FABRIC BUTLER

Fabric Butler

Is the free mobile app we created for Albini Group. Fabric Butler digitizes all Albini Group collections and integrates an advanced mobile eCommerce for fabric purchasing and order tracking.

The challenge

Albini - the founding brand of the group of the same name - has been operating in the textile sector since 1876 and is the European leader in the production of high-end shirting fabrics. From the very beginning, the company has shown a marked innovative imprint and a vocation for internationalization. Today the group directly controls the entire production chain, from the raw material to the finished product.

Albini Group has expressed the desire to give customers direct access to the entire catalog and network of tailors, retailers and end consumers with a solution capable of combining tradition, technology and style, the cornerstones that distinguish the company.

The DuckMa move

In the first phase of project analysis, we realized that Albini's delivery sector was already structured to support an expansion of the Bespoke division, in charge of creating catalogs aimed at putting tailors and the market in relationship, both directly and through an independent reseller channel. The complexity lay in establishing new international business relationships with small businesses and artisans. Hence our intuition on the ideal tool to achieve the business goal and integrate with the sales materials already in use: the smartphone! As a result, the choice to develop a mobile app with a mobile commerce module came almost naturally. Fabric Butler is a native iOS and Android app dedicated to fans of high quality shirts. Thanks to an innovative and fully digitized catalog, Fabric Butler presents the entire range of Albini fabrics, offered by the best tailors in the world. The Albini Group Fabric Butler application is aimed at tailors, retailers and end consumers.

Feautures and benefits of Fabric Butler

  • Tailor Locator: the native app allows end consumers to locate the closest tailors using GPS and gyroscope;
    • Gamification: Fabric Butler guides the user in choosing the ideal fabric through a series of questions that play on his tastes and personal needs;
    • Innovative catalog
    • User interface customized according to the type of user
    • Mobile eCommerce
    • Textual and filter search
    • Cart and order history
    • Contact form
    • Account configuration.

    Killer feature: fabric scan

    A much felt need was to improve the experience of tailors, accustomed to using paper catalogs and then manually searching for the item codes in the eCommerce. The easiest way would have been to include a barcode (or QR code) for each item in the catalogs, a solution that would however have involved the reprinting of tens of thousands of catalogs and would have compromised the clarity and style of the catalogs. Only a native functionality could brilliantly solve the situation: the app uses the camera of the mobile device to identify and interpret the item codes from the catalog page in real time. Not having these codes a standard format, we have developed an ad hoc OCR functionality, customizing the TensorFlow machine learning framework and then instructing it to recognize these fabric codes.