CAD for Fashion Featured in the Create Growth D2 Hub Legacy Lookbook

Jul 23
4 min read

Last year I was invited to share the story behind CAD for Fashion as part of the Create Growth D2 Hub Legacy Lookbook.

It was a chance to stop for a moment and reflect on why I started the business, what I was seeing across the fashion industry, and what I hoped the future could look like.

Reading it back now, it's interesting to see what has changed and what hasn't. AI has moved incredibly quickly, Virtual Reality has become a much bigger part of what we do, and we're now working with even more universities and fashion brands to help them explore new digital workflows.

What hasn't changed is our mission. We still believe that technology should empower creativity, not replace it, and that education is the key to helping the industry embrace change with confidence.

I've shared the original feature below.

Rewiring the fashion industry's relationship with digital technology

Erica Horne didn't set out to pick a fight with one of the world's most change-resistant industries. But after watching a brand fly in clothing samples overnight, with components from six different countries, for a meeting that lasted minutes, she decided someone had to.

CAD for Fashion, the Derby-based education and consultancy business Horne founded, exists to close the gap between where the fashion and textiles industry is and where it could be. The client list runs from Next and Hobbs London to universities including UCLan and Bath Spa, alongside software partnerships with CLO3D and NewArc, an AI design platform for which CAD for Fashion serves as education partner.

The Case Against Samples

The starting point for understanding CAD for Fashion is understanding just how wasteful the current design process in fashion actually is. Horne describes it plainly.

"A brand might ask for 15 samples from a supplier, knowing that they only have two options that they want to buy. And the components for one of those samples would have come from six different countries, made in a different country, and then flown overnight because their meeting is tomorrow, in order for someone to look at it and say yes or no."

She pauses. "It's insane, really."

Advances in CGI and gaming technology now make it possible to create a virtual garment with accurate fabric physics, visualise fit across size ranges, and identify problems before a single physical prototype is made. AI can take a rough sketch and generate a photorealistic image in seconds. Five years ago, Horne spent three hours with a client rendering a single complex print in Illustrator. The same result now takes moments.

"We can actually fit before making that first prototype sample."

Why It Still Isn't Happening

The technology is ready. The industry is not.

The resistance, Horne says, can be almost paradoxical. AI can produce a photorealistic image of a garment that would be trusted immediately if it came from a supplier, but because it is labelled AI, buyers hesitate. Within the same organisation, menswear teams may already be running digital workflows while womenswear teams in the same building are still hand-sketching.

This is why CAD for Fashion calls what it does education, not training. Skills delivery is only part of the job. When Horne goes into a brand, she will run sessions with designers on the tools and separate sessions with buyers and decision-makers on what they are actually looking at and what they can confidently sign off.

"It's about education of everybody around the change to digital assets, not just skills training," she says. "The change management will be part of what we do."

The Long Game

The commercial cycles are long. Lounge Underwear took 18 months from first contact to a single day of training, not because the decision was difficult, but because of the rhythm of fashion's design calendar and the challenge of getting the right people in the room. That patience runs through everything Horne does.

It also explains her investment in the education market, which is not, she acknowledges, where the money is. But universities and colleges are where the next generation of designers is formed. If those graduates enter industry already fluent in digital tools, they shift the culture from the inside.

The evidence for this strategy is already visible. A student she trained five years ago, recently graduated and newly hired at an unknown brand called Lounge, is now Head of Product there. She is the reason CAD for Fashion gets the call.

"Little, little seeds."

What the Future Looks Like

Ask Horne for her five-year vision and she maps it out with quiet certainty.

Designers sketch on iPads. AI makes those sketches photorealistic. A 3D model is generated from the image, refined by a designer who, for the first time, is working with actual data embedded in the garment: fit metrics, fabric properties, size specifications.

Decisions are made virtually. One physical sample is produced to verify everything works. Then, possibly, production. Or possibly not, if virtual clothing becomes a reality.

And then VR, which she is already delivering in partnership with Mesh Training. Not as a gimmick, but because reviewing a 3D garment on a monitor is not the same as reviewing it at scale, in space, at scale.