A presentation at the H&M Tech Event, August 2026. Scott Camp, Head of Engineering, Shapeshifter Technology Ltd.
Two hundred years ago, the single biggest leap in human productivity did not start in a laboratory, a bank, or a government ministry—it started in a cotton mill. From the spinning jenny to the power loom, the modern manufacturing supply chain was born on the factory floors built to weave and spin fabric. Today, as artificial intelligence is hailed as the new industrial revolution, garment manufacturers are not latecomers to technology; their industry is where industrial transformation began.
Speaking at H&M’s supplier conference in Shanghai, Scott Camp, Head of Engineering at Shapeshifter, framed the strategic choice facing modern apparel manufacturers. Historically, the ultimate winners of industrial revolutions were not the inventors of the machines, but the factory owners who adopted them first. When Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom in 1785, most weaving remained manual for another forty years. The factory owners who moved early—asking whether new technology delivered more fabric at lower costs—built unassailable competitive advantages, while those who delayed spent decades trying to catch up.
The Core Challenge: Fabric Yield and Cutting Efficiency
In modern apparel manufacturing, fabric accounts for up to 70 percent of a garment’s total production cost. The fundamental question for factory leadership remains unchanged: how to purchase only the fabric required and extract the maximum number of garments in the shortest possible time.
Shapeshifter addresses this challenge by combining advanced mathematics with cutting-room expertise to score thousands of candidate cut plans for every purchase order, carefully balancing fabric yield against cutting floor time. Because no two factories operate identically, the system is fully configurable—handling operational variables such as block fusing, ratio matching, width batching, lay limits, ply limits, and end-bit utilization strategies.
Two AI Initiatives Reshaping Factory Operations
To accelerate this transformation, Shapeshifter is deploying two major AI-driven initiatives:
- Human Expertise, Delivered by AI (Onboarding Assistant): Historically, onboarding a factory required weeks of back-and-forth emails to gather spreadsheets and native CAD markers from software systems like Lectra, Gerber, Optitex, or Tuka. The new AI onboarding assistant cross-checks cut-plan spreadsheets and CAD files instantly upon upload. It automatically flags discrepancies—such as fabric type mismatches or width variances—and asks the exact technical questions an expert engineer would ask right at the moment of upload. This compresses weeks of data collection into a single afternoon session.
- Operational Intelligence Mined from Production History: Factories possess a vast, untapped asset in their own production history. Because Shapeshifter evaluates thousands of alternative candidate plans for every order, it retains data on both the plan executed and every plan that could have been cut. AI algorithms mine this data to deliver actionable insights, identifying, for instance, which roll widths are delivering the most efficient markers on the production floor, or highlighting trade-offs where adding one additional marker would save over 1 percent of total fabric.
Rethinking How We Work
As manufacturers navigate rising costs and shifting global supply chains, history offers a clear lesson. New technology pays twice: first when a factory adopts it, and again when the organization rethinks its processes to take full advantage of it. The factories that lead the next decade will be those that put their own operational data to work and embrace automated hyper-efficiency
