How Li & Fung’s Design Team Used Make the Dot to Shorten Development Cycles, Cut Costs, and Win Over Retail Buyers

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The Challenge

Design at a Distance + Costly Concepting

Li & Fung’s NYC-based apparel design team—led by SVP, Head of Licensed Brands Mel Limoncelli and Senior Design Director Nicole Murray—develops large seasonal collections for clients like Lands’ End, and Sam’s Club. They faced major bottlenecks in trying to keep up with tight timelines while meeting the demand for realistic visuals and fast iteration.

Prior to Make the Dot, the team was using a combination of tools such as MidJourney, Miro, Adobe Photoshop but ran into several issues:

• Steep learning curves from prompt engineering (e.g. MidJourney)
• Inability to make precise design edits without morphing the entire garment
• Poor handling of print and pattern - specifically scaling and placing prints accurately on other AI software
• Delays in sample development, especially during peak times like Chinese New Year

Ultimately, these tools couldn’t meet their demands for visual realism, speed, and precision—without requiring advanced prompt skills or manual touch-ups..

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The Solution

From Sketch to Sell-In with Make the Dot

LF Distribution Holding integrated Make the Dot, an AI-powered fashion design platform, into its team’s daily workflow. Built for the realities of the fashion industry, the platform streamlined every step—from moodboarding to prototyping to line sheet creation—by enabling fast, collaborative, and ultra-realistic design.

Designers could:

• Generate photorealistic garments from sketches in seconds
• Extract textile color codes from reference images
• Collaborate on shared boards across internal teams and external buyers
• Replace time-intensive Photoshop tasks with in-platform tools
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“With tools like Make the Dot, we’re finally seeing tech catch up to the pace of our vision—delivering hyper-real, brand-consistent design with less waste, fewer samples, and a clearer path to sustainable creation.”

Mel Limoncelli, SVP Head of Licensed Brands – Apparel, Li & Fung*

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“My designers are like, why can’t we just drop in a sketch and have it work? That’s when we found Make the Dot. We saw much more accurate generation—it didn’t morph every time and it didn't require wordsmithing.”
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Nicole Murray, Senior Design Director - Licensed Apparel, Li & Fung

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By the Numbers

Faster Design, Fewer Samples, Higher Impact

Cost and Efficiency Related Benefits

• ⏱ Research time reduced from 1 day to 1 hour using Make the Dot’s built-in retail analysis
• 🗂 Line sheet creation cut from 7 days to 1, dramatically accelerating sell-in timelines
• 🧠 More creative output as designers used AI to amplify, not replace, human ideas
• 🖼 Visually consistent decks that looked “more polished, professional, and advanced” than previous Photoshop-based mockups
• 🎯 Increased design accuracy, especially important when samples couldn’t be produced in time
• 🌈 Enabled colorway exploration and variation with realistic AI renders of production-ready garments
• 🤝 Enhanced collaboration through shared boards and faster handoffs

Revenue Related Benefits

• 💰 Reduced dependency on protos in tight deadlines, enabling major client pitches to proceed without waiting for overseas sampling
• 💵 Increased line adoption by 20% for the exact same categories and the same brand compared to last year

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Ready to use Make the Dot?

If you're interested in experiencing the power of Make the Dot firsthand and discovering how it can reduce your product development costs as well as increase your line adoption, get started here.

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