Measuring 3D sampling and returns in sustainable fashion

Most 3D and AR vendors in fashion have a sustainability slide, and we had one for a while. The slide says that digital products replace physical ones, that fewer things get shipped and thrown away, and that the technology is therefore green. Part of that can be measured with figures a brand already collects. The rest is usually a number given without a baseline.

Fashion's footprint in public figures

The European Environment Agency measured the environmental cost of an average European's textile consumption. In 2020, per person, that was about 15 kilograms of clothing, household textiles and shoes, requiring 391 kilograms of primary raw materials, 9 cubic metres of blue water and 400 square metres of land, and producing about 270 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. The agency also notes that roughly 80 percent of those impacts happen outside Europe, in the countries where the material is grown and the garment is sewn.

The European Parliament's page on textiles gives higher figures for 2022: 19 kilograms of textiles consumed per person and about 355 kilograms of CO2. It also says that only about 1 percent of used clothing is recycled into new clothing. Anything 3D does in fashion affects a fraction of those figures.

Sample rounds that can be counted

The clearest saving from 3D in fashion comes before the product exists, in the sampling rounds.

In a physical sampling round, a factory cuts and sews a garment and couriers it across a continent. A design team looks at it, and most of the time it gets changed or dropped. Textile World, citing industry figures, reports that around 40 percent of sampling doesn't move forward into production, and that of the clothing that ends up in landfill, a quarter is samples that were seen once or twice at most. Digital sampling settles fit and colourway in software, so only the versions that survive get sewn.

Your company already counts this. You know how many sample rounds a style took last season and what each one cost in air freight. If digital sampling takes a style from four physical rounds to two, that difference goes straight into a report.

The saving depends on the physical samples being cancelled. A brand that runs both processes side by side saves time on the design side and no material.

Returns that can be partly counted

The second saving is parcels that never come back. The National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail put United States returns at 743 billion dollars in 2023, about 14.5 percent of sales, with the online rate at 17.6 percent. Each return means a van trip, packaging and handling, and some returned items are thrown away.

Better product information reduces returns. A shopper who has seen the true dimensions, the real fabric and the item on a body close to their own orders the right thing more often. Most vendor figures measure conversion, and a higher conversion rate and a lower return rate are separate claims that sometimes get presented as one. If someone tells you AR cuts returns by a specific percentage, ask for the study, the product category and the sample size. In our experience the effect is there for products where the doubt is about size and space, and much weaker where the doubt is about fit on a body.

You can measure this yourself with a plain test. Take twenty products and record their return rate for a quarter. Add 3D and AR and record it for another quarter, in the same season and at the same discount level.

Claims that have no measurement behind them

The claims in the left column need a life-cycle assessment behind them before they can go into a report.

What our own work supports

Most of our own work is in furniture, stoves and home products. MELIMELI, for example, shows each sofa in 3D with its fabric options switched on the same model, and places it in the customer's room through AR. From that work we can say that one 3D model replaces repeated photography of the same product, and that a correctly scaled AR view answers the size question behind many furniture returns. We have no CO2 figure for that.

Using this in sustainability reporting

If sustainability reporting is part of your job, "AR is green" is too vague to report. What you can report is that 3D assets let you make fewer physical things during development and ship fewer things back after sale, and both already show up in your cost data. Start by counting sample rounds per style and return rate per category. Then change one variable and count again.

To test the returns part, pick the product with your worst return rate and the most size-related complaints and send it to us; we'll build a 3D model of it free so you can put it live and watch the rate. The plans cover what it costs after that.

Sources

• European Environment Agency, Textiles and the environment: the role of design in Europe's circular economy (2020 per-person figures).
• European Parliament, The impact of textile production and waste on the environment (2022 figures).
• Textile World, feature on the benefits of 3D digital sampling, March 2024.
• National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail, 2023 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry.