admin With digital and gaming culture moving at an ever-more-rapid pace, and the explosion of
user-generated content in social gaming environments, the need has never been greater for
flexible on-demand digital production, allowing brands and creators to realise their vision for
allied physical garments.
Kornit Digital is working with apparel fulfillers, designers, retailers, and brands to deliver
sustainable, scalable, on-demand digital decoration solutions enabling a new breed of digital
creators to bring garments to life in the physical world, serving engaged audiences quickly
and keeping waste and water usage to a minimum.
Scott Walton, Director of Business Development at Kornit, underlines Kornit’s philosophy:
“We’re inspired by the boundless self-expression we see among the new breed of digital
creators in social gaming and web3 platforms and their audiences. Kornit is committed to
empowering these communities and the platforms that serve them with the hyper-
customization capabilities to translate their imaginations into brilliant, uncompromising
apparel.”
The business recently collaborated with well-known digital fashion artist Stephy Fung (who
has worked with brands such as Gucci, Dell, and X-Box) and PhygitalTwin to bring her first
physical apparel into the world for London Fashion Week. Kornit is also sponsoring the New
Codes Digital Fashion Summit at the Royal Institution in London this fall.
Growth in digital self-expression
The wider context is one of significant anticipated growth in digital self-expression, with
related implications for physical style. Social gaming, which provides a substantial theatre for
digital style and self-expression, has been forecasted by Maximise Market Research to grow
at a CAGR of 16.01% to reach US$76.8 billion by 2029, with the global digital clothing
market forecast by Reportlinker to grow to $2.5 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 26.6%. With
the power of virtual customization, the market for gaming skins is also strong and growing –
with sales of in-game items including skins reported to have reached US$50 billion by the
end of 2022. Many in the gaming sector now anticipate the emerging suite of AI tools will
result in huge proliferation of user-generated assets and creativity.
In a sign of what is coming for fashion, this year the elite Parsons School of Design launched
a Roblox design course, equipping students with skills in “researching and prototyping digital
and physical fashion for immersive environments.” The course accompanies a
Roblox/Parsons study which found that 70% of Gen-Z dress avatars like their physical style
to some degree. A similar proportion also take physical style inspiration from their avatars,
bearing out the intuition that our personal identity and affiliations are increasingly a
composite of physical and digital personas.
Strategy of Kornit while moving to the creator economy
Looking to the future, Omer Kulka, Chief Innovation Officer at Kornit Digital, reflects:
“The world is experiencing a digital transformation like never before. The lines between the
physical and virtual are quickly blurring – creating a new ‘phygital’ universe where
immediacy, customization and personalized experiences are the rule not the exception. As the digital-native generation comes of age to build the new ‘creator economy’, the Kornit 4.0
strategy is perfectly aligned to capture these new opportunities in fashion and textiles. We’re
helping to transform what is often considered slow and wasteful to a place where creators,
designers, and brands unleash new possibilities without traditional production limitations.
With on-demand digital production, brands and producers can now move at the speed of
culture – bringing together the immediacy and creativity of converging physical and virtual
worlds, driving unprecedented sustainability, harnessing lean manufacturing, and fulfilling
the promise of an industry no longer burdened by legacy production. In this new world of
fashion and textiles, the only limit is your imagination.”
