I have had similar experiences to Jeff in working with softgoods. I don’t have that much experience with it yet, but I have found the development process to be a bit more exciting. You have to act on the fly and make quick confident decisions as the products are being sampled.
While models and prototyping are incredibly valuable with any product, I find that with softgoods I want to move to 3d as fast as possible. This may change with experience, but I’m just now beginning to understand how the material behaves. I can get a pretty good idea of the volume and form of a hard product from a sketch, but I find it much more difficult with fabrics. When I’m experimenting with size and shape, it seems like half of the rough prototypes end up looking ridiculous on the first try.
When we were working on a wallet design this summer, we moved to prototyping almost immediately. We realized we were able to iterate and learn more quickly than with sketching. As the concept became more refined, we went back to sketching to work out alot of the details. It was almost the opposite of what I was accustomed to.
Jeff, Like you, I’d love to get into developing some outerwear. We are thinking about doing some later this year, but we’ll have to see how our strategy develops.
Singletrack, was is just the sampling process that frustrated you about developing clothing or was it more than that? Can you explain a little about how the process was different for clothing than other softgoods?
Patrick