Experts

Nico's expertise includes applying new digital and biological technologies to footwear. She has been 3D printing wearable shoes for three years, teaching and consulting on the specialty. For over 25 years she has consulted with leading footwear brands around the world, including Timberland, Vans, Birkenstock, CAT and Diesel, machine manufacturers like Atom, and material suppliers like Stahl. Nico guest lectures at various universities on broad future vision and creating original and effective solutions both for start-ups and established companies.

Mitch has been an expert in 3D footwear for more than a decade. In his current role as 3D Innovation Manager at Deckers Brands, he is implementing a holistic approach to automatically generate patterns, costing, and bill of materials using virtual prototypes at the very beginning stages of the design process. He has collaborated with numerous software companies to develop footwear specific tools to streamline the digital creation process.

Darren has worked in software and digital transformation technologies for fashion and retail for over 20 years. He brings his extensive experience and vision for innovative technologies in emerging markets to the Material Exchange, a platform that works directly with the world's leading retail apparel and footwear brands to analyze, optimize, and digitize their supply chains. The Material Exchange promotes best practices for product creation, data management and PLM integration.

Janne's passion is to empower and advance the 3D printing industry, and he has been doing this for two decades in the form of product design, building companies, and investing in moonshot ideas. His focus is to create 3D Value Networks in footwear and to fuel footwear professionals' desire to change by sharing his creative approach to solving big problems in the world.

With his innovative outsole factory ALOFT, located in Portugal but working worldwide, Pedro is pushing the boundaries of digital design and manufacturing, especially when it comes to sole design and mold making. Together with Jens Schmidt he will talk about how to ensure that your digital designs are not just fancy pictures, but actually manufacturable.

Andrey is internationally known for his achievements in virtual retail, but this time he is showing another side of his knowledge and his company, helping footwear brands to set up their digital design flow in the most efficient way possible, so they can be "smart from the start". His low-cost, cloud-based applications that are specialized for footwear make it possible to work quickly and do not necessarily require staff to have any kind of 3D design training.

Foundry is of course known for Modo, the software package that allows designers to make renderings of footwear that are so photorealistic that they can be sold as virtual prototypes. This time, they will focus on how to streamline your workflow using Modo, giving concrete examples of best practices across a range of their customers.

Ales has over two decades of experience applying 3D foot scanning technology to the footwear industry, and studying large (millions) datasets of 3D footscans. As one of Volumental’s earliest employees, he has been the chief architect behind Volumental’s revolutionary fit engine, an AI-based footwear recommendation software powered by Volumental’s database of 10 million foot scans called ‘Volumental Recommend’. He recently wrote a scientific paper, analyzing 1.2 million foot scans from North America, Europe, and Asia, published in Nature (Scientific Reports).

What if you could develop a system that creates optimal shoes for each individual consumer, involving participants from various disciplines—from doctors to designers to the wearer—improving those shoes based on actual user data that is gathered with sensors? In a nutshell, this is what Troy Nachtigall researched for his PhD Thesis "Materializing data". He will be sharing his insight on what is needed to make such a system a reality, covering technological, medical, creative, and legal aspects.

A founding partner of Strategies, Jean-Marc has helped developed collaborative solutions for the footwear industry for 25 years. As digitalization becomes more demanding, his company is moving beyond CAD to FIM (Footwear Information Model), an integration of 3D/2DCAD with material database, enabling brands to connect with users. 3D virtual models are sent to the marketplace to detect trends before going to actual manufacturing, minimizing costly mistakes. FIM also offers a new and realistic shopping experience by making Fashion to Factory a reality.

Andy oversees FDRA’s communications, reports, events, and advocacy strategies. He heads up FDRA’s innovation working group which develops education programs and unites innovation directors and executives across the industry to solve common challenges. Andy has helped companies understand emerging digital design and development programs via 3D technologies, as well as software that improves development and supply chain management. He also helped develop a digital material database called Material Exchange.

When it comes to digital local manufacturing of high-level performance footwear using cutting-edge software and hardware, Jens Schmidt is THE expert, since he is actively doing it with his Footwear Innovation Lab in Pirmasens, Germany. He also partners and consults on this topic for brands around the world.

Patterns.ai is an artificial intelligence company specializing in digital personalization of consumer lifestyle products. The company has developed groundbreaking optical recognition software that could be used for a wide range of purposes in fashion. You will hear how this technology can be applied to help designers quickly select the right last or sole mold from archives of existing tooling, saving the cost of unnecessary production of new tooling and lowering companies' footprint.