Seddi, which is dedicated to the digital design of textiles and garments, has received a $477,075 loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to help build up its commercialization team in Halifax.

With offices in Madrid, New York and Halifax, SEDDI has developed software that can be used to design fabrics and clothes, solving a problem that has bedeviled the global $2 trillion apparel industry for years.

“If you look around your office now, everything you see was designed on a computer – your computer, your desk, your chair,” said Alan Murray, Vice-President of Product and Co-President, in an interview. “That’s true of almost everything except clothing. . . . What we’ve come to realize is that soft materials are really, really hard to simulate.”

Unlike hard materials like wood and metal, fabrics curve and stretch and act in unusual ways when interacting with other fabrics or the soft tissue of human bodies. Even threads and yarns vary, not only in their width and strength, but in “hairiness”. All of these factors make it extremely difficult to simulate fabric on a digital platform.

Growing out of research at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, SEDDI has developed software that can create “digital twins” for all the components of clothing – threads, yarns, fabrics and clothes. In the interview, Murray mentioned several times that its solution is especially good at digital simulations of seams in clothing, which has proven complicated because it is where different fabrics meet.

More than 50 people now work for the company, including the 10-person commercialization team in Halifax, which is led by Murray and long-time tech entrepreneur Jason Powell. The ACOA loan to SEDDI Canada, issued under the Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program, will help to grow this team. The largest segment of the staff is the 40-member R&D team in Madrid, which includes 10 PhDs, and there is a team of executives in New York.

The company currently has three offerings that are being piloted or will be piloted by the first quarter of 2021. It is entering the market with a service that allows apparel- or textile-makers to send in fabrics for analysis. The SEDDI team examines a material at a microscopic level to understand the threads, the weaves, how light passes through it and other factors. This gives the customer a true digital twin of the material, said Murray.

SEDDI also has two Software-as-a-Service products called Showroom and Author, which can assist in the design and engineering of garments. The software can work on about 80 percent of the clothes produced, said Murray, and the team continues to work on applications for more complicated materials.

Murray said the company’s total addressable market is worth about $22 billion, with an initial focus on apparel industry supply chains. SEDDI has a social mission as well as a concern with making money, as it can reduce pollution (including green house gases) by improving the design and production processes of clothes. The apparel industry creates 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, and 12.8 million tons of clothing end up in landfills each year. By reducing trial and error in the production process, SEDDI hopes to reduce these numbers. 

The industry has wanted this sort of software for years, said Murray, and the COVID-19 crisis has only intensified demand. Trade shows are huge sales vehicles for clothing brands, and they haven’t happened during the pandemic, so a digital solution becomes more urgent.

“The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on apparel has been swift and dramatic. Storefronts have closed and supply chains halted,” said Murray. “This has increased the demand for digitally based supply chain solutions.”