Fabric Butler by Albini Group
Albini Group is a company in the textile sector founded in 1876. Since its origins, Albini Group focuses on attention to the quality of raw materials, on reliability towards customers and has always shown an accentuated vocation for 'innovation. Today Albini Group controls the entire supply chain, from raw material to finished product.
Albini Group customers are tailors from all over the world - we speak of small shops as well as internationally renowned brands - to whom the company's catalogs are addressed.
The desire to have direct access to the entire network of tailors, resellers and end consumers pushed the group to seek a solution that could combine tradition, technology and style to give everyone immediate access to the exclusive world of Italian haute couture. The search for this solution started from a fulcrum that unites all needs: the smartphone. Hence the Fabric Butler App.
Fabric Butler is a native iOS and Android app dedicated to those who love high quality tailored shirts.
Thanks to an innovative catalog, Fabric Butler presents the entire range of Albini fabrics offered by the best tailors in the world. The app can be used by tailors, retailers, final consumers who are already customers and final consumers who have never been customers: each user has a personalized user interface, depending on whether he belongs to one of these four groups.
Fabric Butler has all the typical features of an ecommerce: a main page with editorial content (news, latest trends, shortcuts, etc.), a rich catalog divided by brands, books, pages with over 1500 images and product descriptions, text search and with filters, cart and order history, contact form and account configuration.
It is easy to understand that the pluses of a mobile ecommerce derive largely from the hardware features made available by the device: Fabric Butler is a native app and therefore is able to exploit the network, GPS and the camera to obtain concrete application advantages. .
One of the requested objectives was to improve the experience of tailors, accustomed to using paper catalogs and then manually searching for the article codes in the ecommerce. We found the solution in the native functionality: the app uses the camera of the device to identify and interpret the item codes in real time from the catalog page. As these codes are not in a standard format, we have developed an ad hoc OCR function, customizing the machine learning framework Tensor Flow and then instructing it to recognize these fabric codes.
With Fabric Butler, end consumers can view the map of the tailors closest to their location. By exploiting the hardware features of the device (in particular: GPS and gyroscope) with the scroll and pinch to zoom, the user can search for Albini tailors in the world, see the details and choose who to send the wishlist to.
In the Fabric Butler project we were supported by two Albini Group technical partners: the first took care of the development of the back end, the second of the UI / UX study. In regards to development of both iOS and Android, we were also hired for all the coordination and project management activities, dictating priorities and times and taking care of synchronizing the work to optimize the releases on the stores of the intermediate versions of the apps.