Sizing Up the Technical Design Position, Part II

Apparel's Technical Design Roundtable participants discuss the challenges of sharing fit information with offshore vendors and finding talented technical designers in the second part of this two-part article covering highlights from the event.

DesMarteau, Apparel: What skills are most important to be instilled in a college graduate who is preparing for a career in apparel technical design?

Janice Larsen, Product Engineering Manager, Arc'teryx: People really have to love the idea of problem solving because that's a huge part of it with all of the different skills that they're going to have to utilize. The communications skills also are so important.

Jill Simmons, Vice President of Business Development, Lectra: I know some of the university systems are trying to develop [a technical design] curriculum because one of the things they're faced with is that nobody really goes to school to try to become a technical designer. It was one of the last things that people wanted to do, and it was seen as kind of the failure route to being a designer. It's an old perception, and this is a fairly new industry and technical design is a fairly new position within the industry that has arisen in the past 15 years. Universities are having to break the mold, and they're having to remold it to make sure that people really want to embark on this as a career.

Elaine Paullus, Manager of Technical Design, Ready-to-Wear, Saks Inc.: In [my college's] pattern making classes, we had to make the patterns to fit our own body, and then we had to make a muslin, and we had to get up in front of the class and conduct a fitting.

Janet Moss, Director of Apparel Technical Services, Nike: One of the things that I would like to see of the higher education systems is more of a partnering with businesses. There are some schools out there that do a really excellent job of that. It's important to just get the professors out [in the field] for educational internships because it seems there's a lack of knowledge, even over the last 15 years, of what's actually happening out in the industry.

Paullus, Saks: That's a very good point. We have instructors that visit us from Auburn University, and they do exactly that. They come and spend the day with us, and then we actually hire their [school's] interns. So far from the internship program, we've hired three assistant technical designers who have turned out to be very good hires.

Julie Dean, Director of Technical Design, Catherines (Charming Shoppes): To a certain degree, I almost find that if you grow your own, you end up with a better employee because this is such a new career. We've really had some good luck with the younger folks coming right out of college.

Jeanne Kilian, Technical Design Manager, Fashion Bug (Charming Shoppes): I've gone to the schools and recruited sophomores and juniors, who are not quite sure what they want to do when they get out of school. I go through the technical design experience with them and kind of help them to go back and restructure their program or their education so that they are taking pattern making. They're not just taking design classes and things of that nature, and it's helped.

Apparel: How are you using technology in your technical design processes?

Paullus, Saks: We have created, and our technical designers use, a library of the pattern corrections. They are able to go pull it, and then they can redraw the line, and that can be inserted into our spec package.

Moss, Nike: The biggest thing that I look for in any of the technologies that are coming out is the ease of use. We have about 25 technical designers at Nike and their positions are all a little bit different. For instance, some are working directly with factories all the time, while others are building patterns all the time. To that point, the technologies that we bring in have to be relatively user-friendly.

Dean, Catherines (Charming Shoppes): My preference would be to have the speed. There is a lot of multitasking in technical design. When you have a whole team of people doing that, and you've got a system that's slow, in this deadline-driven business, that can be just annoying.

Apparel: Do you all have any thoughts on [TC]2's SizeUSA data, and the things you're hoping to pull out of it?

Irene Mak, American Eagle Outfitters: We primarily dress the juniors market, young juniors and college-bound consumer, and we're looking forward to buying the report and looking at demographics of our age group, primarily in the Midwest.

Apparel: Do you feel pretty good about your size charts, or are you planning some major changes?

Paullus, Saks: Being that we're a chain and we have several different department stores that we do size for, when we set up our department here four years ago, we were very careful about doing research upfront and really making sure that it was correct going out the door. We continually check ourselves to the market with what the product managers of the individual businesses see as their key competitors. We keep ourselves in line like that, and our private brands are doing extremely well, so we believe that we have been successful in our efforts.

Larsen, Arc'teryx: Our products are very focused into specific core uses, so we do a lot of fittings with multiple people who are going to actually field trial our products because things like articulation and reach when you're in mountain climbing and ice climbing are really important. We fit it on a standard model, but we also fit with the people who are going to be doing field trials for us in order to confirm that functionality.

KATHLEEN DESMARTEAU is editor in chief of Apparel and may be reached at kdesmarteau@apparelmag.com.

For More Information

Here is a link to part 1 of this feature, "Sizing Up the Tech Design Position," which was published in the April 2004 issue.