PARIS — Behind the scenes of fashion’s digital reinvention sits Lectra, the France-based technology company quietly shaping much of what we wear. In June, the company appointed Maximilien Abadie deputy chief executive officer.
Abadie joined the company 14 years ago, and was pivotal in its acquisitions of traceability platform TextileGenesis and trend analysis tool Launchmetrics, the latest in a flurry of deals he has spearheaded since 2018.
More than one third of the world’s clothing is designed by brands with Lectra technologies, according to the company’s data, reflecting its widespread behind-the-scenes influence in manufacturing. With fashion contributing more than half of Lectra’s revenue, the industry will be “the vast majority” of the company’s future investment strategy, Abadie said.
Lectra started as design and sizing software for the fashion industry, later expanding into production equipment. The group now has a SaaS-oriented acquisition strategy, with more expected in the coming months to support its growth.
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For Abadie, who stepped into his latest role in June, Lectra’s ambitions stretch into steering the fashion world into what he calls the “fourth industrial revolution” — a future defined by AI, cloud computing and real-time data analysis.
The shift is fundamental and will boost brands’ revenues, as well as sustainability, he believes. “Fashion is a loop,” said Abadie. “You need to create, manufacture and market quicker than before. And before the steps were siloed — first you were focusing on create, then manufacture, then market. But now everything starts from the market.”
Abadie believes we’re in the midst of a move from the top-down “push” model of the past, when brands would dictate trends and drive production, to a “pull” model, where consumer demand influences everything from design to manufacturing and distribution.
Brands must understand consumer demand, identify trends, determine pricing and position products competitively — all at the same time. “Everything goes in parallel now,” he said.
It’s a shift that will fundamentally change the fashion industry, Abadie asserted.
In response to this transformation, Lectra has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy, snapping up six companies over the past few years.
Among them is Launchmetrics, acquired in January 2024, which provides brands with analytics tools to evaluate ROI from runway shows and media campaigns. It goes beyond the runway — though that, too, is expanding with invitation and event management tools — to assess consumer brand sentiment.
Despite ongoing economic challenges across the fashion sector, Lectra reported a 10 percent year-over-year increase in revenue for the 2024 fiscal year to 526.7 million euros.
Launchmetrics, consolidated as of January 2024, contributed 41.2 million euros, and fashion overall accounted for 50 percent of the company’s 2024 revenue.
Lanchmetrics’ latest initiative aims to analyze consumer perception through AI-driven analysis of buzz, mapping words like “responsible” or “innovative” to track how brands are perceived in real time.
“We track every post on social media, every magazine and newspaper,” Abadie said. Using an algorithm, it can gauge if response is positive or negative, and analyze what images are most popular by use in articles or posts.
This kind of visibility is increasingly valuable in a fast-paced environment where consumer attention must be maintained constantly amid the clamor of Instagram and TikTok, and “new-in” drops.
Abadie described this as a step closer to the “see-now, buy-now” model, where new products can reach consumers within weeks of being showcased on the runway, instead of months.
“Products now, they are coming to the store on a regular basis — if not every month, twice a month or every week,” Abadie said. “So the goal for the brands is really how they can attract consumers on a regular basis to the stores, how they can create several reasons for the consumers to go back.”
That same real-time agility is also reshaping production timelines. Lectra’s technologies allow brands to adapt to be closer to a “see-now-buy-now” model — products paraded on the runway can hit the shelves within a couple of weeks, rather than months.
“By interconnecting people around the same data…all those creative mindsets now, they can get a product in the hands of the consumers in a few weeks,” said Abadie. “That’s a tremendous shift.”
On the sustainability front, Lectra’s TextileGenesis platform seeks to improve supply chain transparency by tracing certified fibers such as organic cotton and recycled polyester. The system uses blockchain-inspired technology to track materials across the supply chain and flag discrepancies, such as mismatches between the volume of garments produced and the available supply of certified fiber. If they don’t match, there has been some mixing of fibers or misreporting along the way.
“If you are not, as a brand, capable to know who is behind your supply chain, you cannot master it,” Abadie said. “You cannot influence the decisions, you cannot make commitments.”
The platform has tracked 2.6 billion garments to date — up from 2 billion at the beginning of the year — with over 15,000 suppliers across Asia, Europe, and South America participating.
“Without traceability, there’s a risk of fraud. There’s a risk of greenwashing,” Abadie said. “That’s what we’re trying to solve.”
Other manufacturing products enable real-time adjustments in production planning. According to the company, this improves agility in responding to market fluctuations, while its on-demand production platform aggregates orders and aligns manufacturing with actual demand to reduce overproduction and waste, and allow for smaller, more frequent collections.
One company cited by Lectra has reportedly used the system to produce 5 million made-to-measure shirts in Vietnam for the U.S. market.
Driving all of this transformation is AI — not as a buzzword, Abadie noted, but as an embedded, working reality. “There are more and more concrete applications of AI, notably in fashion,” Abadie said. “Our belief is that the only way to shorten lead time, to close the gap between consumers and the brands, to use material resources in a responsible manner so to avoid CO2 emissions and so on — the only way is by digitizing the task and automating processes.”
The cloud, resisted a decade ago by fashion executives concerned about ensuring IP secrecy, is now essential. “Ten years ago I had an interesting discussion with a very famous luxury company” which refused to use the cloud, said Abadie. “Now I can tell you if you are not in the cloud, you are not competitive.”
Abadie also rejected the notion that technology and creativity are in conflict. Instead, he argued, technology allows designers to iterate and execute ideas more efficiently.
“People are pitting one against the other, creativity and technology,” Abadie said. “I don’t know why. Technology is leveraging the creative mindset of everyone, because you can iterate much more than in the past.”
An AI-empowered designer can test ideas, communicate specifications, and move from sketch to store faster than ever.
“If the rest of the value chain is digitized and the designer is not, then you create a conflict. Only technology can remove this barrier,” he said, noting that design does not come from the tech, but the tech is used to promote creativity. “I think it’s highly correlated — this notion of emotion and technology. Emotion starts from the product itself.”
