ you know, usually what we've seen, you know, especially in my experience, is that there's a there's a garment tech, there's a pattern maker, and and they have the ability to use these powerful tools and do the design. But when it comes to collaborating with your team, you know, it's hard to actually share that out with your team and get comments and get alignment and and get other team members exciting. But it's also It seemed like a very slow process and a lot of meetings needed to be set up and there's different tools and people didn't have access to t access to the tools. And I think what DPC on the web opens up is that these bigger brand teams, everyone can just come into the same workspace and and work off the same ⁓ workflow. So the the planners, the buyers, the merchandisers, the ⁓ the creative directors, the marketing team members, even you know, the the whole company can really come in there and actually collaborate and whether someone's, you know, working on a 2D pattern or the 3D design or the tech pack or, you know, building out a range plan and doing costing and, you know, pricing, ⁓ doing quantity planning, developing the purchase order, that whole workflow can now be integrated and be very collaborative. So that's who we really think is opening it opening it up for bigger brands. But then, you know, we're also very excited and we see this market of small brands coming ⁓ online and there's a a massive ⁓ democratization of commerce. It's very easy now to build a community online, for example on Instagram. It's easy to create a storefront on Shopify. And we've seen this whole new breed of ⁓ entrepreneur being being started. And ⁓ you know, if you look at their journey in the past is that they would come up with designs, but they would always have to find a technical designer on Upwork, for example, or search on Google and and you know pay five hundred dollars or a you know, up to three, four thousand dollars for for a tech pack, ⁓ for a range of tech packs. And I think that was my my journey building grana, for example, and and now, you know, with with this new ⁓ design capability on the web and making it easy to use, ⁓ then they they don't have to to go. speaker-0: Let me play devil's advocate for a second because I think democratising everything you just talked about for smaller companies, for people with ideas who haven't who've been locked out of the tools to realise those ideas, I think that's right. I think that's something that the the market needs. I think fashion has closed a lot of doors that it shouldn't have done. If we think about the big companies, if we if we think about the kinds of places where design and garment engineering and so on have been quite like ring fenced disciplines and they're done by a specific set of people. When you start to democratize that and you can get more people in there and you get more people collaborating and you get more feedback and so on. ⁓ I wonder if there's a cohort of designers listening to this who may maybe don't vocalize it, but who might think, God, I liked product design better. And we got better results when not everybody in the company was throwing their two cents in. wha what do you think about that? Y are there instances where maybe the gatekeepers had the keys for a reason? speaker-1: I like that question because, you know, I've studied with probably some some of these people that you mentioned. I do think that that is more of a governance problem or or a governance question inside a company rather than a software ⁓ problem. What I mean by that is right now in our company, we're obviously at Fabre, we're building software. We use Figma a lot. ⁓ We sometimes some files we invite a lot of collaborators in for feedback, comments, different stakeholders throughout the company. But some files, like we have a certain vision for a certain department, and that is really contained within that department. So w ultimately we're building a tool to allow that capability ⁓ to invite in collaborators if if the user wants, but they could also keep it very close and just stick to their vision and not invite ⁓ collaborators or feedback in if they want. speaker-2: Yeah. And I'll I'll just add to that just briefly as well. Like I think we wanna see more creativity in the world. And I think that, you know, collaboration enables that, but it also enables more people to be creative and bring their ideas to market. And I think that's a really exciting proposition. And, you know, I think there'll always be big big big brands out there. ⁓ you know, no one's saying that they're ever you know, ever gonna go anywhere, but there's gonna be this new breed of of brands that come in and there's gonna be a a lot more creativity and a lot more new types of products. And I think ⁓ that's a really exciting thing and and we wanna really empower and and champion that. speaker-0: Fine. That's a good answer. I think I like the governance ⁓ side of things there. I'm gonna just pull out the comparison to Canva Figma for one more question, I think, ⁓ and run something else by you. So like a lot of people in the design and tech space, I watched some of Figma config, ⁓ so Figma's yeah, the conference ⁓ this year. one of the big shifts that they ⁓ brought about product-wise there was the introduction of what they refer to as code layers, which bring coding into the design space. ⁓ and that's happening right about the same time that AI is giving anyone, designers included, the ability to generate code. There's a whole different stream of democratization going on here. Now, for me, I think that all only works because those two pieces go hand in hand. And they only go hand in hand if you scaffold them with some kind of structure and reusable components. So let me just quickly explain. You compare a design system with a code framework to iterate and execute faster by removing the gap between those things. But I don't think it's a good idea to give a designer an open-ended free text box to create whatever code they feel like, any more than I think it's a good idea to give anybody in a brand the ability to mess around with patterns and blocks and so on. So basically I I feel that you need some kind of data standardization to make this democratization work. And I feel like I see that expressed already in Fabric because you're leaning into templates and base products and so on. Now, I know that's a bigger fixture of your V one than it is of your V two. ⁓ but am I on the right track yet? Like w w how do you think about this need to componentize ⁓ pieces so that you can do democratisation the right way? speaker-1: Yeah, I think products ⁓ products and templates are still going to be a huge part of V2, ⁓ except that we did restructure a lot. but we still see a lot of people will start from products and templates and adjust from there. ⁓ like how how a lot of brands have a library of silhouettes within their ⁓ library blo blocks, you could say, that they start from and then adjust seasonal designs from there. ⁓ we in terms of the data structure side, that's something we think about a lot. ⁓ so each design file you can see it in f a few ways from the two D side to three D side to the tech pack specs and all of them are synced to the same data. So I think we we have thought about that structurally a lot, technically, to make sure that whatever someone has designed will be producible and could ⁓ the specs would be correct. speaker-2: Yeah, I think just to add to that, you know, my experience ⁓ you know, building building a fashion brand, I was quite annoyed just with the process. Every time we would create a new product, it would just be from scratch. You know, we'd we'd build a new pattern, that we'd build a new new block, ⁓ but there'd be a whole new sizing ⁓ chart that we'd need to develop. And there wasn't there was a lot of inconsistency between other products. And then we really like as a company, we created all the blocks, the libraries and componentized the trims. the designs ⁓ and ⁓ as well with the with the sizing with alvine on and we you we ha obviously the set sizing standards and I think for you know someone creating a new brand ⁓ or even brands now, you know, they don't have a lot of that standardization. So that's been something that we've really, you know, put a lot of emphasis in the last year. We you know we've got a a a team of garment ⁓ techs and pattern makers ⁓ you know trying to standardize a lot. to really make it easy and really take out the technical side as much as possible and really, you know, give users the ability to design but within guardrail, make sure it is production ready. ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. No, think I think that's that's the right way to express it, those guardrails. And I think like every brand listening to this will be familiar with the idea that there's only so many blocks for a t-shirt. There's only so many patterns for a t-shirt. Like realistic having to redo that every time is quite often redundant work, unless unless you're really experimenting with a silhouette and pushing it in a really interesting direction. Now, to be clear, and you I think you mentioned this as as part of your V2, which should be out by the time people are listening to this. F that V2, Fabra does allow you to create new patterns from scratch if you want to. Because the website of the minute kinda says you can go with the base product or you can do your own thing. Just just how how we talked about what I think there is what I would describe as like the skill floor. What's the skill ceiling? speaker-1: ⁓ that's a great question. So with goal of a base product, we mean someone could select a template that is created by our professional team of designers as a starting point for design. So that's ⁓ but then from there on they can adjust the pattern ⁓ as they like and you know, obviously adjust the surface side of design, like colors, materials, ⁓ trims, prints, all that. ⁓ in terms of starting from scratch, in our Fabra V2, we do have ⁓ pattern making tools so that someone could draft a pattern from scratch or even import a DXF pattern. We are looking at some AI capability to prompt a pattern from scratch and that's something that will be launched in due time. speaker-2: Yeah, just to to add there, I think, you know, we we've been live in our public beta, you know, for six months and ⁓ it's it's a great initial product because users can choose a base product, it's a jumping off point, they can't really damage it in any way in a production sense. ⁓ it's it's it's all there. But a lot of users have been asking for say, hey, we want more custom ⁓ abilities, we want to, you know, change the pattern, we wanna, you know, as see the the the product material drape a as it would. and so we've spent, you know, six months now really building in ⁓ V two. ⁓ like Glory said, that ⁓ that you can start you can build a a pattern from scratch, you can simulate it. ⁓ and it really takes us ⁓ from just a ⁓ a modular design tool to really a custom design tool and you r you can really ⁓ you can really do anything you want in it. You can you can really ex expand your skills and s you know, someone who's a ⁓ a ch a trained pattern maker could could could really ⁓ get a lot out of Fabra now with our V two launch. speaker-0: Okay. Excellent. And I like launched in due time. I'm going to start using that one myself when somebody when somebody asks me when something is coming. ⁓ Beyond design development, so we've talked a bunch about creative design here, technical design. ⁓ One of the biggest use cases for 3D has been also been like high fidelity visualization. So the pro the promise of what people refer to as like scaling DPC quite often means taking assets that were intended in their first kind of instantiation for in-house use. And pressing them into service in marketing and e-commerce kind of image or 3D viewer creation and so on. Like companies build garments in 3D for internal audiences, but then they still end up rendering them out as the way of telling the product's visual story, mm, like out out of house to partners and downstream to end consumers and so on. How far do you see Fabra going in that direction? Because there's a difference between kind of Web GPU and things and when it comes to what internal colleagues and collaborators would be willing to look at and go, Okay, I can make a choice based on that and what is suitable and ready for e-commerce, for marketing and so on. speaker-1: I think Luke and I both still really enjoy like real products being filmed, ⁓ like ⁓ photographed on real humans for final marketing purposes. But we think what what Fabra ⁓ enables is a really realistic rendering for, as you mentioned, internal stakeholder communication. But we also will have the tools, generation tools to allow you as a designer to quickly prompt an image so that you can communicate your vision of how an outfit would look. We don't think that would be used really in the final, but it it just helps ⁓ to communicate to different stakeholders what the final vision is. ⁓ but we also see the use case of some solo entrepreneurs and brand owners using ⁓ you know marketing images generated from their 3D, accurate 3D designs to maybe test with their audience to to like communicate a final vision and be like, do you prefer this or that and teasing what's coming? ⁓ but we still think there's a huge place for f ⁓ taking photos and videos of products on real people. speaker-0: Good. I think you would maybe be surprised at how far a lot of brands are willing to take generative AI outputs towards the final consumer. ⁓ okay, so from a right, fine. So from a visual presentation point of view, that's the AI question answered, I think. How about from a design and pattern making perspective? I think you hinted before, Gloria, at the idea of allowing generative tools into some of the the earlier stages of the product life cycle. What what's your perspective on how far you want to bring AI as a kind of interface element, as a design collaborator rather than just creating finished images? speaker-1: Yeah, I we think the most powerful potential of AI in Fabra is simplifying the technical process that is involved between intention and final output. So as as you probably know, ⁓ r right now if you have a ⁓ idea in mind of what you wanna design, technically getting there in 3D and pattern making is could be incredibly complicated depending on what what product you wanna make. So we think If we could simplify that using AI and technology, that would open up a a large market of people who could make products, but also ⁓ just just like make the process of designing for existing designers more efficient. Ultimately, our our tool, ⁓ unlike some of the existing AI design solutions out there, enable fine-grain control. So, like how I'm sure we're all using AI tools, we use AI to get us to a certain stage and then we ⁓ manually edit and refine until we're happy with the final output. So ⁓ we see how we see that as a very powerful use of AI in our case. speaker-0: Perfect. Now, I want to ask this guy two commercial questions, I think, like business plan questions to bring us to a close. And the biggest one, I guess, is this. Do you see your proposition surviving if one of the big desktop 3D companies launches a browser native web GPU version of what they have? Now, Luke, you mentioned before that you you think this is where 3D in general is going. So I I guess I'm asking what the differentiation is what the mo is for Fabra ⁓ in in this space. And there's a reference frame for way outside our industry that I like in this, which is ⁓ FL Studio, which is one of the foremost like digital audio workstations used by producers that you guys, as younger people than me, probably know. but they they the company behind that said for years that they would only make desktop applications and the web was a dead end for a dead end layer for the kind of serious work that people do in a digital audio workstation. Then they saw the wind changing, they launched a web native version that has full compatibility with desktop projects, free version, basically drastically expanded their user base and were able to replicate all the necessary functionality in a browser. So that that path exists and we've seen a lot of companies in different spaces follow it. I wonder if Browseware or Clow follow that trajectory, what do you think happens to February? speaker-2: Yeah, I think it's a good question as well. And I think that ⁓ you know, I think there there's the potential to have both the desktop and web based version ⁓ for for for players in the space, I think makes a lot of sense. ⁓ but my thoughts there is that the fashion market is already massive. It's you know, one point eight trillion. it's a really big market, it's growing. ⁓ and I think DPC on the web opens up the market in a bigger way. ⁓ for more more players to to grow and have different niches. And I think our current focus is more on the solo entrepreneur, the small brand, the community creating ⁓ products. And that's definitely our our lane. And that's where we're doubling down and focusing on and building the best tool that we can. And I'm I'm sure that you know other other tools, you know, will will move into the web and they'll have their their their lanes as as well. ⁓ and I think there there could be a lot of players actually because the market is actually ⁓ bigger and and it's growing. But I think, you know, just to answer your question, like we we very much build with our users and and what our users are saying is that they want more flexibility, they want more design, ⁓ they want help planning out a range. So, you that that's our our V two ⁓ launch now includes range planning, costing, pricing. quantity planning and and purchase orders and and that's all moving towards production, which is our our big goal of of getting that ⁓ design ⁓ directly into the right producer anywhere in the world. ⁓ and I think that's, you know, definitely how we're thinking about things. So try and standardize production outputs and product specs, integrating that into production. And I think that's definitely the vision and the pathway that that we believe in. speaker-0: And that does bring me to my last question. ⁓ so when I look at the the fundraising that you've done so far, you have, amongst others, LFX ⁓ on your precedent table. So for listeners, LFX is part of the originated from the Lian Fung ecosystem ⁓ as the big manufacturing coordinator, but is a separate investment entity. Now, despite that little footnote, ⁓ this still suggests to me that there is some confidence in the the manufacturing space in the idea that you just expressed, which is across a vast network of manufacturers and suppliers and that whole design to production connection, there's there's a role for Web Native 3D in there that can directly feed into it. Tell me, so what happens right now when a factory receives a package from Fabra today under V1 or so on? And Luke, I think this is probably a question for you because you've spent, as you said, a long time in Hong Kong brand building and working with manufacturers. What do you think needs to happen? to make what you've just described reality, to get to where there is this proper integration layer between web native design and production. speaker-2: Yeah, it it's a great question. You know, we you know work very closely with producers. You know, we have producers on the cup table, like you meant like like you mentioned with LFX. and you know, since since the beginning of of Fabra, we've worked closely with them to make sure that the tech packs that are generated on Fabra are production ready. They have all the information to go straight into production and and obviously ⁓ you know, we look at satisfaction and product market fit with tech pack downloads. and and how production ready the tech packs are. ⁓ so that's currently with version one of Fabra. And version two is just making that more collaborative, making ⁓ producers have the ability to collaborate and have different version control of that tech pack. ⁓ and that's obviously, you know, li live now with version two. ⁓ but you know where we see the future is that As you know, there's a lot happening in the DPC space. And we think that even more will happen when that opens up on the web with accessibility. But there's also a lot happening in the supply chain space. I think bigger, major pr producers are moving from huge, large MOQs to being to retooling their factories. And a lot of them now are doing small batch productions and testing quantities and, you know, fast replenishment. And then obviously everyone's talking about on-demand production and and that's ⁓ something that we you know we believe is coming. ⁓ and and that really gels very well with 3D product design because if you have a a user creating a design on Fabra or on any you know 3D design tool, ⁓ then that becomes machine readable product specs that could be implemented directly into a a a a producer that can very quickly determine whether they're the right producer ⁓ whether they've got the right stock ⁓ fabric, they've got the right pricing, the right capacity, and it could really fast track design to production in a really big way. ⁓ and I think that's really an a a very exciting future. And that also opens up ⁓ you know 3D design tools to a a bigger, broader ⁓ market. so yeah, we're we're we're working closely with a number of producers, especially ⁓ you know, bigger ones in Hong Kong, but even all around the world. ⁓ and I think they are getting very excited by integrating with three D design and they're also realizing that they they need to to set up their production processes in i in a new way ⁓ to adopt to this faster moving world. So it's a really exciting time. speaker-0: And I think you you hinted at something there which I don't think I properly got into earlier, which you know, the democratization, the expansion of the user base and so on. We talked about it from the brand level or from the entrepreneur, the kind of small, mm, small business owner launching a brand. getting into 3D for manufacturers and suppliers has always that overhead is more threatening in a way for them because They have to have specialist skills, they have to have some specialist software, they have to ⁓ like building up that those kind of D P C capabilities in the supply chain is a is quite a big ask. And there are companies that have come a long way there. You have like massive manufacturers like MAS and so on. ⁓ but for you know, for your smaller ones, your more agile ones, the ones that are retooling their production in that way, there's a difference between saying, hire one or two or five or ten people to go and learn clo or browserware ⁓ and and get us to where we can communicate with companies that are doing the same and the slightly or potentially ⁓ significantly easier on ramp that they would have with something like February potentially. speaker-2: Yeah, absolutely. And I I think the big challenge that we see with producers ⁓ that, you know, are now moving towards small batch production is the human ⁓ interaction and how slow it is to negotiate and to discuss with with potential brands. So if that can be automated, if that can move quicker, ⁓ that will help them a lot as well. And ⁓ you know, if it is a web based tool, ⁓ it just makes it easy for anyone to log in, including the manufacturers. ⁓ so the the whole industry we think is is gonna benefit ⁓ from from ⁓ DPC on the web. speaker-0: I think that's a good reminder that DPC in general is not just for 3D design and simulation. It is that whole ecosystem that we ⁓ that we talked about at the top. ⁓ Gloria, Luke, I'm keen to see how all this turns out. I'll be watching ⁓ what you launch with ⁓ with V2. I'll be keeping tabs on Fabra as this as this all grows. ⁓ maybe we have you back on the show at some point to ⁓ to talk about how things develop over the next couple of years. For now, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. speaker-2: Thanks so much, Ben. speaker-1: Thanks, Ben. speaker-0: And that's the end of my chat with Gloria and Luke. There's a fair bit to go away and think about. And I think there's also a very big remit that they've carved out for themselves here. I'm gonna be keen to see how realistic that ends up being. Whatever happens though, I do think we're entering a new turn for 3D in digital product creation. Whether Fabra itself takes off or not, I don't think we're gonna end up stuck with this idea that AI is easy to use, AI is everywhere, and anyone can use AI. Whereas 3D is stuck on the desktop, it's got a high skill floor, and it's for a niche audience. I feel like those two things are gonna move much closer to one another over the next couple of years. And I've obviously got a vested interest in watching that happen very closely, so you'll probably hear me talk about this again in the near future. For now though, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you again really soon.