What does it take to be a pioneer in uncharted retail industry waters? The global fashion industry is driven by innovation and creativity, but defined by more tangible assets: fabric, form, warehouses and stores. Technology has played a central role in production, less so in the front office. Alvanon, a Hong Kong-based fashion tech firm co-founded by siblings Janice and Jason Wang, has strived to harness data and leverage technology over the past 25 years. As forerunners, they have led the way to maximize the impact of innovation while minimizing the friction and constraints across solutions that impact every stage of the fashion supply chain.
AI-Relevant High Tech
The Wangs focused on a core problem in the industry, responsible for customer frustration and a cascade of returns and a frustration for retailers: sizing. Alvanon has worked with hundreds of the world’s leading brands, from Chanel, Walmart, Lululemon, and Gap, to Target, Stitch Fix, Polo Ralph Lauren, and more to help them optimize the ways they approach fit and sizing to design processes and reduce waste and inventory costs.
This is much more complex than it sounds and has advanced exponentially with AI. The fashiontech innovator has been enhancing its solutions with artificial intelligence (AI) to infuse further precision and accuracy in the fit and design process and turn product development cycles into perpetual learning and innovation engines.
Founded in 2001 in Hong Kong, Alvanon currently has headquarters in New York, London, Germany, Shanghai, Shen Zhen, and Australia. Its global team of 200 creates data-driven physical and digital sizing and fit tools and provides consulting services to help clients address challenges in apparel development, production, and retail.
“The supply chain for mass-produced garments is a very lengthy one—we can predict weather better than we can predict what fashions will sell.” Janice Wang
The Wang Way
Founders (and siblings) Janice and Jason Wong grew up in a Hong Kong garment manufacturing family, where they developed a holistic understanding of the apparel industry, from the rigor of precise design, through the complex logistics of globally dispersed supply chains, to the ever-evolving expectations of consumers. Janice is CEO and Jason is COO; together they guide Alvanon with a pragmatic understanding of their industry’s challenges and a desire to balance innovation with execution.
Alvanon’s strategic outlook is holistic and begins with an essential understanding of the critical importance of data, and how it flows between each link of the apparel value chain. “The supply chain for mass-produced garments is a very lengthy one—we can predict weather better than we can predict what fashions will sell,” observes Janice. “The 18 months it typically takes to bring a piece from concept to floor is typical for producers of evergreen items like basic T-shirts or sweatpants, but for a hot neon pink shirt, trendiness cannot be predicted that far out,” she explains. Janice believes most processes are currently insufficiently agile to fulfil fast-changing consumer trends and tastes. “And then when you factor in sizes across a global consumer population, the problem becomes even more complex!”
The Fit-Tech Revolution
The Wangs understood that sizing was a key unlock to brand success. Alvanon’s journey began with a prescient realization: Precise sizing is not only key to consumer satisfaction, but also the fundamental underpinning of the profitability of every apparel brand. Janice explains, “We’ve built a ‘fit standard’—a series of mannequins that work as an industrial benchmark, covering the global spectrum of human bodies.” Alvanon has created a consistent sizing and fit language, AlvaForms. Their innovation is a poster child for the practical application of AI technologies. These physical and digital fit models are crafted based on extensive anthropometric data from millions of body scans and are designed to reflect a broad spectrum of human body shapes and sizes.
AlvaForms are used in product development, grading, and quality control processes by hundreds of apparel brands and manufacturers and are integrated within digital design workflows, accessible via Alvanon’s Body Platform (ABP), a software-as-a-service solution it launched nearly a decade ago. The ABP enables apparel designers, manufacturers, and retailers to create consistent sizing for prototyping, sampling, and fit validation, which in turn allows tighter coordination across globally dispersed supply chains. By converting vast amounts of anatomical data into granular and precise fit categories, Alvanon helps global brands improve design accuracy and, in return, reduce expensive product returns.
AI Transformation
The Alvanon Body Platform was a breakthrough for stakeholders—whether high-fashion couturiers or fast-fashion manufacturers—to work with one universal, trusted fit standard. “As 3D design gained more industry traction, ABP allowed 3D design software users to use virtual AlvaForm that was exactly the same as their physical AlvaForm,” says Janice.
As visionaries, Alvanon is looking to harness AI to ride a further wave of fashion tech innovation. Janice observes that as brands continue to build ever-massive libraries of digital assets, “there needs to be some discipline, and they need search capabilities. Alvanon’s AI journey was built on top of 20 years of building libraries of bodies, examining outliers, categorizing ethnicities and points of measurements in 3D.” AI now forms an integral component of Alvanon’s sizing intelligence ecosystem, integrating all the data and analytical processes the company has generated along that journey. AI tools have been layered onto this foundation to address and reduce the challenges created by the data silos that emerge within the legacy systems of fashion companies. As Janice describes: “Silos emerge as more humans try to do their jobs with limited amounts of data or try to draw holistic insight from the wrong datasets.”
Alvanon’s AI-driven system enables faster, more accurate demand forecasting and fit analyses, in part because it is purpose-built to cut through these silos in an increasingly digitally native fashion world. Eric Lee, Alvanon’s Executive Director for the Americas, explains, “The truth is, we know what an effective sizing system looks like — it really hasn’t changed that much since Alvanon started 25 years ago.” That said, “Most sizing tools on ecommerce sites are built to drive conversion, not to capture accurate shopper body and shape data. As a result, brands are often left with an incomplete—or misleading—picture of their customers’ bodies, which limits their ability to design better-fitting garments.”
Alvanon is working to deepen AI integration to build end-to-end sizing solutions that continuously adapt and learn from real-time data across the fashion supply chain. The company envisions AI not just as a fit and demand prediction tool, but as an enabler of data-driven collaboration between designers, manufacturers, and retailers to break down existing data silos and achieve a single sizing standard across digital and physical product workflows.
Transformative Agentive AI Platform
The transformation Alvanon is working to achieve is being accelerated by AI’s own iterative journey, as the technology moves beyond basic generative functions (creating images or designs based on prompts) towards agentive AI, in which models can act autonomously to optimize and manage workflows. Jason highlights this pivotal transition: “AI agents are increasingly more interesting for the apparel industry. AI is all about machine learning; more and better ‘ground truth’ data you can feed the machine, the better.” Agentive capability allows AI to make decisions proactively and improve operational efficiency, rather than requiring constant human input. Such autonomous intelligence is particularly relevant for the complex and multifaceted apparel industry, where multiple stakeholders need to collaborate on fit, sizing, and design in fast-moving environments.
Lee explains BodyAI was developed as “a data translation tool that helps apparel teams interpret ecommerce feedback and other data sources to drive smarter sizing and design choices.” Lee believes this will help brands “create smarter products, better fit, and loyal customers who keep coming back.”
BodyAI represents a key step in moving toward autonomous intelligence: “AI can enhance many tasks today in the apparel industry, but only if there is enough reliable data and the systems are in place,” says Jason, “ I can see a future where AI is helping in real time to determine the exact sizing allocation going into each store, and from that, determining the production lot. The key is to solve the issue of reliable consumer data.”
BodyAI’s suite of services uses AI to capture and create avatars of consumers and provide each with sizing and fit advice alongside other AI tools that are in the market today. Other tools on the market, like Google’s Doppl app, offer a virtual representation of how clothes might look, but there is a critical difference between visual try-on and accurate fit. “Virtual try-ons make everyone look good, but if the digital asset doesn’t match the physical garment, customers will be disappointed,” says Jason Wang. That’s where BodyAI comes in; not to replace existing tools, but to sit alongside them, ensuring that the visual experience is grounded in physical reality. BodyAI acts as a “bridge between the ecommerce team and the product teams,” enabling both commercial and product stakeholders to extract greater value from the data already in their possession.
From AI to Beyond
Looking forward, Alvanon is significantly expanding its investments in AI and data-driven solutions. The company envisions a future where fashion is shaped by entities capable of converting complexity into clarity and speed at scale. Beyond delivering reliable sizing and fit, Alvanon seeks to harness consumer trust to help fashion evolve into an industry where digital precision, sustainability, and customer satisfaction are no longer trade-offs but synergistic goals. As Janice puts it, “The issue is not just about getting the right size, but building systems that can adapt, learn, and serve both the industry and the consumer—faster, smarter, better.” In this AI-powered era, Alvanon’s continued focus on innovation, collaboration, and human-centric design is its foundation to remain indispensable in the ever-evolving fashion landscape.
