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Announcer: Today on Building the Open Metaverse.
Christine Marzano: So that’s how I got into the idea of virtual fit, virtual try on. Not that those things hadn’t been attempted before, but the more and more that I looked at the space, the more I saw that none of those attempts had been made from anybody that understood fashion. It was all attempts made from, surely, the technology side.
Announcer: Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.
Marc Petit:
Hello everybody and welcome to our show, Building the Open Metaverse, the podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the open metaverse together. Hello, I’m Mark Petit from Epic Games and my co-host is Patrick Cozzi from Cesium. Patrick, how are you today? You’re back in the US?
Patrick Cozzi:
Hey Marc. I’m doing great. Yesterday I’m in my basement and we are recording on Halloween. And growing up, this was one of my favorite holidays where I was one of those kids with the big pillowcase getting hundreds of pieces of candy, but I didn’t realize that I was going to spend the rest of my life giving back all that candy. So we are one of the houses that gets the big king size bars. We have a big tent set up. So, looking forward to doing that tonight. But before we do that, we have a great episode.
Marc Petit:
Yeah and we’re super excited to welcome to our show, Christine Marzano. She’s the CEO and founder of BODS. Christine, welcome to the podcast.
Christine Marzano:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored to be on this podcast today with you guys and excited to talk about everything fashion in the metaverse.
Marc Petit:
Yeah, we love to talk about fashion.
Patrick Cozzi:
Well, once again, welcome Christine. We love to start off the podcast by asking our guests about their journey to the metaverse. I mean, in your case, I believe you started your career as an international runway model and an actress. You were one of the first fashion models to create your own photo-realistic, 3D avatar. Super forward looking. You’re a successful entrepreneur. Tell us about your journey.
Christine Marzano:
Sure. So yeah, I started out as a teenager in modeling. I was not exactly looking to go into that space but, as many of those stories go, I got discovered while doing a science project in Manhattan. I was doing research at a hospital at the time, and someone came and found me and asked me if I wanted to be a model. I thought, oh, maybe? And brought my dad there a few days later to make sure that it wasn’t a scam.
One thing led to another and, yes, I did model. I worked for some of the biggest brands in the world, walked the runways for people like Dior, for Saint Laurent, Gucci, all the biggest names. It was an amazing experience. It was an amazing experience to have at that age. You’re traveling all over the world. You’re sort of trying to figure out who you are but you’re doing that in an adult setting and you’re making your own money.
I saved my own money. Paid for university. I went to Princeton after I stopped modeling and had basically paid my own way because I had made some money modeling.
I also worked as a fit model as well towards the latter part of my career. I worked as a fit model for Victoria Beckham as well as Rachel Zoe. I think doing that really gave me some unique insight into how fit works for clothes. How fit is determined from brand to brand, why that’s different, why maybe it doesn’t work in certain cases. I think it’s an experience that not a lot of people get to have. You really are on the inside of all of those decisions that are being made. After graduation, I worked in theater so I did a ton of shows. I worked in TV and film so, again, worked with stylists, got dressed all the time. I had to figure out, if I am a sample size, why is the dress not fitting me? Those questions were always in the back of my mind.
I got into 3D and that whole space totally by accident. I was doing a lot of voiceover for film and TV and then I started to get asked to do VO for games. When I started to do that, that was my first introduction to motion capture and to that entire space. For me, the moment that happened, my mind just exploded. I looked at it and went, why aren’t we using this anywhere outside of games?
I wasn’t a gamer but I was watching it going, oh, I have so many ideas for where we could use this outside of gaming and I would do more motion capture. I interned at a motion capture company to learn about everything there and I just became obsessed with the space. I knew that no matter what I wanted to be part of it, I wanted to figure out how to bridge it into the spaces that I knew which was not the gaming space and which was primarily film and television and fashion.
It was 2017. I made my own avatar, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I thought, oh, I’m going to sell this into fashion and they’re going to think it’s amazing and I’m a genius, et cetera. It was way too early.
I mean, we’re talking about the open metaverse on this podcast. No one outside of sci-fi was using that terminology and no one in fashion was not only using the terminology but even thinking about anything remotely in that space. So I tried to sell it in. I tried to tell modeling agencies that they should digitize their rosters, get all their models digitized and they could have another revenue stream. Everyone looked at me like I was absolutely insane. They were like, Christine, we love you but come on. There’s no real need for this. Cut to covid and everyone that I had approached at that time all of a sudden started telling me, oh, about the digitization of those models. Are you still doing that? Are you still not?
So that was where I started. I was trying to figure out where could it fit? Where did it make sense? Where did it work in the spaces that I understood? But the fact that they thought I was crazy in 2017, 2018 actually worked in my favor because it made me really go back to the drawing board and do a lot of research into, okay, these might be fun for PR activations or something like that when I was thinking about my own avatar but where is their real utility? Because the only way I’m going to be able to sell into these brands if I can figure out where the actual value add is for them.
So I did all this research and I was looking at the space and really honed in on, okay, it’s fit. How do we make that experience better? Forget about me selling my avatar or these model avatars for right now into that space. Let’s do something that’s really going to make sense to their CFO right now. So that’s how I got into the idea of virtual fit, virtual try on. Not that those things hadn’t been attempted before, but the more and more that I looked at the space, the more I saw that none of those attempts had been made from anybody that understood fashion. It was all attempts made from, surely, the technology side.
What you have to understand, coming from the tech side, is that fashion is as siloed as their own group. Tech has its own group. 3D Graphics has its own group. It’s quite insular. It’s hard to break into. Fashion is exactly the same but in a different way.
No one had come at it from the fashion side and those who did didn’t understand the technology. So you either had a product that sort of worked but looked bad or a product that looked great and didn’t work at all. There was nothing that was really hitting anything even close to the middle. I thought this is where I can really make a difference in where I can really make my Marc. So that’s what I did.
I formed BODS and covid happened while we were doing that, which propelled the adoption of digital solutions in fashion anyway, which I would guess would’ve taken at least another five or more years. So we accelerated the acceptance. That was probably a long-winded answer to your question.
Marc Petit:
No, it’s perfect–a fascinating background. So, just for the sake of clarity, tell us what a fit model is? I think fitting is going to be at the heart of this conversation. So how does it happen today?
Christine Marzano:
A lot of brands, not necessarily mass market brands, but luxury brands in particular, use a model to fit their garments. They use that model as the base size from which they then size up and down. So they will create that model as their size model. That would be their, in luxury, size two or four. Some other brands, it’s maybe someone who is a size six. They’ll take that and then they will grade that garment up and down. It’s why fit doesn’t really work. I have really narrow hips, I always have. It’s hard for me to buy pants if I am your fit model, that means you’re grading the garment based off of my hips and you’re grading it up and down. So somebody who is a 10 still has to have fairly narrow hips for their size based on the sizing that brand has created. It was interesting to see that, to even wonder, oh, I’m the size model? This is fascinating.
Also what was cool, having worked as a model, was I had been in many photo shoots where they take those giant clamps that they use for lighting equipment and they use them to clamp the back of your outfits to make sure they fit tightly. If you’ve ever been in a shop and you see they pin up the back of a mannequin, they do the same thing on the real models in the real photo shoots.
So nothing that you see is actually providing you any indication of how that thing is going to fit you in real life. We’re getting poor information from all around. No number in sizing makes sense from brand to brand. That’s the reason why if I’m the fit model for one brand, then that size two is going to be very different than another size two where another person is the fit model who maybe is a bit curvier or who has just different proportions in general.
It’s super confusing for the end customer who’s like, why am I a two in this brand and a six in this brand and I’m a small here and I’m a large here? It makes absolutely no sense because there really is no standardization within the fashion industry for that so we’re looking for a standardization in the digital realm of it. It doesn’t even exist in IRL. So we might be able to push it from the digital side. We’ll see.
Patrick Cozzi:
So I’ve experienced this myself firsthand. So Christine, Marc knows I’ve actually lost 70 pounds since January, so I’ve been buying a lot of new clothes.
Christine Marzano:
Congratulations.
Patrick Cozzi:
I’ve learned that–oh, thank you, thank you–that sometimes I’m a small and then if I go to Japan, I’m usually a medium. Then, even within the US, the small might actually be too big for me.
Christine Marzano:
What I really love about what I’m doing at BODS is that it is something that everyone who has shopped e-com has dealt with. I don’t think anyone who has shopped apparel online has ever been like, oh my God, it was the best experience ever. I ordered exactly what I wanted. I got it. It looked amazing. It fit me perfectly, said no one ever. Whether they’re male, female, or trans anybody who has shopped online has had this same problem. It’s not something that you need to be an early adopter to want to engage with. It’s a problem that, Patrick, you have. It’s a problem that I have. Marc, I’m sure you’ve had it. Everyone has experienced this problem where you’re buying, you’re sending tons of stuff back. We can talk about this later too, but that is not a sustainable model. Whether it comes from the bottom line for the brands, how much money they’re losing on returns or just sustainability in general, packaging those things, sending them back, not reselling them because they come back in after the time that that garment was on sale, et cetera.
So then what are these brands doing? They’re dumping them in landfills. They’re burning them. I mean, it is not at all a sustainable solution. So the more information we can give to the end customer about what is going to fit them, the better off everyone is, the brands as well as the customer.
I think that I talk a lot about fit, not about size, because, as I mentioned earlier, fit is subjective and size is some random number that the brand has assigned to a specific garment that has no rhyme or reason. What we are trying to do for customers at BODS is to really give them a visualization of fit and they can determine for themselves, does this look too short? I don’t like when my shirt is that short or does this look like the arms might be too long? That’s always a problem of mine, but I like how the rest of it fits, so I will just buy it. All of those determinations are currently being made at home when the customer gets the items at home. Then they tried them on.
The funny thing we learned too is women shop differently than men. Men, if they have issues with size, they’re not sure, whatever, they won’t buy. Most women will buy three of the same thing in three different sizes knowing that they’re going to return at least two, if not all three.
You’re solving different problems for men and women. Women, you’re solving the problem of please don’t buy three things from our company and keep them out of stock and everything else and then return them. For men, you’re solving the problem of, yes, please become our customer because once you’re our customer, we know that you’re our customer forever. It’s super hard to get you over that initial threshold if there is any question around whether it’s going to fit you or not.
Marc Petit:
So please now tell us in more detail how you achieve that with your platform. So what does BODS do for retailers?
Christine Marzano:
For retailers, we work within their platform. We partner with them, integrate with their websites and we allow the customer to upload photos. They upload two photos and height and we create a 3D avatar of their customer. For us, this is super important. How do you create a personalized experience for your customer, which is what every brand and every e-commerce experience wants, personalization?
Right now you shop e-com and what do you get as far as personalization? You get some recommendation engine recommending things for you. That’s as far as personalization has come within e-commerce. What we’re doing is we’re taking it to the next step. We’re giving you your own body. Now, some brands are doing a better job of inclusive model representation. In the past you had a bunch of models, they all kind of looked the same, they were all the same size, everything else. Now you have models of different colors, models of different sizes but they still don’t represent all of your customers. What better than to allow your customer to represent themselves with their own body? So we create this 3D body off of the measurements using AI and then we actually use Unreal Engine to render the 3D bodies and we pixel stream or use WebGL in order to serve that up to the customer on top of–
Marc Petit:
How accurate is the body double?
Christine Marzano:
It’s very accurate. We’ve trained our AI off of huge, huge data sets. Could it be more accurate, even more specific if we were using, let’s say a body scan? Sure, but we have to split the difference between no customers have a body scanner in their house and LiDAR isn’t at the place yet where it’s super efficient. We’ve built the process so that, if we need to, we can swap out that front end portion of the process and have it include a scan if that’s what we want to do going forward. Right now, the goal is get as many people using it as possible. What we found from the women that have used the software is that they’re really shocked and impressed at how much they actually do believe that it represents their own body.
Marc Petit:
Don’t you think that for people to buy an improved version of themselves, it would be more enticing to buy than the actual version of themselves?
Christine Marzano:
If they would buy an improved version of themselves?
Marc Petit:
If it was an improved version of myself, maybe I would be more inclined to buy. You stick to the real measurement of the customer.
Christine Marzano:
We have to stick to the real measurement of the customer or else they’re buying the wrong size clothing, which is not good for anybody. But what we did do, and I think it’s a testament to my experience in fashion and the difference between us and the attempts that were coming from the technical side, is we didn’t make it look off putting. So there are things that you can do to make something look more attractive, look less off putting to the end customer than not. I think all of those decisions that we made, even if it is your actual size and measurements, it’s not something that you don’t want to look at.
I think that this is something that we found too. Most women were willing to engage with the avatar, even if they didn’t have great relationship to their body or things like that because they knew that it was helping them in the end make better decisions about their purchases. People who have more specific sizing have an even harder time making correct purchases online. But, yes, if you want to make a better looking body, you can do that, just not using our software.
Marc Petit:
Okay.
Patrick Cozzi:
So Christine, what about the acquisition of the garments and the materials, right? I could imagine the user running very high visual fidelity. What’s the state and what do you think the future is?
Christine Marzano:
So right now, I think one of the biggest things that brands were responding to with BODS when we launched a prototype was the fidelity of the garments. We have built a very large database of fabrics, fabrication, stretch factors, things like that, that we can pull from and that we can create very realistic textures based off of. I think that’s only going to continue to get better, not just with us, but in digital clothing in general. I think when I built my own avatar in 2017, it was hard for me to even find a T-shirt to dress it in. The only clothing that existed from my avatar then was some Wonder Woman stretch latex suit so I think we’re getting better.
There are many more brands that are actually investing themselves into creating garments in 3D. We’re seeing that happen on the brand level as well. There won’t even be a need for us, hopefully, going forward to be doing that much of that process because the brands will be doing it themselves. They’ll be doing it for all sorts of different reasons and uses of those 3D assets.
Patrick Cozzi:
Yeah, I hope so. Even outside of fashion, we see an infrastructure that we hope people make the digital version and the physical version at the same time.
Christine Marzano:
I think if you look at fashion instruction too, you see more and more digital fashion classes on the syllabus at places like FIT and other fashion schools. Once these new graduates start coming out of these places, they will have that skill set in their quiver and they will use that and they’ll push it within the places where they’re working. I think it’s inevitable that you have it and you already see investment being made in a lot of the bigger brands into creating digital assets.
Patrick Cozzi:
That’s super promising. So Christine, previously you mentioned two of my favorite things. One was WebGL and the other was pixel streaming with Unreal Engine. I was curious about your view of platforms when you look at web browsers versus native apps and what you’re adopting now, what you think the future will be.
Christine Marzano:
So we chose to keep it in browser and part of the reason for that decision was just, again, ease. Fashion customers are traditionally not tech savvy. Some are, and some of the younger ones are, but the majority of the ones who are shopping, especially luxury fashion, are not tech savvy. You need to make it as easy as possible for them to access your technology. It can’t feel off putting and it can’t be complicated. Even asking that customer to download an app is already a hurdle that you don’t want them to have to jump in order to use your software. So, for me, one of the most important things when I created BODS was it has to be easy to use and it has to work in browser. They have to never leave the brand’s website.
That’s another thing too that the brands don’t want. The brands don’t want them leaving their website to go to your app to come back to their website. So if they can keep their customer on their site and just engage with your software while still making the purchase at the end, adding things to their cart, that’s what we decided to do. I think that having it work in browser is just more advantageous in getting the end user to use it than trying to get them to download something separately, even if you’re going to have to sacrifice maybe a little bit of quality or something like that here and there.
Patrick Cozzi:
Yeah, I think that that ease of use in that streamline workflow makes a lot of sense, having that all in browser.
Marc, you may find this hard to believe, but I’ve actually had a few shirts and suits made for me and I’ve had to go download an app and then do the measurements and, yeah, it was a lot of steps compared to Christine, what you’re able to do online.
Christine Marzano:
And you are someone who likes technology. When I was building BODS, I was using my mom as a measure of whether or not people would use this. My mom is a 68 year old woman who I wouldn’t say is the most tech savvy person on the planet, but she uses e-com and she knows how to use her computer. Any time we would add a new feature, I would use my mother to test it out because if it seemed like it was too many things for her to do, I knew that your average fashion customer was never going to interact with it.
Marc Petit:
Are you happy with the capabilities and the economics of pixel streaming right now…
Christine Marzano:
I would like the economics to be better on pixel streaming. It’s why we’re looking more into WebGL and stuff like that because we would love for it to be the most economic decision, but at the moment it’s not.
Marc Petit:
Yeah, no.
Christine Marzano:
Any plan for it to be?
Marc Petit:
We’ve been pushing for it. I do believe it’s starting to happen with X Cloud and a number of platforms. I mean, it’s GPUs on the Cloud. Hopefully it will go down in price and it would be a boon for everybody.
Christine Marzano:
Oh, absolutely. I think the more economic pixel streaming can be, I think you’ll see a whole world open up for people with what they can do with realtime graphics.
Marc Petit:
Conversely, it’s one of the things we discussed on this podcast quite a bit. We need the wave APIs like OGL next version, web assembly, web GPU, to have better access to the hardware so that the gap between the browser version of an experience and the net version of an experience is narrower. Right now it’s pretty big, there are technology and security reasons, but there’s also a lot of platform policy reasons and we look for those to go away. Right now the two avenues have their own kind of limitations but I do believe that if the open metaverse is to take off, we need good browsing, good graphics in the browsers and we need pixel streaming to go down. I think we need to learn when to use which and create those hybrid experiences.
Christine Marzano:
I agree. That’s what we’re looking into right now. It’s like how do you create the hybrid experience that makes the most sense for your users?
Patrick Cozzi:
Christina, I had one more geek question for you, which is on the physics simulation. When you think of body movement and then the garment movement, what’s the state and where do you think it will go?
Christine Marzano:
The current state of cloth simulation is not anywhere near the current state of other types of simulation. I actually think and, I could be wrong, but that’s a testament to the fact that A, it’s extremely difficult but B, it wasn’t something that was ever really thought about that deeply by gamers. They wore garments that were close to the body. They were those wonder woman suits, right? You didn’t really need to think about cloth simulation. There weren’t that many women that were working in those areas either. I don’t mean to put it in those sort of, men do this and women do this, but I do think that when you’re thinking about fashion, when you’re thinking about things, yes, there are tons of men that are involved in fashion, but those men probably weren’t also working in gaming.
Most of the guys that I know who are working in gaming didn’t have a huge fashion background. It wasn’t a priority. It wasn’t something that people were putting a lot of attention into. I think that now that we are, and now that we’re seeing that there is a whole opportunity within fashion and within garment assets and things like that, there will be a lot more people that are actually putting in time, energy, and focus as are we within our own company into making cloth simulation better. At SIGGRAPH, there were two great papers and presentations this year about cloth simulation. I think it’s just a matter of time before we get there and I think we’re going to get there sooner than people think. The only reason we didn’t get there at the same time as maybe we got there with muscle simulation and whatever is just because it wasn’t a priority.
I think what we’re doing with BODS is interesting because it’s the inverse of what fashion on bodies and gaming was always meant to be. It was take the garment, make it fit to the body, and then do your thing. What we are trying to do is say, here’s the body. This garment may not fit this body, what does that look like? How does that simulate? So it’s kind of the opposite of what garments on avatar bodies and gaming were created to do. I think as we see that there’s more and more need for that and there is more need for simulation for realistic type garments that aren’t just things that are spandex. We will see that change we need.
Marc Petit:
So the layering problem, the class interaction. How do you put a jacket on top of a shirt and heavy–
Christine Marzano:
We’re working on stuff like that internally right now. How do you layer clothing? How do you layer specific types of clothing? What kind of parameters can you set for things like that as far as simulation? If there’s anyone else that’s working on that that wants to come and help us, we are always open to new ideas.
Marc Petit:
So where is your money? Where do you think the solution will come from? Is it going to come from a game engine? Is it going to come from a fashion industry? Specialty software company? Like Clo3D or Browzwear. Where’s your money on?
Christine Marzano:
I think it’s going to come from a mixture because each of them has their own advantages and things that they are good at. For one of them to create all of those things together I think is going to be really hard. I think our best bet is if all of those things are working together with the same goal of, okay, we are going to make a great cloth simulation. Whether that’s going to happen or not, I don’t know. We spoke earlier about whether there should be standardization. I think right now it would be super helpful if there was a standard for 3D garments and things like that in the way that they could interact within these different metaverses, et cetera. If we can get there, I think that would be super helpful.
Marc Petit:
Are people starting to design garments in 3D or is it still mostly a 2D panel stitching process? Is there design data in 3D in the garment industry, in the fashion industry?
Christine Marzano:
Yeah. A lot of the manufacturers are already using 3D in order to do the manufacturing. It’s already on that part of the life cycle of a fashion design process, whether it’s happening in the very beginning, I think it’s still new. A lot of brands, especially more luxury brands, are very deeply rooted in tradition, in craftsmanship, in all of those things. So for them to completely switch over to digital design as the starting point is a huge ask right now because to them, they feel like they’re losing some sort of the tradition or craftsmanship. I don’t think you want to ask the brands to do that, but I think when it comes to more fast fashion and things like that, they are looking into whether they can design digitally and what that looks like for them and how that means that they can more quickly sample and they can quickly turn around trends and fashions and things like that. It depends on which sector of the industry you’re talking about, but I think it’s coming.
Marc Petit:
Okay. Yeah, it’s interesting. We support an old couture maison in Paris called Jean-Charles Worth couture and, interestingly, they are the most advanced thinking people. I’ve seen those old couture people try to improve their fitting process because they need to fit to the real person. Each piece of clothing is unique. They use a virtual model for the runway so that you could do more looks or they could actually show on the runway more variation of the looks in a different size. I think even the old couture people, [person] and his company, they’re really thinking deep about those problems. They are very, very optimistic about how technology can help, even though couture is the most manual craftsmanship on the planet.
Christine Marzano:
Of course. I used to do those before. I would do it for Dior. I would show up at the atelier the day before and they would be pinning muslin on your body into the shape of the garment. Then you would show up the next day for the show and, magically, they had created this insanely beautiful gown out of the muslin that they had been pinning to you the night before. So I’ve been part of that process as well and it’s amazing. It is so high touch and if they are willing to embrace technical things, then that’s huge but I think he is rare in that.
Marc Petit:
Yeah. He did the skins for PUBG. I mean, you think of an old couture designer taking the time…pretty deep thinker out there.
It’s an interesting segue. We talked about virtual try-ons and how using your digital body, you can improve the selling of a physical piece of garment, reduce the returns, the economics, the impact on the environment. This is all great stuff but once you’ve got the digital body and you’ve got a digital clothing, could you do more than fitting and get into the digital fashion market yourself? How do you see the future of BODS there?
Christine Marzano:
I think that once you have a digital asset, you can use it for many different things. If you’re giving your customer utility first, why not then see if they want to go on a different journey with you as well into the metaverse or into any type of those experiences? That’s sort of how I see it. If you’re giving them something that really works for them, now, you can take them on that journey as it becomes more and more clear to everyone.
Marc Petit:
So, really, where we are a lot hinges on that Cloud stimulation technology because if we had proper digital twins and if we had virtual clothing that would behave more like real clothing, we would unleash a big market.
Christine Marzano:
Of course. That’s the way I built BODS and I did it strategically as well. Right now, we don’t have to have the avatars running around and jumping and spinning for the purposes of what we are providing and the utility there. I can ride the wave of cloth simulation until it gets there. I don’t think that a lot of the stuff that’s being put out now that is fashion within the metaverse looks good for that exact reason. So the more that I can contain the need for that, until we actually get to the point where it looks amazing and where the product that you’re putting out matches the product that you’re putting out on a real couture runway, I don’t have to make that decision until that point. I built the company specifically in that way because I think that fashion does really care about what things look like. That is their business.
If we’re trying to sell them something that’s digital, that looks subpar to what they’re putting out in the real world, it’s going to be a much harder sell than if we try and sell them into something that looks incredible and also has all these fantastical elements that they can add to it. There has to be a baseline there where they think their product is being represented in the same high quality, amazing light that it is IRL.
Marc Petit:
And if we have simulation, we would still have the fitting problem in the metaverse. So can we come back on the topic of standardization? We know with the Metaverse Standards Forum there are some people thinking about trying to create the 3D equivalent of size charts. How would you go about that?
Christine Marzano:
That’s a huge question. I think that there are lots of ways that you could go. There are lots of ways in that you could try and start to do standardization, whatever that is, but size charts are–even from brand to brand, from country to country–they are wildly different. It would have to start in that way. Then, I would love to be part of a conversation around standardization for digital fashion.
Then again, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with XKCD, the tech comic guy. He basically did a little comic about, okay, there are 15 standards but we should really get one standard that has everybody on board. Yeah, it’s a great idea and then it’s like, okay, now we have 16 standards that are working for everybody.
I don’t know what the answer is. I have a few different ways that I think I would go about it, but I’d love to be part of a bigger conversation with people that are from both the fashion side as well as the technical side to see what is truly possible. I think having competitive 3D garment softwares and things like that are not the answer because it’s just going to continue to silo things. We see, right now we have brands that use Browzwear, we have brands that we’re working with that use Clo. We can use both in our pipeline but it would be wildly easier if there was one thing that was coming. I don’t know if that’s a possibility or not but we’ll see.
Patrick Cozzi:
Christine, the open standards and interoperability has been a theme and a topic on every episode that we’ve done on the podcast. So, stepping back from garments and just thinking about avatars in general, you have an avatar system today. If you thought about it, if you would integrate that with other systems and if you were to standardize with avatars, where you would start?
Christine Marzano:
Yeah, we’ve been thinking about where we would integrate if we were to integrate with another avatar system and what that would look like for us. I don’t think it’s bad to be able to integrate and work with other avatar systems. I think it’s a matter of which one do you choose and when do you choose to do that? I think because we also don’t need to make that decision just yet in the way that I built the company, for me it’s like, why don’t I just wait and see which one makes the most sense to be interoperable rather than trying to build a rigging system right now that works for X or Y or Z, and then X and Y don’t exist in two years and Z does. We’re building the stack with that in mind, but making the decision right now I think might be foolish for a startup, I guess.
Marc Petit:
Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s talk about this from a different perspective, which is our privacy. Inaccurate representation of your body, especially for me, would feel like some very private data. How do you envision data protection and show identity? Because it’s becoming very close to something we care about.
Christine Marzano:
For sure. BODS don’t have heads right now, so they don’t have faces. I think that in and of itself is huge, right? It’s your body, sure, but is anyone really going to recognize it without your face? Maybe. But I think the fact that there is no face is a little bit better and makes people feel a little bit more comfortable.
I also think it comes down to the privacy policies of the company. We are building this product for you. We are not building it for your data and I think that’s huge. The more and more companies that can embrace that is great. That being said, we are also working with privacy experts to figure out ways that we can make sure that, as we do introduce faces down the road or things like that, these can be protected. So it is, again, something that we’re thinking about and something that we have built into the identity of BODS and the fabric of BODS. We don’t want people feeling like their personal identity is unsafe or unsecure with us.
Also, right now, we don’t have any identifying marks on the bodies either. That is something that we have talked about including in the future, but it’s only really if customers think they want or need it. Sometimes for tattoos, people are like, yeah, I would like to have this but we don’t have birth marks or things like that on the body that would also be really identifiable. So, it’s a little bit more anonymized data than if we were truly scanning your body and having it there.
Marc Petit:
So switching gears, you’re a woman entrepreneur in technology–from a runway model, to entrepreneur in technology and at the bleeding edge of technology in digital fashion. Do you have specific advice to other female entrepreneurs?
Christine Marzano:
I think.
Marc Petit:
How was it? First of all, how was your experience?
Christine Marzano:
It was definitely interesting. For me, I’ve always been somebody that has not been afraid to do anything. I don’t know where that comes from. Maybe it’s something that is wrong with me, but I have never been afraid to take on a challenge head on. Even becoming an actor, it’s the worst business in the world. You’re being rejected on a daily basis. You’re going to auditions, you’re just being rejected, rejected, rejected. That doesn’t sound like something that a sane person would want to do, but I’ve always just been like, I’m going to try. I’m going to do it. I really like this thing, and why not? So for me, I didn’t really think that much about it before I jumped in. I just thought, this is a great idea. I’m obsessed with this space. I feel like I have the right set of skills that could combine these two otherwise siloed worlds.
Who else was really doing that at the time? Nobody. I was like, there is no one else that I know of in the fashion space that’s really trying to work in this other 3D space. So I would say for a female entrepreneurs or any entrepreneur, really–I don’t think it’s just for women–your journey allows you to have a unique perspective on the world. Had I not been a model or had I gone into banking, that was what everybody had been being recruited out of Princeton to do instead of going into acting or whatever I had chosen as my path, would’ve set me up for something very different. If I had never done that voiceover job, I would’ve never been exposed to MOCAP and 3D. So my advice would be A, take all the opportunities that come your way because you never ever know which one will really get you passionate, what will change your life trajectory.
If you had asked me when I was 17 what I would be doing now, there’s no way I would’ve ever said, oh, I’m going to have this digital avatar company with fashion. No, I didn’t even know that existed. It didn’t exist. So I would say to any entrepreneur, always be open minded. Take any opportunity that comes your way and then once you go after it, really go after it. I mean, I knew nothing about 3D, about pixel streaming. I’ve read every single book or I keep up with all the blogs and I make sure, I mean, I was weirdly stalking Marc on LinkedIn being like, what is Unreal doing? That’s what you have to do in order to keep up. Like you said, we’re at the bleeding edge of technology, so things are changing daily and if you are not aware of that, you don’t have that advantage with your company.
So just keep reading. Try and get to know as much as you possibly can about your space, even if it’s not the space that you have a ton of information or knowledge base in already. I was confident enough that what I was bringing from the fashion side was real and was good and was robust. If I could just make sure that I could level up on the other side, I really would have this killer combo of skills. Leading a team of men, for female entrepreneurs, is not the easiest. When you’re working in technology, especially when you’re working in graphics and 3D, there are not a lot of women.
Running a team when your expertise and background is not necessarily theirs is a skill that you have to hone and practice and make some mistakes and kind of rejigger. That was definitely something I had no experience with. I didn’t know how to run a team of engineers. I had never been an engineer myself but I think at the end of the day, as long as there is mutual respect, it works. So for any entrepreneur, but especially women, if you’re working with a team of men, there has to be mutual respect. If there’s not, there is a problem. Either you have to figure out the way that you’re managing the team or that person needs to go. That would be, again, my long-winded answer to what I would say to female entrepreneurs.
Marc Petit:
Yeah, that’s great to hear. Anything specific? If somebody needs to get into technology for fashion, what do they need to know about the fashion industry? In two words, what’s the specificity of the fashion industry?
Christine Marzano:
If someone from tech wanted to get into the fashion industry? Two words. I think you just have to change your mindset a tiny bit, because most engineers are extremely pedantic and focused on quality in what they are excited about. If you can just shift that focus of quality onto the fashion garment and realize that that is the way that the fashion brand or industry is thinking about it, you’re set. If you can take that same focus and be like, okay, so they care that the length of this cashmere is this long and apply your OCD to that, you got it but I think it’s hard to make that shift. It’s like, who cares that the cashmere is that long or that sort? They care. That’s why it matters. So I think the skill sets are there to really get into the nitty gritty of those things. It’s trying to figure out what those are.
Fashion is all about look and presentation. If you can make sure that the look and presentation match what their expectations are, you’re golden. Granted, it has to work as well, but it’s very important to them. It may not always be important to somebody that’s coming from the tech side. They’re focused on, it’s efficient, it’s working. Fashion does not care about efficiency. They want it to work.
Marc Petit:
Patrick, do you know the difference between muslin and organza?
Patrick Cozzi:
I do not.
Christine Marzano:
Okay. These types of things, you should know the difference between fabrications. You can learn those things. I think that the jump to learn the difference between muslin and organza is a much smaller jump than me trying to figure out the difference between WebGL and pixel streaming.
Marc Petit:
Yep, I agree.
Christine Marzano:
So it’s definitely not something that I think people should be afraid of. It does seem daunting at first if you’ve never dipped your toe in there but once you’re in, you’re like, okay, I understand this. This is how this works.
Marc Petit:
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
Christine Marzano:
You’re welcome.
Patrick Cozzi:
Christine, this conversation has been a ton of fun. I really admire your drive and your passion and how forward looking you’ve been. We were talking about, you’ve seen two worlds, the technology and fashion world, that are siloed. Your unique journey showed how you could connect those. I think in so many success cases I’ve seen in my life, it’s been all about the intersection of two areas. The advice that you gave for entrepreneurship, was some of the best I’ve ever heard in my life. I have a friend who is starting up a venture and I will be sending her this episode and telling her to go to that exact question, so thank you for that.
We like to wrap up with a shout out if there’s any person or persons or an organization you’d like to give a shout out to.
Christine Marzano:
It might sound stupid, but my family. My family has always been the biggest supporter of me from every single crazy idea I’ve had from the time I was a little kid until I was trying to make avatars and sell them into fashion. People who knew better than them were saying, oh, you’re going to have to change customer behavior. It’s never going to work. My family just continued to support me and said, well, you know what? If you really believe in it, we know that you will work hard to make it happen. They’ve always been my biggest champions, my biggest supporters and, at times, my biggest critic which I think has helped me remain grounded and not do anything that’s too insane. But yeah, my family. I am so lucky and I’ve realized that throughout my life that I do have people that are supportive and are my biggest cheerleaders.
Patrick Cozzi:
That’s a great shout out.
Marc Petit:
Great. Thank you so much, Christine. We were delighted to have you on this podcast. To me, you’re a model in many, many ways. As an entrepreneur, as a founder and CEO of BODS, the mission of BODS is fascinating to me. So BODS.me, by the way, is the website. If somebody wants to look at what the garment looks like, it looks fabulous. The quality that you get is quite amazing. Thank you very much for being with us.
Christine Marzano:
Yeah, BODS.me and, like I said, if anyone is interested in the space or wants to have a chat, reach out. I’m always available.
Marc Petit:
Sounds like someone who’s hiring right here.
Christine Marzano:
We’re looking for people who always have new ideas. So yeah, thanks so much for having me, guys. I really, really appreciate it. This has been so much fun.
Marc Petit:
It’s been a real pleasure. It’s been a treat. Thank you very much to our audience. We like to hear your feedback, so keep hitting us on social. Let us know what you think. Let us know who you want to hear from. Thank you everybody. Thank you Patrick and thank you again, Christine. It was a pleasure.
Patrick Cozzi:
Thanks everybody.
