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According to Rui Oliveira, this initiative will enable “the customers, suppliers and partners of Riopele to experience the fabrics in the digital world”. The Riopele Chief Information Officer emphasised that “with this technology, which falls within the framework of our project designed to digitalise the samples and provide virtual prototypes of products, Riopele is placing all of its tools in the Metaverse to enable its customers to fully analyse the collection, verify their functionalities and visually experience the materials through highly realistic digital pieces”.
This Meta-collection is to undergo its first public presentation at the QSP Summit, which takes place at Exponor, in Matosinhos, on 29 June.
Helping customers to enter the digital universe
The challenge facing Riopele is still more demanding. “Within the scope of this project, Riopele is going to help its customers in this digital transition” and “companies that do not have their own internal teams for producing digital samples, may use Riopele technology to enter into this new digital era”. According to Rui Oliveira, “our conviction is that the physical and the digital are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary”. “The metaverse – he continued – will bring gains in terms of the speed of development of collections, eliminating waste in the Textile and Clothing Industry value chain, thus nurturing sustainability through this means and enhancing the capacity to provide collections tailored to each client in a cost-efficient format”.
Riopele began its approach to the metaverse five years ago. “Despite the term having recently gained in popularity, the underlying technologies have been around for some time. We may reference, for example, the control and monitoring of production in real-time in our “factories”, through the metaverse, in a project that has already been operational since 2018”, recalled Rui Oliveira.
According to the Riopele Chief Information Officer, “the digital collections are clearly drivers of creativity”. On the one hand, “digitalisation has enabled facilitated access to knowledge unimaginable some decades ago that, in order to be well-applied, has to first be “filtered” by the receptor of this knowledge to generate more diversified and richer sources of inspiration.” Furthermore, “despite having already started to gain access to 3D and immersive technologies and virtual or augmented reality, being able to capture the attention of business customers or final consumers is far more complex. That requires greater creativity in the collections and in the way they are presented in digital environments.” “The time we have to capture attention in the digital world is far lower as we are interacting with a maximum of three senses of the customers or purchasers. We have to be far more creative to make that difference”, he concluded.
A new generation of talents
The Riopele digital priority has also simultaneously extended to attracting a new generation of talents and correspondingly recruiting various younger members of staff, specialized in the new technological fields. According to Rui Oliveira, Riopele promotes “an attitude of constant learning” in keeping with which “the appropriate integration of a new generation of talents has catalyzed a consistent cultural environment focused on innovation, with a vision of the future and a highly leveraged and strong sense of team spirit”.
Investment advances mid-pandemic
The pandemic generated a very significant impact on the business world and, in particular, on the fashion sector at the international level. In the case of Riopele, due in large part to the ongoing commitment to digital transformation and the continuous improvement of operations, the adaptation to this new reality took place without major turbulence. “Regarding our business processes and our capacity to deliver value to our customers, both in terms of service and in terms of the regular supply of new proposals and new fashions, the adaptation occurred fairly naturally”.
