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Table of Contents
best apps for fashion
The ultimate digital moodboard and a hugely popular resource for fashionistas, Pinterest allows you to collect – or “pin” – images from around the web and save them for reference. As well as creating your own boards full of the kinds of outfits or looks that inspire you, you can search and browse other boards to explore different themes. With over 602 million boards on fashion and 21 billion fashion ideas, Pinterest is an indispensable tool for discovering new ideas and trends.
The Matboard
An alternative moodboard app, the Matboard has been dubbed “the Pinterest for designers”. Functioning in a similar way, the Matboard is a social bookmarking hub for creatives, which allows you to organise, browse and discover inspiring work, as well as create moodboards for your own specific projects.
Art Authority
Fashion inspiration should go beyond fashion itself and art will always be a crucial source of ideas for designers. The Art Authority app gives its users the chance to browse over 100,000+ paintings and sculptures by 1,500 of the western world’s leading artists from ancient times to today. This easy-access archive is an incredible visual library that should inspire all kinds of designer.
Vogue Runway
Created by the world’s leading fashion publisher, Vogue Runway offers unlimited access to the world’s latest collections. But it’s the archive that really makes this app special – offering images from 12,000 fashion shows and more than 1 million runway photos all the way back to 2000.
The Hunt
Stalk the latest fashion with this app which helps you track down looks. Post photos of outfits you like and the community will help identify the designers, as well as where you could buy it for yourself. The Hunt also helps you keep on top of current trends, with news and interviews.
apps for fashion designers
Best apps for fashion design
Adobe Illustrator
A core piece of software for graphic designers, Adobe Illustrator is popular with fashion designers as a tool for drawing flats, as well as freehand sketching, tracing patterns and experimenting with colour palettes.
Corel Draw
One of the most popular choices for vector based design and a software staple for fashion students, Corel Draw allows for everything from sketching and pattern making to creating geometric mannequins to pin designs to.
Sketch
Another powerful vector graphics editor, which has been competing with Illustrator, Sketch is an intuitive piece of design software with a wide range of plugins and an ever-growing choice of extensions and add-ons.
CLO 3D
A virtual sampling tool, CLO 3D allows you to build your designs in 3D, trying out different patterns and fabrics in a way that you can really visualise.
Pret-A-Template
A bit like a portable digital sketchbook, Pret-A-Template allows you to sketch out designs on your iPhone or iPad across a choice of over 1,000 templates – from bodies to shoes – using a wide selection of brushes, patterns and colours.
Sketchbook
With its stripped down, intuitive, interface, Sketchbook is an excellent drawing app perfect for sketching out concepts on your device. You can instantly scan in paper drawings for digital editing using your device camera, and play with a wide variety of brushes and tools. Best of all – it’s free.
apps for fashion designers
Best apps for fashion marketing
Instagram
It may seem obvious, but Instagram is a vital social media platform for any designer hoping to make a mark. As well as being the place to share photos of your work, it’s a crucial networking tool and the perfect place to find new customers for your products.
Shopify
One of the leading e-commerce sites for independent sellers, Shopify allows you to quickly set up an online store. It also boasts a wide range of themes, full access to HTML and CSS for customisation and unlimited products and bandwidth.
Depop
Like Instagram for selling clothes, Depop is a hit app thanks to its colourful marketplace and active community. It’s popular with people selling vintage and designer fashion, as well as with independent designers looking to sell their work.
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apps for fashion design sketching
15 Apps Fashion Designers need to Maximize Productivity
In the United States alone, we get four times more work done than our grand-parents in the 50s according to the United States Nonfarm Labour Productivity. It’s no secret businesses’ productivity demands are increasing and a whole new stream of apps is helping maximize our output.
But, with more than 4 million software, browser extensions, phone & tablet apps to choose from, it can get overwhelming. In this blog post, we will suggest 15 apps that will make a fashion brand work much easier, faster, smarter, and profitable. In short, better ROI (Return on Investment).
These apps are divided into 5 categories that will walk you through all stages of building a product. These stages include sources for fashion inspiration, applications used for product design, product development apps, manufacturing and marketing. So this is basically the A-Z guide for your entire product development process.
Softwares and apps catagorized by each fashion lifecycle stage
Fashion inspiration stage
What is the very first step of the product design? It is getting inspired by something! It doesn’t necessarily have to be a piece of clothing, it could be a mood board, movie, or a piece of art. Here is a list of our suggested sources to get inspiration from.
WGSN
WGSN is a trend forecasting platform. It constantly monitors how consumers think, feel, and behave. Their experts help brands stay relevant by predicting the products, experiences, and services people will need in the future. WGSN’s network of industry experts provides inspiration to a community of over 43,000 product designers and thought leaders in 32 global markets.
Price: Free registration
Art Authority
Art will always be the biggest source of inspiration in the fashion world. The Art Authority app lets you browse over 100,000+ paintings and sculptures by 1,500 of the Western world’s leading artists from ancient times to today. Their visual library is easy to access and use for every designer.
Price: $4.99
Vogue Runway
Take inspiration from other designers’ collections! Vogue Runway is an app created by the world’s leading fashion publisher. And it offers unlimited access to the world’s latest collections. Their archive contains over 1 million runway images from over 12,000 fashion shows including the new ones and old ones from way back to the 2000s.
Price: Free
Other apps for fashion inspiration: Pinterest, Business of Fashion, Instagram, The Hunt.
Design stage
Fashion design includes sketching an initial idea and technical specifications. The old-school method of sketching on paper is outdated. These apps will help you sketch your designs fast and customize them on the go.
Adobe Illustrator
Fashion and technical designers use Illustrator to draw flat sketches (or functional sketches) with callouts for construction and styling details to put them in tech packs so your team and manufacturer can easily understand and follow.
If you are new to illustrator then there are some great resources available. You can join free webinars and training classes from Fashion Classroom or Sew Heidi.
Price: $29.99/month
Repsketch
Create professional fashion flats using the pre-made templates
You don’t always have to draw technical sketches from scratch for all your fashion projects. Apps like Repsketch allow you to re-purpose and customize existing sketches created by the community of top technical fashion designers.
Select from a variety of styles from tank tops to gowns and modify as you need. Quickly change sleeve type, neckline, or add a logo to your garment. Download, embed, or simply share a public link of your designs with the world in web-friendly SVG format. Sign up for early beta access here.
Pret-A-Template
Select from over 500 templates on Pret-A-Template
Pret-A-Template is your digital sketchbook. It allows you to sketch your designs on iPhone or iPad. They offer over 500 templates to choose from, including bodies and details like shoes. Select from predefined skin, hair and makeup color pallets for quick success.
Price: Starts at $5.99
Other apps for fashion design to consider: Sketchbook, Corel Draw.
Product development stage
Product development includes the following stages: design, planning and developing salable products. It involves processes of getting your fashion products ready to manufacture.
Techpacker
Building a factory-ready Tech Pack in Techpacker
Tech packs (or specification sheets) used to be the most time-consuming tasks and every fashion designer will tell you the endless frustrations of creating flat sketches, condensed wordings to fit in a format, amendments, and repeated data entry and fixing those measurements numbers…. grrrr!
Techpacker took the challenge of making tech packs better, faster, and together. By breaking down tech packs into cards, the process of creating tech packs becomes simple, visual, collaborative and 70% faster. The beauty of cards is that you can copy, move, reuse, connect and do lots and lots of things with them. You can bring your entire team or manufacturers on Techpacker and integrate it with other apps to make it super powerful.
Price: Free 7 days trial and thereafter US$49/month
CLO3D
If you are looking for a futuristic pattern-making software, or a way to visualize your sketches in 3D so you can eliminate at least one sample, then you can check out CLO 3D.
It begins by picking up a 3D body — avatar or dress form, available in different shapes and sizes. Then either import your own patterns or draw them from scratch directly in CLO. Finally, pair each seam of the garment, and select fabric to see them all coming together in 3D. You can then fine-tune your designs in real-time and adjust the pattern.
Price: Free 1-month trial and thereafter US$99/month
Zapier & Workflow
With all these apps, the new challenge is moving data around and communicating between them so we found that the best way to do it is, Zapier (for web) and Workflow (for i-phones).
It connects more than 750 web apps for you so you can create workflows and automate tasks in the background and you can focus on more important work. There are thousands of pre-available workflows such as resizing images and adding to Dropbox automatically.
Price: Starting at $50/month
Other product development apps to consider: Slack, Pantone Color Finder.
Manufacturing stage
Once the garment is designed and the prototype is created, it’s time to produce it. Selecting and sourcing the right fabric and finding the right manufacturer are the starting points.
Maker’s Row
Finding a manufacturer specific to your product categories is hard. And finding a good one is even harder. You can start by asking around for references however it could be time-consuming. So if you are specifically looking for a manufacturer in the USA with crowd-sourced reviews then Makers Row could be useful. They have a fairly decent list of about 3,900 apparel and accessories-related makers that are clearly sorted by categories and rating.
But then, many products still can’t be produced locally in the USA and what if you are looking for lower manufacturing costs and a greater number of manufacturers to choose from then Global sources is a good resource as they put a lot of effort into listing factories that meet higher standards compared to its direct competitor Alibaba (another listing website).
Price: Starts at $35/month
Swatchon
Swatchon is a wholesale fabric platform based in Seoul, South Korea. It ships to 52 countries and has 100000 fabrics to choose from online. This platform works with brands of all sizes allowing them to place an order as small as 3 yards, or up to 500,000 yards.
Price: Free for ready-to-wear businesses, $500 prepayment for everyone else.
Higg Co
Higg Co is a technology company that focuses on building tools that power sustainability measurement. Higg Co helps brands reduce energy use, combat audit fatigue, and safeguard those who work in the supply chain. Higg Materials Sustainability Index allows designers to create custom materials, and understand their environmental impact.
Marketing stage
When the product is manufactured it’s time to sell it! Using the following apps you will be able to build a website, create line sheets and market your business.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to easily set up an online store and start selling. It lets you customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders — all with a few clicks. It powers over 350,000 businesses and over 1,000 Enterprise Plus customers.
Price: 7 Days free trial, thereafter US$29 per month
Brandboom
Brandboom is a wholesale e-commerce platform to create clean Line sheets, get orders directly from retailers & receive payments in simple steps. After setting up your line sheet, you can directly send a link to your buyers and showrooms so they can book directly and can also pay. This will avoid so much back-&-forth communication and missing critical SKU/sizes etc.
Price: Free with limits and thereafter US$79/mo.
Garmentory
Garmentory is one of the top online marketplaces existing right now. It is an ultimate source of indie boutiques, emerging and contemporary designers. By setting up a store on their online platform Garmentory gives brands access to thousands of customers around the globe.
Boutiques and brands can submit their application on the Garmentory website and start selling after it’s approved.
Other marketing apps to consider: Afterpay, Like to know it, Faire.
Conclusion
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