‘47 Brand

OVERVIEW

‘47 is a sport lifestyle brand that makes premium headwear and apparel for all your favorite teams.

In such a fast paced and competative industry, it’s crucial to maintain efficiency, especially in areas of design and production. By implementing automation technologies, we have more flexability over where to allocate our time and manpower.

ROLE

Production Designer
Graphic Design, Visual Design, Branding, Typography, Problem Solving


Oct. 2021 - Ongoing

Background

Over the last few years, ‘47 has become a brand that’s gained a sort of silent popularity. You’ll find it worn by celebrities, featured in your favorite movies, and maybe even in your own closet. Once you start looking for it, you’ll start to see it everywhere. With this, it was evident that adopting automation technology was critical to keep up with the brand’s ubiquity.  



I joined ‘47 as a production designer a year and a half ago to run the automation program for the production process. I support the design team by creating league breakouts and performing QA on every style.

I’ve grown tremendously in the last year, some key achievements of which I have listed below.

• Implemented an automation process. This has helped to decrease the time spent on production by nearly 30%.
  

• Developed the automation platform. Working with software engineers, we were able to create a platform that is intuitive and can be used by any designer.

• Created design templates. Before a design can be automated, it has to be made into a template specific for the program. Each season, I created over 60 of these templates.
  

Process

At ‘47, production runs a bit differently. Because we make sports apparel, we create many variations of each graphic specific for each team. That’s where the production team comes in. 

Once we get a graphic from the design team, the first step is to create a working template for the graphic in the automation program. The template needs to have a particular space for any logos, wordmarks, or verbiage to be placed; and the team colors need to be set as well. From there, the program takes that one template and creates as many team versions as needed. For instance, if I’m working on the fall season, I would tell the program to create variations for all 32 NFL teams.


Depending on the detail of the graphic, the program takes an average of about one minute to run a variation. When this process is done by hand, we have to open the original graphic, open the team’s spec pages, copy and paste the logos, write out all the verbiage, etc. You can see where the automation program saves us a lot of time. After the program has finished running, I inspect each variation for QA. I look particularly close at the kearning, alignment, and overall visual design of the graphic.

Next, we start with the original graphic in the program again. This time, we run the exports, which creates two seperate files for each variation: one to send to licensing and one to send to the factory. After those finish, I clean up the production colors for licensing and send it off. Once everything is edited and approved, I clean up the factory art, send that off, and I’m done!

Developing the program

Since its implementation, the automation program has never stopped advancing. Our team always says, “It was built for a toaster, but now it has to run a rocket.” 
 
We work closely with our software engineers so we can constantly update, troubleshoot, and develop the program in real-time. 

Collaborations

During my time with ‘47 I’ve had the pleasure of working on some big name brand collaborations such as Carhartt, Hurley, and Oakley.

In recent years, ‘47 has expanded into the lifestyle market while simultaneously dominating the sports market. By collaborating with brands like these, ‘47 has solidified their place at the forefront of the sports apparel industry.