Quality, Price, Delivery schedule. All of these characteristics are important factors that need to be address in order to win new business. In a luxury product industry, where most buyers already have flexible spending thresholds one must ask what helps drive selection of a particular item or vendor?

For example, why would a buyer look at two boats with the same engine, capacity, and overall mechanical features and yet choose to buy one over the other?

What separates one Luxury product from another?

The worldwide demand for custom and luxury goods(ex. cars, yachts, leather handbags, etc) is on the raise. A recent Bain and Company Report estimates a 4%-5% CAGR for this $1.3 Trillion segment. In the quest to understand buyer preferences a few things come to mind:

Overall visual appeal
Flowing, organic shapes
Top-of-the-line materials such as:
- Leather
- Fine woods
Lavish and custom details

If these are the things that appeal to so many customers, then why aren’t more manufacturers in the business of including these luxury features?

Well for one, simpler designs and "cookie-cutter" options cost less to produce. And you need to add in the possibility of mistakes in the production process. The potential to ruin expensive materials during fabrication makes it even easier to understand why few manufacturers want to take the risk.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if your team could utilize Automation Software that makes it easy to produce these luxury or custom items at roughly the same price as typically mass-produced products?

How can Automation Software Solutions help?

One of the most expensive parts of creating a custom product is the labor-intensive timeline needed to perfect that customized and quality look. The old-school way of creating things like patterns for custom upholstery was to tape and drape material over the part, draw out rough patterns, digitize the pattern, and then spend hours working on the pattern design.

Then, it was time to cut and sew the sample pattern only to realize, there’s an excess of sag over here or that the seam allowance is missing there. This type of iterative process is not only exhausting, it’s also a costly profit killer.

Of course, the solution to this must be one thing: automation. Digital Design and Patterning solutions like ExactFlat allow manufacturers to by-pass many of these legacy processes. The tools generate better patterns, faster. They also interface with nesting software to help optimize material usage and drive down costs.

Creating fewer prototypes is the first way to lower material waste and to make the use of premium materials like leather more cost effective.  Nesting provides another method for cost optimization.  Click on the image to see the process in… — Creating fewer prototypes is the first way to lower material waste and to make the use of premium materials like leather more cost effective. Nesting provides another method for cost optimization. Click on the image to see the process in action.

A Better Way to Manufacture Luxury

The demand for custom products made with luxury materials is rapidly increasing. The issue for manufacturers is that those words, “custom” and “luxury” are the often considered to be the opposite of cheap and fast. In fact it can often cost 3 or 4 times more to design and deliver on customer requirements using the current processes.

Transitioning to Digital helps by making it easy to:

capture the complexity of the design concept
flatten the 3D design and custom graphic images into 2D patterns which are immediately ready for cutting and sewing
predict and document the fabrication steps and costs ahead of time. ExactFlat software uses real material cost and labor estimates to help determine just how much it will cost to produce the custom product.
complete the entire pattern making process in minutes rather than days or weeks

Stand out from the competition. Give clients the custom look and luxury materials they want. To learn more just click on the link below and schedule a time to meet with one of our experts

We'll also be attending IBEX, the largest marine industry trade event in North America. Let us know if you're attending and we can set up a time to meet. We'll walk you through examples of the impact ExactFlat is having on Yacht manufacturer's like our clients at Eclipse Yachts.