The fashion industry faces tough challenges this year. According to McKinsey & Company's State of Fashion 2023 Report, fashion companies face global fragility due to geopolitical turbulence and the cautionary consumer behaviors it evokes. In other words, creating fashion projects right now isn't easy. To appease stakeholders, industry leaders are more meticulous in formulating what goals to prioritize and how to enact them. That's why a stellar project manager is crucial for planning, organizing, and executing fashion projects from beginning to end. They coordinate workloads to make projects possible—and with tech, they're realizing bigger and better fashion ventures. The following article gives an overview of how project managers and technology work together to bring the next big fashion projects to life.
They use 3D design software to exhibit fashion designers' vision to stakeholders
It's the project manager's job to communicate with the suppliers, partners, and overarching stakeholders for projects like fashion shows and product lines—and convince them of each project's feasibility. For that, they need the cooperation of the designers whose creations become the company's unique offerings. As any fashion designer will tell you, however, coming up with design concepts that illustrate their appearance in their final form isn't easy. That's where 3D design software steps in. This tool can produce prototypes with numerous art options and even create physical manifestations using 3D printing. When pitching fashion ventures, project managers utilize these simple 3D prototypes to demonstrate a fashion designer's vision to stakeholders and convince them it's worthwhile to back.
They operate agile planning apps to organize fashion projects seamlessly
It's a best practice to plan fashion projects in an agile manner—separated into clear, incremental steps emphasizing velocity and flexibility to attain a fashion company's goals. The Scrum framework is often the most helpful for extensive undertakings, as it allows for more complexity. One aspect of it is having a living document that can be continuously refined. While this can easily be created on word processors like those offered by Google and Microsoft, agile planning apps like Jira help project managers take it to the next level. Such apps provide customizable workflows, creative request forms, and other tools configured to adhere to the Scrum process. With the right digital planning tool, project managers can better articulate and clarify how to bring a fashion project to life.
They leverage tech monitoring tools to coordinate fashion initiatives
Fashion projects consist of the stellar efforts of every team member, and part of a project manager's job is to ensure that everyone executes their tasks with competence and timeliness. To do this, they keep an eye on all deliverables, which in the fashion industry can range from identifying raw material suppliers and making buyer profiles to producing the final iteration of a sweatshirt. The variety of these tasks can be boggling, so they use monitoring technology like Techpacker to stay on track. Its time and action reports allow project managers to hold every team member accountable for the quality and promptness of their work, and its Gantt chart tool helps them visualize what the team has accomplished and the milestones it needs to reach as the project progresses. Ultimately, this piece of tech streamlines the process of supervising every effort that goes into a fashion project.
They utilize AI to optimize supply chain management
A project manager's precise skills in supply chain management are especially paramount in the fashion industry—today's buyers are more concerned about ethical sourcing and want to understand a particular fashion item's journey from factory to store. However, supply chains are notorious for vanishing their data in silos. Project managers overcome this hurdle by using AI-powered software to track and evaluate particular suppliers' environmental impacts, then present that information to executives. This allows for more transparency and efficiency in a fashion project's sourcing strategies.
For the fashion industry to succeed in 2023, it needs experienced project managers. By working with the right technologies, these professionals show that the industry can continue bringing bigger fashion projects to life.