Applied Series: The (Im)Possible Formula of On-Demand Fashion With Dr. Kitty Yeung

Incubating Inside Microsoft's Garage
When host, Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, first met Dr. Kitty Yeung she was a quantum physicist by day and a fashion technologist by night. Kitty's fashion tech journey was structured via a global Microsoft hackathon where she and a group of intrapreneurial colleagues decided to take on the mammoth task of solving fashion's overproduction problem by developing a software enabling on-demand production with a minimum order quantity of 1 unit. But is that even possible?

From On-Demand Production to 3D Assets
Having moved on from the Microsoft project, Kitty shares her insights from her role as a Senior Director of AI at Browzwear, where she's continuing to tackle the industry's problem through the lens of 3D assets. Kitty is taking it even further with her next startup,  Wear It, combining AI, 3D assets and Gen AI into a digital wardrobe solution ready for social media. Kitty's foray into AI-generated clothing blurs the lines between algorithm and artistry, setting a new standard for global markets from the West to the East.

Kitty is featured in chapter 3 of the book Fashion Tech Applied.  Check it out.

Connect with Kitty on LinkedIn.
Check out Wear It.

*EXCLUSIVE OFFER* -20% discount for podcast listeners on the printed or ebook of Fashion Tech Applied. Purchase your copy at Springer here using the discount code*: 08cWPRlx1J7prE

*Offer ends end June 2024

Transcript

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 0:03

Fashion Tech Applied is published, my co-authored book taking you through six chapters and covering the technologies and innovations powering the fashion industry. I'm Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form, and welcome to the special podcast series Applied. Each episode, I'll be sitting down with incredible fashion tech professionals that are featured inside the book. On today's episode, I'm sitting there with Dr. Kitty Yeung, founder of Wear it, her startup, and senior director of AI at Browzwear. But that's not the origin story of how we know each other. Kitty and I met when she was still at Microsoft, where she was an entrepreneur on a mission to solve fashion's clunky supply chain systems. Kitty is curious by nature, and it's this curiosity that somewhat leads me to think of the nutty professor always building, testing and breaking things, with a PhD in quantum physics, hence the doctor title. Kitty applies a scientific approach to building fashion tech.

Kitty Yeung: 1:03

To ship any new products within Microsoft, you kind of have to ship your product within an existing product. That limits you to achieve what you really envision to do and eventually I think for this project and for myself is the wrong place, the wrong timing. We had a really good team, but then it was in the environment and the timing that wasn't the right place.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:26

Let's get into the conversation with kitty on this episode of venturing into fashion tech. How are you today, kitty? Hi peter, so good to be here nice to see you and thank you so much for taking the time out for us today, for our listeners. Kitty managed to drag herself out of bed, put on a dress and makeup, having just given birth to a baby, so I really appreciate that so much. So congratulations, kitty.

Kitty Yeung: 1:53

Thank you so much. This is important or just to set the scene for our listeners.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 1:58

Fashion supply chains are not the most stable at present. As reported in the Business of Fashion State of Fashion 2024 report, the fashion supply chain is currently witnessing the bullwhip effect post-COVID-19, causing volatility between demand and supply, so it's going up and down. Supplies are going all over the place. It's quite difficult, especially for those emerging brands as well. Producing in a more agile way is what the industry needs right now and I know you're all about that, kitty. You've got some strong opinions on that. We also obviously did some work on your microsoft project together as well when you were working there, so we'll be telling our listeners the outcomes of that. 54 of our fashion executives expect to increase reshoring or knee shoring in 2024. When it comes to production, however, this is difficult to find and integrate new supply partners that easily. Getting you exploring on-demand manufacturing enabled by tech, which is one feature method the industry should be exploring. Of course, we're all about fashion tech and we're always going to be on that side, but it's going to, of course, help executives find and reorient their supply chains. There are many benefits of on-demand manufacturing, but the most glaringly obvious is, of course, the fact that you're only producing what you need. However, brands just don't seem to want to be able to produce less. Even with the new EU legislations against waste coming into force, for many brands it still seems to be business as usual. Teams are being set up to deal with that, but it seems to be. Change is very slow at the moment, as we'll discuss in today's episode. The industry is just not ready.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 3:44

But let's get into your story first, kitty, before we go into the fashion side. When I first met you, you were a quantum physicist by day at Microsoft, and you know that's just a whole nother word which I just don't understand, to be honest, and I think that'll be for our listeners to hear as well. At night time, you are also looking into fashion tech. Tinker, inventor, curious, creative at night time is how I probably would like to describe you, kitty, but those two elements don't necessarily come into the same sentence. Fashion tech, quantum physicist probably not seeing that much. So tell us your journey, kitty. How did you get into fashion tech? That somebody coming from a tech background?

Kitty Yeung: 4:31

yeah, exactly, I'm a physicist by training and all my professional education and work has been focused on hardcore science, and quantum computing was the latest thing that I was doing, while exploring fashion tech at the same time. So I really love art and fashion and music also. I've been exploring all those all my life. So, even though I was focusing on physics and science in general, the art side has always been my passion and hobby and always I've been painting and making art and doing music. So fashion has a very interesting opportunity for me to integrate my passions together. And I was actually doing wearable tech some time ago when I was working at Intel. I think it was around the time in 2016, 17, when wearable tech was a big thing back then and there were a lot of maker, open source hardware that's available for tinkerers to play with. So I have been designing clothes with electronics embedded in them and functionality, and also light up LEDs arranged into starry nights and all those very creative ideas I was putting in my fashion design.

Kitty Yeung: 5:59

So I learned all about fashion design on the side as a hobby about fashion design on the side as a hobby and people started asking me how they could buy my designs, and back then I was making everything by hand. I did not know how professionally it's done and how a designer would turn their creative ideas into something that's repeatable and manufacturable. Then I started looking into manufacturing because I was so curious. I couldn't pass up this curiosity and I learned how to then bring my sketches and handmade samples into production level products and that was very painful. That was an independent designer brand called Art by Physicist. I'm still operating that and in fact we're launching something super exciting like an LED tattoo in a few days. But when I was building this brand, I experienced everything all the pain points that an independent designer would experience. So the supply chain, the difficulty of getting a sample done. You have to ship back and forth between manufacturers and myself and the sizing wasn't standardized. There's also lots of errors and wrong fitting problems. So there's tons of back and forth.

Kitty Yeung: 7:31

So it took about nine months or even more to even bring a set of collection into production level samples and I thought that was very strange because I come from the tech world, where things are more efficient and things are more automated and digitized, and I thought that that shouldn't be the case. And in fact, my clothing has my hand-painted paintings digitally printed onto the fabrics. But digital printing back then was also new when I started this, and embedded electronics was not at all a capability for a fashion brand. So I was doing something even more difficult than just making clothes and I had to be the integrator between the technology and the physical fashion clothes. So I thought there must be something that can allow us to upload the design and then get it manufactured based on our drawings and tech pack.

Kitty Yeung: 8:43

And creating the tech pack was also a very long-winded process and I learned everything basically from first-hand experience. I thought that was just me coming from a different industry, not knowing how session products are made, but then, after working with a lot of independent designers as well as large brands during my work at Microsoft, I learned that actually the pain points I was experiencing was very common. Even the biggest brands are going through those back and forth iterations and lots of inefficiencies. So that's when I decided to do something about it and also build inefficiencies. So that's when I decided to do something about it and also build technologies for fashion.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 9:27

And your fashion tech journey began. So Kitty is based in Europe. You don't come from Europe, though, do you Kitty?

Kitty Yeung: 9:34

I am based in Germany, but I did spend a chunk of my life in the UK, actually for years, and in Cambridge doing my physics BA and master's degrees. Then I went to the States, did my PhD in Harvard in applied physics and then when I graduated I went to Intel to do silicon photonics and then Microsoft for quantum computing. But in between I did a lot of interesting things like wearable tech and being a manager of the Silicon Valley Garage, which is Microsoft's innovative program, and learn everything from building and launching products, from not just the technology but also UI, ux, program management, marketing, business development the whole set of things, and it's actually needed to go into market with new ideas.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 10:36

Yeah, so you have like a truly global perspective and I believe your family's from China Is that correct as well.

Kitty Yeung: 10:40

Yeah, yeah, from China, and I grew up in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. So I'm officially from Hong Kong, but I spent a lot of time growing up in Shenzhen.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 10:52

And did your parents? You know classic Chinese parents. My parents are also from Hong Kong as well Did they try to push you into like physics and science and mathematics, or did you just always have a look for it?

Kitty Yeung: 11:01

They never pushed me. I actually chose physics myself.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 11:05

Oh, okay, Now just because, because, growing up, a lot of people always ask me are you not going to do finance? You know to do mathematics. I'm just like, no, I'm just gonna go do fashion, basically.

Kitty Yeung: 11:15

I had. I had a lot of choices. That was hard to make. So when I was a kid I loved everything and I loved science. I was always reading science books like the dinosaurs, the oceans, the universe and all that. But then I really also wanted to be a musician, a fashion designer, an artist and philosopher. So all these intellectual areas are very stimulating for me. But then I decided to do physics after I started learning the subject in middle school and I felt that it's a study of nature. It really helps us understand how nature works and nature creates the most beautiful art. So that's why, also in my brand you will see all my designs are inspired by science and nature.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 12:09

In essence, you're just very curious. By nature that spreads out all of these different subjects and you mentioned that you were quite shocked when you first started looking into production and the fashion supply chain. How does it feel to be an outsider of the fashion world and suddenly exploring and discovering all of these somewhat challenges and somewhat a broken system in some way?

Kitty Yeung: 12:35

Yeah, I was very curious, so everything that I was doing was driven by the curiosity I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn how this whole industry works and I really am passionate about helping this industry be more clean and efficient. So the other thing that really impacted me was finding out the numbers about the environmental impact from the industry. So we go into fashion because of the artistic expression, the beauty that we pursue, but it turned out that the supply chain is supported by a very backward and wasteful manner. So overproduction of goods that are not really needed and then they can send into landfill and get burned. 10% of global carbon footprint comes from fashion. So I think the listeners all know about this and it was a big shock to me. How can this even be possible? Another really really big reason for me to continue driving this.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 13:37

That's a nice segue for me to then talk about your Microsoft project. So we collaborated in 2021 with my MBA fashion tech students at IFA Paris. You're also featured in chapter three of the book fashion tech applied. But when we first started working together, you were still at Microsoft and you were an entrepreneur in the Microsoft garage at the time. For me, it was actually completely new that they had such this global entrepreneurial activity happening. So, as an outsider, for me it was super interesting and, more interestingly, there was a fashion tech project inside the garage as well. So that's how we met, just for our listeners, in their context. What was that project and why did you feel it was personal for Microsoft to help you to do that?

Kitty Yeung: 14:26

Yeah, I started that project in 2018 as part of the Microsoft Global Hackathon. It's a very innovative cultural program for this big corporation to let employees come up with grassroots ideas, and some of them do become actual official products or projects that launch into Microsoft products. And we were at first very small, so I was just starting this with a few friends. I kind of pitched the idea to them. Like, I think that, as a technology leader, we have the opportunity and we are in a position to help a traditional industry to upgrade their technologies, and there are so many things we could do, as also mentioned or actually discussed in detail in your book. Lots of the areas from design to retail to manufacturing they can all leverage the latest technologies. We, as a big corporation, had all of those technologies. We just haven't. We didn't connect them together to help the fashion supply chain, and I think that was a very big opportunity for Microsoft as well as helping the industry change, because this is not something that one single player can do. It's something that really requires collaboration across all the players in the ecosystem and Microsoft, being so big, has so many fashion brands being our customers and has all the reasons that it has to help.

Kitty Yeung: 16:13

I Just started this initiative and it just grew and grew and grew Every year. We got like a hundred of volunteers joining, so eventually I built more than 200 volunteering team. We didn't even have the resources to do this but then everyone coming together volunteering their time to study the different businesses that we could put together. So we were designing a product for on-demand manufacturing allowing designers to create things digitally and then send to manufacturing, especially a network of micro factories actually a network of micro factories. So that was like the ideal product would be an on-demand mass customization platform and also supporting creative designers to turn their ideas into reality, to get something physically made faster.

Kitty Yeung: 17:14

And eventually we were also talking to world's largest brands and we got a lot of interest but they are quite slow in terms of the adoption of technologies and eventually we decided to go ahead and pitch as a startup. We got all these interests from the fashion brands and a lot of the possibilities for B2B. So I eventually got the funding from the CTO's office and Microsoft M&A to do this internal incubation. So we had a very lean team to build a product MVP to launch within Microsoft ecosystem to test the idea. There was a lot of years of effort, but it did get to a very good position to study as an actual official project within Microsoft, as an actual official project within Microsoft, and that also was around the same time that we were working together with BeyondForm and IFA Paris.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 18:28

You were one of our partners that made this project possible aside from us, our regular listeners will know that we've also had on the show matthew drinkwater from fia. We've also had staff members from browse white as well, which were also some of your other partners. So just this little gang coming together to try and solve on-demand manufacturing as a challenge, and I think it was great that you were able to actually merge your day job with you know, your art, your fashion, your creative side into this startup, and it was great that Microsoft actually backed you with resources as well. However, you subsequently moved on from Microsoft and the fashion tech project.

Kitty Yeung: 19:28

What went wrong and what were your biggest learnings? So the fashion tech area I'm still continue doing, but just not with Microsoft anymore. So that's something that is still needed for the industry and that's something that I can still drive, but Microsoft is no longer the right platform. The incubation was having a very hard time getting hiring more people because, first of all, we were actually doing this in a really bad timing, so that was 2022. And the first half of the year was very, very good. We got all the momentum and we got the traction. We were interviewing and working with designers and manufacturers and what we found out was the process in design and manufacturing are still quite slow. So even if we provide the best technologies to the ecosystem, to the manufacturers and designers, they are not able to adopt the technology fast enough. So we could be building a million dollar to tens of million dollar of business, but it requires a really hand-holding process with each partner one by one, because there's no standard across the industry and even within digital tools, there's no agnostic, transferable ways to go from one tool to another. So in order to really connect all these things would require a long, long time and also is going to be a slow business and it's not a big enough market for Microsoft. But then at the same time, we learned about a bigger opportunity with consumers, which is to use digital fashion to drive digital transformation down the line. That is actually itself a much bigger market and opportunity. It could go up to the billions, and we did do a MEP there and we got initial data.

Kitty Yeung: 21:47

But the project in order to ship any new products within Microsoft or any like big corporation, you kind of have to ship your product within an existing product. That limits you to achieve what you really envision to do. So if you think about existing products at Microsoft, how many of those are really fashion focused? Not really. So we did the MVP 13s, for example. We did test our technology for people to try on digital clothing and we learned that people are willing to pay if it looks realistic enough, and all these things can be further developed.

Kitty Yeung: 22:34

But we also then moved into the second half of 2022. That was a really really bad time globally, economically. Microsoft started to freeze hiring. So it's not just about our project. There's just no way for anyone to hire anyone at the company and then later on the company, even in 2013, started laying people off. We were not impacted by that, but we experienced a precursor of how it was to come. The incubation was not the same setup as a real startup and is no longer the right place to do what I wanted to do. Startup and is no longer the right place to do what I wanted to do.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 23:19

And how did that make you feel? Katie, Like you know, you spent quite a few years getting it to that point where you had funding, you had team members, you had resources, Microsoft. That thing you obviously did it for, was it a year, year and a half, within the incubation program at Microsoft, and then it just got taken away from you just as quickly. How did that make you feel?

Kitty Yeung: 23:45

I think it's a part of a startup life. You're doing something very risky and you have to test things and iterate, and sometimes the resources, the timing doesn't work out, and it's part of the startup life. So, basically, in order to succeed, there are many, many, many factors that come into play and, in fact, if you summarize them, it kind of comes down to three key things, and in Chinese it's 天时地利人和. I don't know if maybe some of the listeners will understand this. It's the right timing, the right place with the right people.

Kitty Yeung: 24:28

We can analyze to see what's the main problem and eventually, I think for this project and for myself, it's the wrong place, the wrong timing. We had a really good team and, of course, there were always things we could improve as a team, but we were living in the true startup life, but then it was in the environment and the timing that wasn't the right place. We can do that again. So we have the right people, we can find the right timing and the right place and eventually it just becomes. This is my lifelong thesis and all I need is the right platform to continue.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 25:11

Which you are doing again, kitty, and I like that phrase your lifelong thesis, niamh, you said that to us on the podcast show and with that lifelong thesis you've ever said that to us on the podcast show and with that lifelong thesis, you've obviously gone now on to well Browseware as their director of AI. So that's your day job. So you have a day job again with a digital fashion company, which seems a lot more fitting with your personal endeavors. I think it's super interesting. You know the fact that you are a highly skilled technologist coming into fashion and you know we discuss all the time on the podcast and actually in our work with beyond form.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 25:47

The industry does need more people like yourself because at the end of the day, the industry can't really move forward with those inventors, with those people to really challenge how the industry is set up. And you know you mentioned it there the supply chain production partners are just not necessarily there yet with getting up to speed, modernization and so forth. So it's like going against a brick wall sometimes and I think it's really important that tech people are challenging the status quo within the fashion industry as well. Of course, we are moving forward with the regulations, as I mentioned in the introduction there, but those regulations are only guidance at the moment and everyone's still trying to find their way actually how to make this work from a systems perspective, and, of course, technologistsologists engineers are really good at that. Most people in fashion don't know how to do that, so you've gone into Browseware.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 26:45

You mentioned there that you started a new project as well. It's called Wear it, which is all about gen AI and digital fashion. Can you tell us more about that project and where do you think Jenea is heading in general?

Kitty Yeung: 26:59

So Wearit is completely separate from Browzwear. So I'm really enjoying doing these two businesses. So Wearit is actually a digital product of Art by Physicist. It's something that I'm doing independently. I'm doing independently and BrowseWare is the B2B businesses that starts a platform and is working on the digital transformation for the industry. So these two are very separate.

Kitty Yeung: 27:32

So I can talk about the AI and generative AI in both applications, both scenarios. So maybe I start with Browseware. Browseware provides the tool for digitizing for the fashion industry, especially in the design process. So it has this world-leading 3D simulation software, vstitcher, where designers can create the patterns in 2D in the software and then stitch it all virtually, and in 3D you can see immediate simulation with the physics and the draping and the realism of the materials. So it's a really, really good product and I would say that it's my favorite product and when I was working on Microsoft, that's one of the key tools that we were using for our on-demand supply chain projects and BrowseWare. So then that's also why I wanted to join BrowseWare, because I wanted to work on my favorite product.

Kitty Yeung: 28:35

The generative AI can come into very powerful places to automate this software process. So, as we know, the fashion education has been still very traditional and designers are still learning how to create things digitally. They usually would first start learning how to create things digitally. They usually would first start learning how to do it traditionally with hands and on paper, and transfer your paper pattern onto the fabric and you stitch things together into a sample all physically, and go back and forth with the sample room and manufacturer. That can all be digitized. This whole process can immediately be done inside the software. But to learn the software takes a learning curve and is a bit difficult for a traditionally trained designer to learn this thing. So we have the opportunity to allow generative AI. Especially, we need to train models and algorithms to, say, recognize a sketch or a photo, anything that represents a design in this final form, figuring out what the pattern is and then turning to a tech pack that has to be automated.

Kitty Yeung: 30:06

But the current AI community because they are all engineers and scientists they don't actually know much about the fashion industry, so they don't know the pain points and what's needed to be built there. So there's a very niche, a set of people who actually know these two industries, how they work. So they are coming up with algorithms and models to do this kind of automation. So that's what we really need for the industry is allowing designers and creatives to very quickly turn their ideas from 2D images to 3D or to tech pack, depending on what application they want. So there's a huge opportunity for a company like BrowseWare to drive such automation and digitization. So that's what I'm also working towards as their senior director of AI is to push this kind of automation. So that would really be a game changer for adoption of the software as well as the industry to be more efficient.

Kitty Yeung: 31:18

Right now, browser can already shorten the whole process from what I mentioned more than nine months to just four months with all the digitization. But with AI there's an opportunity to even shorten that four months to one month. So to even use generative AI generating some commercial ready or ready-to-wear clothing and already listed on social media or retail websites for orders, and then only when people buy it from the digital point of view, it can then be turned into tech pack and get manufactured. So this is very exciting In terms of where it is.

Kitty Yeung: 32:20

Completely separate from this, my work at BrowseWare is independent study, discovery and building a business around consumer adoption. It creates generative AI for so AI generated content for people to try on to wear. Within seconds, people can visualize themselves in any clothes that they can ever imagine or cannot ever imagine. So it's an AI-powered digital wardrobe for people to wear digital clothing. Eventually, we also can work with brands to put their content into the generated images or videos so that when people order from this experience they can also get the physical. So it's connecting the digital and the physical space through AI generation. And it's not just generated content. There is a lot of computer vision as well. It takes in your photo and understands your face, your skin color, your body shape and then creates the result for you automatically.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 33:34

It sounds like you found your happy place then with this new adventures within BrowseWeb, but also wear it. Is that correct?

Kitty Yeung: 33:42

Yeah, I mean, we have to forge our own career. I'm someone who knows what I want to do and no matter what I'm going to do it, I think it's just a matter of continuing driving and then also working with people with innovative ideas, aligned ideas together.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 34:03

You're now an entrepreneur with Wara, you know it's completely separate from any business. You were an entrepreneur at Microsoft. Like, what are those experiences? Like Do you think one way of doing it is better? Like is it better to be an entrepreneur where you have complete freedom from literally anyone else, or does that support internally within a company really help to help the startup's kind of trajectory? Like is there a better way? Did you think?

Kitty Yeung: 34:29

So, before I started my independent work, I would recommend entrepreneurship, if you can find the platform, be the right one to fund you, to support you. But now that I have been building my separate, my independent business, I will also recommend it because you can have so much more freedom. So, as I mentioned, when we had to push out our product within Microsoft, we had to push it through an existing product and if that product is not your own, then it's very difficult to really push out in the vision you have. If you have your independent idea and you build a business around it, you can do anything. You can build a product exactly the way you want. You can study the market much faster. You can directly go talk to your users and respond to feedback much faster, easily, much faster. So that's the true startup life. That is, finding your own resources and continue building the right thing for your audience.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 35:41

Yeah, and I think it really does depend on the founder as well and their personality type. For example, I've only ever been an entrepreneur. I've never wanted to go into a corporate. You know startup program or something like that. I just don't know the thoughts of it like puts fear within me, but I and I love my freedom.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 36:00

But I can imagine that for many people, just having that structure and that framework that is going to help them on that entrepreneurial journey I meet lots of entrepreneurs and you know they have such a good idea but they would benefit from having, you know, that support of a corporate just to help them to structure their ideas a little bit more, to go to the next stage and I think many potential founders don't recognize that and weaknesses quickly enough for the benefit of their startup, which I think is something that everyone should think about before starting a business. But obviously you wanted to make it work from both perspectives. Even getting the backing of mic Microsoft is not easy in itself and obviously now, as your Wear it project gets going, what are some of the numbers you can share with us right now for the Wear it project?

Kitty Yeung: 36:55

So we had a testing MVP and that's launched within the WeChat ecosystem. So it's a mini program within the WeChat ecosystem, so it's a mini program within the WeChat app. So it is a very good test bed for us with control. And we only started with our own network and we let people share it and give us feedback, and we've been working, talking with users for a couple of months and we now have 1,300 users and it's growing. But we also have seen the limitation in WeChat. So now we are building our V1, which is a web experience for a broader audience, and it will be English and everyone on the web on the phone can access it. So definitely, we have found traction and we have also found our audience. We know our primary users, who they are and what they like, what they didn't like, so we're building a much better experience, in our view.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 38:07

What if you go on to kitty's instagram page, you can see her wearing some fabulous ai generated clothing. We'll put a link in the description, but it shows the potential of the ai in the generative clothing that kitty is working on. I think it's great. Obviously you're proving that people want to explore and experiment with such a tool. But even if you crack the China market with WeChat, that's a huge industry and a huge market in itself.

Kitty Yeung: 38:36

It's very interesting for us. We also have the advantage of understanding both the Chinese market, the Chinese culture and the market, the Chinese culture and the English speaking cultures they're very different and the Chinese markets. We know how people think towards consumer products and fashion and it's quite different from what I would call the Western markets. So we're doing both, which is pretty good learning.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 39:08

So I just want to zoom out a little bit. I'm just going to quote you from the book. We had to convince them that we had a scalable business model, especially in the corporate world where profits are important, but also that we can make a positive impact on society and sustainability. You've already talked about the Microsoft part, so let's focus on the second part of the quote there. How do you think fashion tech can shape the future of society?

Kitty Yeung: 39:42

The reason I decided to work on this is the potential to make the industry cleaner. On-demand manufacturing or on-demand mass customization is kind of the holy grail for the industry. How great would that be if every single piece of clothing were made for each person based on their preference, based on their size and body shapes. But that's kind of ideal. So I'm a physicist. I look at things like in a physics model where this is a syntactic state, that is, innovators are driving and push towards, but we may never get there because it's ideal Holy grail. However, the things, the efforts that we build towards it will push the industry in the right direction, which is already happening, like all these digitization tools like Browsource, vstitcher and tons of other digital fashion companies are working on. If we can reach a point where there's mass adoption of digital fashion, the consumers can drive much faster adoption of the manufacturing digitized design process and microfactory I call it.

Kitty Yeung: 40:53

My thesis is very similar to how my phd was working. Is really like you're studying, instead of a material or quantum property of of subject, you are actually studying the market like a many-body, complex system and your product is a probe. You design to measure, to get data from this market and you build the right thing to test the right market. So this is very, very scientific. So I'm building my startup in a very scientific way and business model and all things have equations and we are plugging the numbers and see how we can optimize each parameters. Yeah, I think this might be a derail, but I think, at the end of the day, my goal is still to drive lean manufacturing, on-demand customization through an AI automated way and, once we can get the digital adoption from the mass market, that's going to completely shift the whole fashion industry.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 42:07

So it sounds like fashion tech needs a lot of tinkering, a lot of pivoting, a lot of testing, but most importantly, it needs time, is my key takeaway there.

Kitty Yeung: 42:19

I think we can be faster with consumers and AI.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 42:24

So, in an ideal world, I just want to finish off this conversation with a quick fire round of questions. The first answer that comes to your head are you ready, kitty? Sure, yes, have you read Fashion Tech Applied yet? Of course, and so this is here. I'm excited that you actually read it. What year do you predict Gen AI fashion will take off?

Kitty Yeung: 42:46

Because I'm actually working on it.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 42:48

I won't say right now right now this like yeah, this year 2015, 2025 yeah, it's pretty busy at the moment. Digital or physical clothing digital first, german fashion or chinese fashion, chinese fashion I get that um best piece of advice for a tech individual wanting to break into the fashion industry.

Kitty Yeung: 43:11

Look at it scientifically and try to collect data as fast and accurate as possible. That would be my advice.

Peter Jeun Ho Tsang: 43:19

Thank you so much for your time, Kitty.

Kitty Yeung: 43:20

Thank you.