Page 32 - Sustainability Report 2019
P. 32

 CHAPTER 3 | Material becomes creation
 3.1 From creativity to the finished garment, a guarantee of quality
Talent that lends form to ideas
Design is an innate gift, linked to artistic sensibility, imagination and the ability of the designer to gather and give form to the customer’s desires. It is a natural talent that cannot be taught.
What can, however, be taught and perfected is giving shape to ideas with the support of IT devices and graphics tablets, in order to best simulate working manually. Developing a complex prototype can require a full month’s labour of a designer, fully dedicated and working with great flexibility, creativity and willingness, to give form to the wishes of a customer that is increasingly multifaceted.
The moment of design has always been one of the
most crucial and delicate phases in Ratti’s production process. This phase does not follow a specific procedure or a constant method in that, mainly, the process is based both on the requests put forward by individual
customers, and on the creativity of the designers, who let themselves be guided by various forms of inspiration. In this sense the final design that is printed on fabrics may be seen as a form of meeting between the end-customer, who may request a product which has exclusive technical characteristics and which reflects the values of its brand, and the creative power of individual designers.
In other cases, for specific and precise requests, the customer is offered a design from the Ratti archive,
with the option of maintaining or modifying the various characteristics of the final product: from the design technique to the compositional pattern, to variations that could be added as the work is being produced. In the design phase a series of prototypes are created. These either propose a new edition of a previous project or a brand new design inspired by the selected sample. This is a road which is paved with perseverance, flexibility and innumerable attempts, before satisfaction is achieved with regard to the desired product.
In this phase, a crucial role is also played by the Product Manager or, in other words, the person who, right
from the start, interfaces with the market and receives customer requests.
In order to ensure that the various product managers in the Ratti Group carry out an effective role of filtering customers and designers, this phase requires the intervention of Product Management who, on the basis
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Creativity at
the click of a button
The digital management of the creative archive is born out of a need to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the processes, integrating design and production and making it easier to safeguard the intellectual property of the designs and images of customers and third parties.
For its digital archive, Ratti makes use of an API (Application Program Interface) for image recognition, classification and research using a cognitive computing system. The project is articulated in four steps: the digitalisation of physical references; data cleaning and
Heritage and modernity: a pair of words
that, in Ratti, look back over seventy years
of history and merge into a heritage
that is driven, always, by the search
for manufacturing excellence.












































































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