T-shirts will be the primary focus of a new partnership between retail supply-chain company Li & Fung and US sewing technology company software.

The aim is to create a fully digital manufacturing supply chain for apparel and textile products. 
Softwear’s digital t-shirt Sewbot Workline is fully autonomous and with a single worker produces one complete t-shirt every 22 seconds – twice as fast as manual sewing.

“This partnership with Softwear Automation is another building block in our end-to-end digital supply chain,” says Li & Fung group CEO Spencer Fung. “Through this collaboration we want to partner with an initial set of manufacturers to create our first fully digital apparel supply chain and use those learnings to scale the technology and create customised systems for our supplier network around the world.”

“We have a shared vision with Li & Fung that the analog will become digital,” says Softwear Automation chairman/CEO Palaniswamy Rajan. “Consumers’ demand to get things faster than ever before is only increasing. With Li & Fung, our revolutionary Sewbots will enable the speed needed for on-demand, made-to-measure manufacturing at scale.”