“AI allows me to be creative”

Anna Franziska Michel is the CEO and Co-founder of yoona.ai. She has decades of experience in fashion and is on a mission to build a greener future for the fashion industry.  As a young designer, she had a wake-up call that her work is thwarted with inefficiencies: in the design process, the materials production and supply to consumers. She decided to change this, and founded yoona.ai. Today, yoona.ai is the market leader for the digitization of design processes. They help companies save up to 80% of the time in the design and collection development phase. This allows companies to design closer to the fast pacing trends and avoids waste. Users can create their design, convert it into 3D images and project it with augmented reality. Anelia Heese from the AUREA Community Team sat down with Anna Franziska Michel for a chat.

Yoona.ai & Commercialising Arts

Anna explains where it all started: “I studied Fine Arts, and I wanted to commercialise art. One avenue to commercialise Fine Arts is through fashion. After my studies, I founded my own label and it was really fun to mix fabrics and techniques: it really felt as though I was creating true art at the time.

Things changed when she started to work as a freelancer for bigger fashion companies, getting a sneak peek into the belly of the beast: “When I started to work as a freelancer for other fashion companies, I realised that the whole process is so inefficient.”

When asked to explain why the process is so inefficient, you can hear the exasperation in her voice when she explains: “If you’re lucky, you can be an artist with no incentive to produce pieces in an economical way. This means, you have a lot of time to design and re-design your garments. But if you’re like most designers employed by a major fashion company, you have to produce things that have to sell. In that case, time is of the essence, because trends are so fast. New season, new style. You just can’t keep up with the trends in the manual design process. This process usually entails: finding inspiration, analysing and calculating the cost of a garment, making the drawings, the pattern and the prototype. In big companies, this process takes an average of 70 weeks until the product reaches the consumer.” 
This means the garments we buy at the shops today were designed almost 18 months ago. Many of us have only recently learned how detrimental fashion is to the environment. A closer look at the figures can make one feel despondent: Fashion production makes up 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions, dries up water sources, and pollutes rivers and streams. What’s more, 85% of all textiles go to the dump each year. Anna explains how the lack of innovation in the industry is fuelling this inefficient production cycle: “For each piece we end up wearing, there are four to five prototypes that get created in that process. Only 30% of the clothes these companies create are sold because they literally go out of fashion. More than 70% end up in warehouses, or are shredded for recycling, without a consumer ever wearing the piece.”

Fashion’s Sustainability Problem

She explains how she realised that we cannot only think about sustainable, organic fabrics when we want to fix fashion’s sustainability problem: “It has to start with the whole process of getting the garment to the consumer. We need to learn how to design more sustainably.” 

A fabric recycling plant in Vietnam

Anna went back to university to learn to code neural networks. “If you use AI, you can cut down the design process down to 8 weeks. This reduces a significant amount of waste because you can calculate and design better.”

Anna has made it her mission to work at the forefront of technology in fashion. Whereas civil engineers, architects and other designers have been taught to adopt the latest technology in their industries, the fashion industry is still lagging behind. “We are taught that fashion is handcraft - that it’s only creative if it is manual. This discourages innovation across the entire industry. If someone asked me to design a new collection and I’m only allowed to do it manually, I will refuse to do it. I would use AI because it can help me be more creative. Creating a collection of forty pieces by hand is tedious, and you aren’t physically able to do it in the short space of time provided. With AI, you can make a 3D version, try it on in virtual reality, and create prototypes with no waste.”

Is Digital Fashion the Future?

Does this mean fashion will become a complete virtual affair? “People don’t wear expressive clothing anymore: we wear black, grey and navy.” 

You can hear the excitement in her voice when she says:

“I’m a big fan of digital fashion, because we can wear whatever we want and try something new. We can wear art.”