New Balance Team Sports
Custom Teamwear Manufacturing with Unmade (Case Study)
New Balance Team Sports
This latest move builds on the existing collaboration between the two companies, and will see New Balance Team Sports provide a unique customisable experience for its teamwear business. Unmade’s powerful end-to-end digital solution, UnmadeOS, enables New Balance to translate customer design into production data, ready for manufacture, anywhere in the world.
The relationship with Unmade enables New Balance Team Sports to both elevate the customer experience and scale production in an agile way, promoting efficiencies and removing manual processes.
Customers and Team Sports sales reps in the USA will be able to customize kit across a range of sports on the New Balance Team Sports website, using UnmadeOS’s sophisticated configurator to get a true-to-life visualisation of a product - before it’s been made. Brand integrity is preserved with predefined templates, and new agile products unlock garment variation potential for a fast, efficient rollout of any changes.
UnmadeOS establishes a direct link between customer design intent and the data and files needed to produce that garment, for virtually all manufacturing methods in team sports. The data can be translated to any factory partner and sent directly to specific machines within the factory environment.
This new system for New Balance is powering custom products for all major sports including track and field, baseball, fastpitch, American football, soccer, lacrosse, basketball, as well as team apparel, each aligned with the relevant season.
Over 300 products, ranging from youth to adult, have been redefined with unlimited variations and options, turning consumers into collaborators, with incredible ease and speed.
Team and training apparel is the first teamwear product range due to go live with the new configurator, comprising t-shirts and tanks, training jackets and hoodies, and athletics pants.
We wanted to create a best-in-class digital experience for our customization program and to solve for challenges unique within Teamwear. Elevating the design and customization experience provides us with a point of differentiation within the marketplace and enables the next level of design collaboration within teams, clubs, organizations and wholesale partners.
Working with Unmade and implementing UnmadeOS has not only helped us achieve this goal, but it has opened the door to innovative and digitally-led opportunities.
UnmadeOS has helped us create the infrastructure we needed to be able to respond to the market more quickly and efficiently, and to fully maximise the potential of iconic New Balance products in new ways.
New Balance is a brand with product and manufacturing innovation at its core, and leveraging Unmade’s technology gives us the ability to drive scalable, fast product planning for the future, driven by consumer demand.
Working with innovative brands like New Balance enable us to drive the Unmade mission forward. Our role is to empower brands to reach new levels of customer engagement and make the shift towards manufacturing on-demand. New Balance shares that vision.
We began working with New Balance by launching the world’s first custom knitted shoe and are thrilled to expand our work together to support New Balance’s Team Sports programme. With UnmadeOS in place, New Balance Team Sports has scalable digital infrastructure for customisation, which delivers a best-in-class digital experience and is easy for the internal team and their vendors to use as well.