VILA x FLAIR PTTRNS automated high-quality fashion renders for efficiency
About VILA
VILA has been part of the Danish family-owned fashion house BESTSELLER since 1994. With its signature look, feel, and core, VILA embraces feminine individuality and a playful approach to contemporary womenswear.
VILA’s mission is to make fashion for women focused on quality, design, and details. The Danish brand combines fashion with femininity and a sense of what’s in style. They use a mix of prints, delicate cuts, and small details to give clothes a sensual and simple feel.
“To be a relevant leader in feminine fashion, always engaging, and ever-evolving.”
VILA serves over 2,000 retail and multi-brand stores across 16 European markets and has 47 showrooms throughout Europe. Together with its internal teams and merchandisers across multiple sourcing countries and their suppliers, VILA is dedicated to accelerating the sustainable development and production of fashion by remaining on the digital and 3D frontiers in everything they do.
Since 2019, VILA’s team has started to leverage digital product creation processes, fostering their creative expertise in a 3D environment and delivering a whole new level of efficiency to their design workflow. The Danish fashion brand has been working with the world’s leading 3D fashion design software, CLO3D, to create designs, improve collaboration, and shorten lead times while contributing to a more sustainable supply chain. Working in 3D allows VILA to sell its digitally designed styles and collections to its customers by showcasing their 3D garments as a complete look while minimising the number of physical samples.
VILA has taken the next step towards digital automation by generating marketing and sales visuals with PTTRNS.ai's innovative fashion rendering platform, FLAIR PTTRNS. The automated rendering platform delivers photorealistic and high-quality fashion renders based on the CLO3D files at high rendering speed, at scale, and consistently aligned with VILA’s brand identity. By adopting FLAIR PTTRNS, VILA's team has witnessed a significant enhancement in their 3D outcomes, allowing them to effectively meet their business objectives.
“As an early adopter of FLAIR PTTRNS, I had the privilege of witnessing and participating in its development. Since I joined VILA as a 3D designer, we have been utilising their rendering pipeline as their launching customer. This partnership has yielded exceptional outcomes, enabling us to expand our 3D capabilities and enhance platform utilisation across various departments.”
Generating photorealistic images with attention to detail
VILA’s 3D team, with FLAIR PTTRNS, has created a vast amount of hyper-realistic renders to a detailed extent, making the difference between an actual photo and a render hardly detectable.
VILA’s product teams upload their CLO3D files into FLAIR PTTRNS’s pipeline, where the digital garment designs are automatically processed into high-quality fashion renders, disclosing every stitch, texture, and pattern with explicit detail. What’s unique about FLAIR PTTRNS is its innovative way of rendering textures, resulting in realistic and detail-oriented shots of, for example, fur, glitter, and loop embroidery.
“Our customers greatly appreciate the seamless quality we achieve in our images from 3D developed styles. The line between our 3D renders and physical pack shots of garments is nearly invisible, showcasing our commitment to excellence and attention to detail.”
A far more efficient digital workflow—speed and scale of rendering
By leveraging the automated and cloud-based fashion rendering platform FLAIR PTTRNS, VILA’s team has significantly improved their efficiency and workflow. With FLAIR PTTRNS, VILA renders multiple variations of the same garment, including different colour ways and multiple shot variations (e.g., front, back, detail shot, clip, etc.), at the same time. A single garment visual can be generated in 30 minutes to an hour with FLAIR PTTRNS fashion rendering.
In short, FLAIR PTTRNS allows VILA to turn their digital fashion (CLO3D) files into marketing-ready visuals at high speed but also on a much larger scale, freeing the DPC team of the burden of rendering.
Consistent visual output aligned with brand-identity replaces product photography
VILA efficiently uses templates offered by FLAIR PTTRNS that are aligned with the fashion brand’s visual identity and guidelines. Whether to showcase their digital product creation output internally or for B2B (in)sales purposes, brand consistency is key. The fashion rendering platform provides various settings for brands to align with. From different render formats: pack shots, details, human-like digital avatars, and mannequin shots to 360 videos and short clips.
As part of the FLAIR PTTRNS platform, VILA uses brand-specific templates designed to mimic the desired qualities of physical photo shoots, incorporating lighting (HDRIs), colour grading, shadows, and camera settings. The exact file format, specific margin settings, and output resolution of the FLAIR PTTRNS templates are further aligned with collaborative effort, resulting in templates that are used repeatedly for consistent, high-quality fashion renders that replace product photography without the need for post-production.
Collaboration and growth
PTTRNS.ai and VILA have adopted a collaborative way of working that nurtures mutual growth and results in the progressive development of new features and output possibilities for FLAIR PTTRNS.
As part of their onboarding, VILA was provided with direction on how to successfully set up the CLO3D files without overthrowing their way of working to secure an impeccable output from the fashion rendering platform. By actively engaging with VILA, the PTTRNS.ai team rapidly indicates challenges and implements advanced solutions to ease VILA’s way of working and meet their digital product creation needs with speed and accuracy through automation.
As stated by Claudia, “We were supported from the start with guidance on how to prepare the files for FLAIR to achieve the best outcome, collaboratively. PTTRNS.ai has always listened to our feedback and implemented features like automated colorway detection, easy uploading, and margins to meet our needs and expectations”.
“Consistently improving FLAIR PTTRNS features to fit the way of working, needs, and desires of VILA is of great importance to us,” says Jelle Stienstra, digital strategy director at PTTRNS.ai. “We look forward to continuing to grow with VILA and BESTSELLER brands in automated rendering to ease out product photography efforts for marketing and sales visuals.”
What is up next for VILA?
In terms of technology and workflow, VILA will further leverage the FLAIR PTTRNS API, which has similar functionalities as the portal for uploading digital garments, starting render batches, and retrieving the visual output. The API enables seamless integration into the VILA workflow, taking ready digital product files from repositories or PLM systems, automatically rendering them in the appropriate format, and sending them directly to image approval flows or digital asset management systems that distribute the output to the right channels.
While VILA plans to continue rendering its collections with FLAIR PTTRNS, they will broaden usage with additional product categories and also continue onboarding their suppliers that work with CLO3D in order to scale up its present efficiency level. To stay ahead in leveraging digital product creation beyond design and collaboration, the fashion brand aspires to explore new output formats offered by FLAIR PTTRNS to stay ahead when it comes to easing out product photography.
“Our team looks forward to creating even more remarkable results with PTTRNS.ai’s fashion rendering platform. We plan to leverage FLAIR PTTRNS’s automated workflow to generate more of our product photography visuals going forward. This not only benefits our B2B customers but also unlocks exciting possibilities for utilising these visuals across various channels.”
Learn more about the FLAIR PTTRNS fashion rendering platform on our website or book a demo with our platform specialists.