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1. Introduction
During the last decade we have seen how fast digital technology has transformed the media and entertainment industries, but we have started to realise how it is transforming the rest of industries (Westerman et al., 2011). Research on digital transformation has been focused on describing the transformation of these specific industries whose products can be completely digitised, missing the study of digital transformation in industries with physical products (Hanelt et al., 2015), for instance the fashion industry, which is the focus of this paper.
First marked by the penetration of the internet, e-commerce, m-commerce and social media, and more recently by the impact of digital technologies like 3D, Internet of Things, virtual reality or artificial intelligence, the fashion industry is on the way to radically change not only the marketing and relationship with customers (the business front-end) but also the back end operations by achieving more efficiency across the whole value chain (Mullon, 2015). Specifically, 3D digital technology in fashion is seen as a transformative and disruptive technology when compared to the way products are designed and developed nowadays (Court, 2015). Even though, when it comes to its usage, this industry is in an exploratory phase (Reilly, 2014; Choi, 2015) and a lot of technological advancements are still needed (Papahristou and Bilalis, 2016) until it is more generally adopted. It is therefore an emerging area of research where there is still a lack of scholarly information and empirical research (Parker, 2016; Vanderploeg et al., 2017).
Therefore, we aim with this paper to enlarge the lack of literature by providing a real case study that describes the experience of a creative fashion designer using 3D technology[1] – with the collaboration of a software company. From this experience we expect to answer two main research questions:
Which are the main benefits the fashion firm can obtain from using 3D technology along the whole process from the creation to the consumer?
How about the main challenges ahead for both software and fashion firms in order to achieve the democratisation of 3D technology in the fashion industry?
The paper is organised as follows. In the next section, the theoretical background and our contribution are presented. Then, we explain the research methodology followed...