At Gerber’s 2018 Ideation, keynote speaker and Millennial designer Rebecca Minkoff commented that she and her brother, who is a partner in the business, “think like companies that can potentially disrupt us.” The joint announcement between New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and OnPoint Manufacturing of Unique.Fashion (see original releases here and here) is set to be one of those disruptors by making it easier for young fashion design graduates—or any fashion designer for that matter—to have access to software tools and an on-demand manufacturing platform that will help them get their designs to market in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. The site will initially be available to FIT students and graduates but will scale up to an open platform over time.

What is Unique.Fashion? It’s a partnership between FIT and OnPoint Manufacturing using the Human Solutions sizing engine. Users will be able to access tools available through a special website, Eliose.Fashion, to help in the design process and prepare their designs for manufacturing. Once a pattern is uploaded to the designer’s Unique.Fashion website, it will be available for purchase. Designers are responsible for marketing their designs and driving customers to their microsites. Unique.Fashion asks for no long-term commitment or control over the design. The designer dictates what sizes they want to offer and maintains complete artistic control.

A unique feature of this site is the innovative sizing engine OnPoint Manufacturing has developed in collaboration with Human Solutions. In this model, the designer uploads the garment, backed by a pattern and all of the necessary manufacturing instructions using the designer module of Unique.Fashion. Buyers can then select the garment they want to purchase and enter minimal data to determine size—age, height, weight, and gender. With this data, the system automatically parses through the 27,000 avatars that Human Solutions has placed in the database to choose the size that is the closest fit and returns more than 100 measurements that are used to choose the pattern that will deliver the closest fit. Then the garment is ordered, paid for, manufactured on-demand, and shipped.