Valia Fashion Powers Modern Manufacturing: Daniel Harari, CEO, Lectra

“Innovation and strong R&D are what make good companies great. They turn ideas into real solutions, solve difficult problems and keep businesses ahead of the curve,” said Daniel Harari, CEO, Lectra. 

Lectra, known for its industrial intelligence solutions that combine software, cutting equipment, data and related services, continues to focus on its premium positioning notably through heavy investment in R&D. 

“Our DNA is to be a premium company. We accelerate the transformation and success of our customers, by providing best-in-class technologies. In 2024, € 67.6 million or 12.8% of our total revenue (€ 526.7 million (US $ 618.48 million)), went into R&D, more than the combined budget of our top 20 competitors,” emphasised Daniel. 

One example of this focus is Valia Fashion. Lectra has invested around € 50 million (US $ 59 million) in this cloud-based solution, which helps fashion brands and manufacturers connect, automate and simplify every step of apparel production. 

The Group is also investing heavily in other solutions that make designing and marketing products easier, creating a truly connected ecosystem that enhances collaboration, transparency and performance across the board.

India has become a key market for Lectra, which now accounts for around 8% of the company’s equipment sales. “In India but also worldwide, about half of the cutting equipment in the top 100 companies are from Lectra. On an average, our equipment handles 67% of their production,” stated Daniel. 

In a free-flowing chat with Apparel Resources on the sidelines of CISMA 2025, Daniel spoke in detail about the company’s journey as a leading SaaS solution provider, their focus on data security and how they are tackling the growing problem of greenwashing. 

Here are the edited excerpts.

AR: Valia Fashion seems like your beacon project! Can you walk us through its journey so far and the game-changing impact it’s making in fashion? 

Daniel Harari: From the outset, Valia Fashion has been very important to me. 

Valia Fashion is really about connecting, automating and streamlining the entire garment production process, thus solving the problem of collaboration within the supply chain. In this challenging environment, where the fashion industry is undergoing rapid transformation, accelerated by tariffs, shifting consumer habits and heightened expectations, Valia Fashion is enabling fashion companies to stay competitive while being sustainable.

By leveraging Industry 4.0 technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Valia Fashion optimises workflows and gives companies the agility they need to thrive. We worked with thousands of experts to understand how they take decisions and built AI to replicate that. We have long-standing experience with AI, having worked on this technology for over 30 years. 

Valia Fashion uses AI, cloud computing, production data and automated nesting rules to achieve unprecedented accuracy in fabric consumption. This reduces guesswork, prevents over-ordering, ensures consistent quality and simplifies a very complex process.

With the unique ability to connect with any existing cutting-room equipment, Valia Fashion allows manufacturers to transform their traditional cutting rooms into state-of-the-art production facilities without the need to change existing equipment and processes. 

Taking decisions together, orders can be processed up to four times faster than traditional methods. Digital twins of fabrics and machines optimise all resources, assigning the most complex tasks to the best equipment and simpler tasks to others. 

Brands and manufacturers can choose the Valia Fashion package tailored to their needs and goals. There’s a package for manufacturers, another for brands that don’t produce but need to collaborate with manufacturers and a third one for integrated companies that handle both design and manufacturing.

This way, each customer can optimise how they work and get the most value from Valia Fashion. 

We’ve already launched Valia Fashion in the US and across Europe since the beginning of the year. We are launching it today in China at CISMA and we’ll be rolling it out to the rest of Asia in the coming months. In January, we’re bringing it to India as well. 

Right now, we have 15 customers using Valia Fashion globally. It may not sound like a big number, but some are major customers, and it proves the value of the solution.

AR: Valia Fashion is impressive. What other solutions do you offer to help the whole fashion ecosystem work smarter? 

Daniel Harari: Our goal is to help fashion brands, manufacturers and retailers create better, manufacture better and market better. 

In the create phase, we have Modaris and Gerber AccuMark, which are advanced CAD solutions for pattern making and product development respectively. These are the most used CAD solutions in Europe and the US. They help teams design garments with the right fit and quality, save up to 30% in development time, accelerate time to market, cut costs and improve collaboration with partners. In the production phase, we have Valia Fashion. For the market phase, our complete portfolio of smart, data-driven solutions equip marketing, e-commerce, merchandising and buying teams with the information they need to position, market and sell products successfully. 

For example, Launchmetrics’ AI-powered Brand Performance Cloud provides more than 1,700 customers with the software, data and insights they need to connect strategy with execution. For years, Launchmetrics has harnessed the latest AI technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and large language models, skillfully applying them to industry-specific contexts to ensure overall accuracy and relevance when benchmarking in the growing competitive landscape. By tracking upwards of 700k influencer profiles, 8 million documents and over 70 million social media comments per day, Launchmetrics transforms this vast amount of data into actionable insights. Right now, Launchmetrics is primarily focused on Western Europe—Italy, France and the US, where the adoption and results are much stronger.

In fact, if you look at our SaaS business today, roughly half of it is focused on the market side, helping brands optimise marketing and performance, which is where the real value is for our customers.

At the centre of this ecosystem is Kubix Link, which integrates data from all solutions and gives a unified view that unites internal creation, manufacturing and marketing departments. It centralises product information, allows teams to plan and monitor collections, supports omnichannel sales and helps achieve sustainability goals. This unified, transparent workflow ensures that all teams are aligned and informed with always up-to-date information, enabling seamless communication and collaboration across borders.

In an industry where supply chains are often fragmented and opaque, TextileGenesis provides full traceability from fibre to retail, so brands can trace a product’s journey across all supply chain tiers. This end-to-end visibility supports more responsible sourcing and accountability. 

Together, these solutions are breaking silos to help reduce lead times, optimise resources, maintain quality, save costs, reduce waste and give full visibility and control over the entire fashion production process.

AR: I can see that Valia Fashion, Launchmetrics and Kubix Link generate a substantial amount of data and security of which is a sensitive subject for all companies. How do you ensure the protection and confidentiality of this critical information? 

Daniel Harari: When we implement software like Valia Fashion or Kubix Link, we always work closely with the customer’s cybersecurity teams to fully check everything we do. Our customers take cybersecurity very seriously and they often compare us with competitors. And honestly, we consistently come out on top. 

We provide a level of security that most companies don’t have on their own. We are certified at the highest level, including SOC 2 Type 2, which we chose to ensure the best possible security for SaaS. Cloud security is jointly managed by our Lectra cloud operations team and our hosting partner, Microsoft Azure. Together, we make sure customer data is stored securely and protected against unauthorised access. 

We also follow strict processes to protect data, and we invest heavily in employee training, so our team stays up-to-date on the latest security practices. Our employees hold certifications like Microsoft and ISO 27001 Lead Implementer. 

We follow a ‘secure by design’ approach, which means security is built into the software from the start. Data is protected through access controls, encryption, threat modelling, risk assessments and daily security scans.

AR: Sustainability is going to shape the future of fashion. What do you see as the single most important priority in the next five years? 

Daniel Harari: I think traceability will be a major focus for the industry with tightening regulations and evolving consumer expectations worldwide. With TextileGenesis, we are taking the lead on this and helping brands face the sustainability challenge. The first goal is to trace the origin of the fabric. 

Brands can select a comprehensive set of digital tools amongst TextileGenesis’ six-dimensional (6D) offering: for example, the Fiber-to-Retail module for its sustainable certified fibres and the new product backward Supply Chain Discovery module for its conventional fibres. Standards are built into TextileGenesis and companies can choose which ones to follow. Currently, around 20,000 supply chain roles use the solution globally, most of them in Asia. For example, the global amount of clothes labelled as ‘pure cotton’ is more than three times the cotton actually produced, which is mostly greenwashing. 

With TextileGenesis, traceability ensures products are genuine. Technology is used to create a ‘digital twin’ or ‘token’ to track every kilogram of sustainable material at the point of origin. This unique ‘fibre forward’ approach allows us to verify that the quantities at every stage match what suppliers can produce. Unlike old PDF certificates that could be faked, the system only records what’s actually possible. Certifications at every level also verify the data. This step helps eliminate greenwashing. 

Traceability also helps companies rethink their supply chains. Today, products often travel around the world multiple times. For instance, cotton might be grown in the US, woven in Turkey, shipped to India for stitching, sent to Brazil for finishing and finally back to the US. That’s a lot of unnecessary travel and carbon footprint. With traceability, companies can optimise their supply chain, pick suppliers more strategically and significantly reduce CO2 emissions. 

Another important aspect is supplier reputation. The solution flags suppliers involved in greenwashing, forced labour or child labour, so brands know exactly who they are working with.

AR: After-sales service can make or break client trust. How do you ensure it works for your business and what’s next to make it even better? 

Daniel Harari: Over the generations, we’ve made significant progress. Five years ago, we could only solve 60% of issues remotely, so we had to send a technician four times out of ten. Today, we only need to send someone once out of ten times. Our focus is on guaranteeing the best uptime for the customer. Most problems aren’t about equipment failure, they’re usually software issues, process mistakes or simple part replacements that the operator can handle themselves. 

Beyond repairs, we offer two more layers of support. First, we benchmark customer operations against best practices for fabric handling and productivity, helping them reach those standards. Secondly, we continuously monitor their processes so that they can make adjustments, predict outcomes and improve efficiency. 

With Valia Fashion, customers can even self-optimise, letting AI make the system smarter and effective over time.