Your clothes are about to get real smart. Thanks to a brand new partnership between Fortune 500 packaging company Avery Dennison and Internet of Things startup Evrythng, we’ll soon be inundated with connected clothing, sending us headfirst into the 21st century of fashion. Thanks to the collaboration, no less than 10 billion apparel and footwear products will soon be switched on, which means having “unique digital identities and data profiles in the cloud.” Over the next three years, the two firms will be working together to bring what is believed to be the largest number of IoT-connected products implicated in a single deal to life.
“Avery Dennison is offering powerful new value to customers through our partnership with Evrythng,” said Mitch Butier, the company’s president and chief operating officer. “We can make apparel and footwear products smarter and enable them to participate in digital applications and services, helping to drive new consumer experiences, protect brands’ value, and provide supply chains with real-time analytics.”
The packaging company will make use of Evrythng’s Janela™ Smart Products Platform, which allows users (and in this case wearers) to interact with products in a mobile-friendly, tech-forward way. Indeed, both company’s believe that this introduction of digital identity and data management capabilities will allow products “to be digitized at the point of manufacturing.”
Not only will your clothes and footwear become smarter, but the brands Avery Dennison works with will also be able to personalize the shopping experience to each individual consumer in a novel way. Internet connectivity could also better inform consumers about product history, sustainability, and aid in personalized recommendations based on everything from the latest seasonal trends to fitness fads.
“The fact that at least 10 billion Avery Dennison RBIS products will be digitized at the point of manufacture is both a milestone in making the Internet of Things mainstream and a huge enabler for the apparel and footwear industry in particular,” said Niall Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Evrythng. “Avery Dennison works with some of the world’s largest and most respected consumer brands. Evrythng and Avery Dennison RBIS are enabling products for these brands to be ‘born digital’ and create new value with IoT applications, which is a huge opportunity for the industry as a whole.”
