Written by Peter Kerr

Photograph by Sabrina Hyde

VENTURE capitalists normally aren’t too interested in the fashion industry. You can understand their reluctance. In which part of its mercurial mayhem can you make a scalable play? Besides which, venture capitalists typically don’t have networks among such beautiful people.

Wellingtonian Sebastian Marino has been gaining lots of venture capitalist interest however, though as this article goes to press he continues to decline to comment officially on 77 Pieces’ early stage funding status.

The market in this case is fashion design. 77 Pieces can take a 2D pattern and blow it up to a virtual 3D image and back again. Does the seat of a pair of pants look too baggy? No problem, trim it on the model and the 2D pattern is automatically reconfigured. He’s also cracked the grading issue, with patterns and models able to be adjusted proportionally and correctly while getting larger or smaller.

All that sounds simple, but there’s a mass of mathematics and algorithms sitting behind what happens on screen. In fact, from Marino’s point of view the maths is comparatively speaking the easy part.  But then again both he and his business partner are mathematicians. Marino is an American who arrived in the capital a couple of years ago for a gig at Weta Digital, and co-founder Joseph Teran is a world-leading maths professor from University of California, Los Angeles.

Marino picked up an Academy Award for clothing simulations in 1999 Star Wars movie The Phantom Menace. Together, the 77 Pieces founders have published more than 30 academic papers on solid and fluid dynamics, which have been cited over 600 times. The maths component of the company is also the part that’s IP protected by a “wall of lawyers”.

“We’re not concerned about our ability to execute the technology, that’s our job and we do it well,” Marino says. “We simply want to help fashion designers do amazing work, faster. Our ideology is to be the magician’s assistant, and our goal is to make a revolutionary tool for designers that’s simple and easy to use.”

He’s recently been carrying out business modelling such as market positioning and costing frameworks (when he’s not pulling all nighters writing computer code), and is slightly relieved to have this side of launching his business behind him. He says the assistance he has received from Barbara Grieve at Grow Wellington’s Creative HQ around this planning is invaluable.

Marino is now concentrating on an onscreen computer interface that has a super high polish, is refined and easy to use, and is slick enough to appeal to designers. “We’re working with a virtual, live piece of cloth,” he says. “We want to move past just a mouse to explore new ways to manipulate something onscreen. There’s interesting new interface challenges. How do you create this type of system with the physics always on? It’s never been done before.

“We also want designers to know how to use it in five minutes,” he says. “And with no instruction manuals . . . something that’s really obvious. I just counted the number of user interface components in a competitor’s product; there are over 1000 menu items, and over 500 toolbar buttons. We’re not getting paid to paint icons. We’re getting paid to make useful software. We won’t waste anyone’s time with that kind of nonsense.”

In fact, Marino envisages that the next major part of the work, for which probably three Wellington-based software engineers will be required, is to get this part of the experience dead right. “It has to work more like a game than a CAD (computer-aided design) program,” he says. Down the track, the user interface will need to be developed for iPads and multi touch screen technologies.

Marino says that the United States, with its US$317 billion fashion market, is the obvious first market to crack, though the beta version is currently being tested in New Zealand by a select few. By the time it hits the market in late 2011, probably in November, he expects the program to be bug free and ready to rock.

There’s an interplay going on between how easy it is to use and how inexpensively it can be sold. “We want to find a way to have a volume of adoption, but, with selective distribution,” he says. “It’s not a toy for someone to download and trial. We will have to have personal contact and be a company that’s there for designers and we want to be alongside those who are doing interesting work. We want feedback and to know how it is working for you.”

77 Pieces will be launched as a SaaS (software as a service) model with an annual subscription. “This enables us to have a significantly lower cost of entry, constant contact and constant updates and new features without bundling things under new charges,” he says. One of the main targets is designers used to Adobe-type design software, with the goal of not pricing 77 Pieces out of the market. “We want to be as cost competitive as possible, and looking to have a high adoption rate,” Marino says.

As such it doesn’t matter physically where the business is located, “as every- thing is virtual”, he says. “We can execute from anywhere, but we’re dedicated to 77 Pieces being a New Zealand technology company. We’ll work hard to develop the R&D organisation needed to sustain 77 Pieces here.” Marino himself will be “where I have to be, though I envisage I’ll be up in the States a fair bit this year”.

Already the news of his software and its application to the fashion industry has generated a tonne of interest, he says. As new, enabling technology, Marino says they’re really looking to “cook gas”.