Education Conference held by Lectra brings together 36 teachers and directors

Paris – Lectra invited its "Privilege" partners from the education world to its second international conference, held over two days at the end of October.

This event brought together 36 teachers and directors from 21 of the best-known fashion schools and universities in China, France, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.K. and Switzerland. As part of its network of more than 680 schools, these "Privilege" partners have built solid relationships with Lectra over a number of years, allowing the company to develop a personalized partnership approach in order to support students and prepare them for their future professional careers.

Lectra’s second education conference provided a forum for an enriching exchange between the different participants—schools, universities, major customers and Lectra’s teams—exploring teaching methods and schools' projects, Lectra’s latest developments, and the issues and key challenges faced by fashion manufacturers.

Lectra's specialists presented its high-potential, value-added fashion product lifecycle management technology, along with the new Lectra Fashion PLM V2R1 solution. Lectra’s teams placed particular emphasis on the need to make students aware of this major development in the fashion industry and to integrate PLM into a genuine teaching project.

Also at the heart of discussions was the ways in which Lectra’s solutions can optimize product development activities. The design offices of Oxylane/Decathlon are equipped with Lectra’s solutions, and the group’s tools and processes manager explained the importance of ensuring processes are consistent throughout the group and of implementing the same solutions to maintain high levels of productivity, all the while protecting the unique identity of each of the group's brands.

The schools went on to present their teaching of software solutions, specifying that this is provided in response to a clear demand from fashion companies for this kind of training. Representatives from Esmod Paris and the Istituto Secoli de Milan explained how Modaris ExpertPro—Lectra's advanced pattern-making solution—has been integrated into their training curricula. Similarly, the fashion high school in Cholet, (France) a forerunner in the teaching of Modaris 3D Fit, presented a variety of projects developed by their students using 3D virtual prototyping.

London-based designer, Maria Grachvogel, also attended the seminar to share her experiences. Using her own creations as examples, she explained how Kaledo® and Modaris®—Lectra's integrated fashion design offer—can be used to accelerate not only style but also print design. This point was reinforced by several schools such as Parsons The New School (USA), Central Michigan University (USA), Hong Kong Polytechnic (China) and York Saint John University (England) all of whom included Kaledo in their teaching programs from the moment it was launched.

At the end of the education conference, Nannet van der Kleijn, Creative Director of the AMFI (Amsterdam Fashion Institute—the Netherlands) spoke for all participants when she declared, "This event includes a great mix of creativity, innovation and technique and has been an extremely constructive exchange and sharing of experience. Presentations from companies as different as Decathlon and Maria Grachvogel have underlined the diversity of our market and have shown that Lectra's solutions meet a wide range of needs.”