Many brands digitize their patterns to benefit from digitally grading them. (It is way faster and more cost-efficient to grade digitally than manually.) You can also send digitized patterns to your factory in seconds regardless of where you each are located. A further benefit of digitized patterns that you might not think of immediately is the access to data. This benefit becomes increasingly useful the more styles you have and the longer you’ve been in business.
Think of how you can glean more information more easily from an excel spreadsheet of data than you can from a handwritten notebook. The information might all be there in both cases, but the digital spreadsheet can be sorted and organized to make it easier to analyze. You can create charts to visualize the data you are interested in. You can even set up formulas to speed up the process and automatically highlight certain data. (Can you tell I’m a nerd who likes a good spreadsheet?)
The same goes for digital patterns versus paper ones. With a digital pattern, you can easily compare the fit of different styles, set up automatic measurement charts, and visualize the graded nest with some setup and a few clicks. While you can get this data from paper patterns, it is much more time consuming and harder to see the big picture laid out before you. Digital patterns make the data easily accessible. They make it easier to analyze and understand your brand’s fit and share those insights across your team.
A brand that is ready to level up their development and production can benefit from this digitized pattern data to assess the current state of the style library and gather valuable insights for future development.