Social and economic changes have transformed the way fashion is designed, developed, produced and consumed. To keep up with ever-changing challenges, expanding markets and to build a better product, companies need to adapt how they work. With the capability to not only match fabric design for furniture applications but also much more delicate apparel jacquards, prints & Co Gerber supports the industry to make yet another step into that direction.

Auto-Match to be the name of the game

The solution very recently also launched for apparel applications of all kind provides cutting accuracy ensuring that stripes, plaids or other patterns flow seamlessly from a bodice to a sleeve and throughout any garment without interruption. Testing of Auto-Match comes with some impressive statistics including a reduction in labor costs by as much as 50 percent while increasing throughput and improvements in cut part accuracy.

“Pattern continuity is a hallmark of quality for the fashion industry,” explains product manager Tom Gordon to textile network. “However, ensuring continuity can be extremely time consuming and prone to errors, adding significant time and cost with wasted materials and labor associated with recutting.”

The Auto-Match technology captures a piece of fabric in a single digital image and automatically corrects for placement errors, pattern repeat variations and distortions. Auto-Match is accurate and repeatable, and most importantly, it can help apparel manufacturers slash costs over conventional methods that rely on teams of operators to manually align patterns before cutting.

Traditional matching methods require highly-skilled workers and rely solely on the human eye for accuracy. In addition to being time consuming, the manual system is costly and more likely to result in waste as a result of poorly matched patterns.

In addition to ensuring greater accuracy, Auto-Match helps manufacturers save on labor costs: The system utilizes a single operator, and – unlike the manual alignment method – it does not require extensive training or labor skilled in apparel design and pattern matching.