One-piece fashion, summary of the Knit-on-Demand project

Knit on Demand is a research project at the Swedish School of Textiles in collaboration with Ivanhoe AB and SOMconcept AB. The purpose of the project is to test new production methods for knitwear that could strongly influence the fashion industry's need for agility. In autumn 2009 sales started in Stockholm. The project stands on three legs; design, knitting technology and logistics and the purpose of the paper is to describe the Knit on Demand project from these three perspectives. Designing the garments and the system was the most time consuming part of the project since the products had to be fashionable, manufacturable and preferably not to expensive so a few trade offs hade to be made. Look was however considered essential since fashion always comes first. For knitting a combination of fully fashion and cut and sew are used so that the garments keep some of the fully fashion advantages but remains easily customisable. Logistics becomes a little bit more complicated because of the unique garments but the logistic costs does still not make up more than 3-5 percent of the sales price of a garment. Return rates are below one percent, which is rather interesting to further analysis.

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