Love Affairs in Melbourne-Chapter 268 - 263 Shining Appearance (2)

The "team" of designers at Y·Y was enormous, and as soon as a design was accepted by Y·Y, the designer would receive an account.

Logging into this account, one would see their own design as well as the three-dimensional model of the sample garment submitted by the designer.

Inside the designer’s personal system, there was a multiple-choice question asking how many garments of the same quality could be completed within a twelve-day period.

There were 20 options in total, forming an arithmetic sequence from 1 to 20.

If your choice was 1, then your garment would be a unique piece, if it was 20, it would be a limited edition of 20 pieces.

You might possess greater capabilities, such as making a hundred, but this was not within the range included in the options, at least one piece and at most twenty.

"Garments of the same quality" was an extremely vague concept.

But at Y·Y, "same quality" had become a very sacred concept.

This sanctity was unrelated to people. It was a very pure concept of technology.

After a designer’s design was accepted, it meant that their "sample garment" had acquired its own three-dimensional model, which included color, style, pattern, and many other pieces of information—exactly what other data was involved, outsiders could not know.

For designers of unique pieces, their "contract" with Y·Y was considered complete; the design fee would automatically be deposited when the garment was sold.

It was one-third of the garment’s sale price.

For non-single item designers, their contract continued.

Y·Y’s studio in New York was equipped with a three-dimensional scanning robot.

Fans gave this robot a very apt nickname: Master Y (Master Y).

When the "replicas" other than the samples were completed, they could be taken to the store for scanning.

Dressing Master Y in the garment or accessory, results would be available after ten seconds.

Those that met the "same quality" requirement would be kept, while those that didn’t would be "destroyed."

No one knew how the robot’s algorithm was written.

But any shoddy workmanship or cost-cutting was sure to not escape the machine’s discerning eye and was doomed to be destroyed.

Of course, Master Y wasn’t entirely "unfeeling."

If one used different materials from the sample and input some choices and properties about the substitute fabrics in advance, one could still possibly earn Master Y’s favor and get through the review.

In short, Y·Y didn’t care how your garment was made, just whether the quality of the garment when it finally hit the shelves was equal to the "same quality" as the sample.

This was why the number of limited editions at Y·Y was not fixed, but the price was.

For a designer, the first sale of a garment brought in one-third of the sale price in design fees, and for every subsequent sale, an additional 20% of the sale price would be paid.

Such a profit-sharing model did not necessarily mean the more sold, the more earned.

For instance, if a designer made ten pieces but only the sample garment met the standards, then the cost of the remaining nine pieces would be wasted.

Or if a style could only be "in-season" for one to two months, making too many and not being able to sell them would also increase one’s costs.

This model, with many game-like attributes, had people calculating the odds of making the most money from a certain number of pieces.

Being a Y·Y designer and checking one’s income for half a month always brought a particularly thrilling feeling.

Some, in an attempt to test the "limits" of this machine, would deliberately make some clothes "defective" as a provocation.

There were times when such attempts slipped through the net.

When store clerks very occasionally discovered serious quality issues with a garment approved by Master Y, the garment would be taken off the shelves.

Although the garment was pulled from the shelves, the design fee and profit-sharing were not reduced by any amount.

Moreover, the "provocateur" would receive a thank-you letter from the robot afterwards, expressing gratitude for the efforts made towards updating its version.

Every few days, the same issues were no longer able to escape the robot’s discerning examination.

At first, the robot made mistakes, but by 2015, it had become difficult for anyone to successfully challenge Master Y.

Y·Y never cared how a designer’s garments were made or whether they were handcrafted by the designer themselves, only caring about the final quality of the clothing.

Some designers, feeling they couldn’t "perfectly" replicate their own work, chose to make their design a unique item as the best option.

Others got frustrated when many creations were reduced to unique pieces by Master Y.

Sometimes Master Y made ruthless cuts, leaving "not a piece left," while at other times, it would gently "destroy" just one or two flawed pieces.

Naturally, different numbers of "replicas" that were approved by Master Y remained, forming Y·Y’s distinctive culture of limited editions.

Initially, only designers whose designs had been accepted were aware of Y·Y’s unique IT system for distributing designer tasks.

As Y·Y’s task system and Master Y’s piercing insight gradually came into the public eye, the hottest items in Y·Y stores were no longer unique pieces but limited editions of twenty.

What enthused fans always proved unpredictable.

Many fans who bought the same version became friends through social networks and then planned to dress up together, starting to "nitpick" at each other’s outfits, looking for faults that their own eyes could detect better than Master Y.

This contest was very simple: if you spotted something that Master Y had missed, you won.

But if you could uncover a glaring "non-compliance with the same quality" issue and uploaded it to the Y·Y testing website, you would receive a thank-you letter and a Y·Y "Special Invite Tester" medal.

Both the thank-you note and the medal were electronic, with no monetary reward.

To distinguish between iterations, Master Y’s "Artificial Intelligence" would automatically mark the second thank-you letter sent to the same person with LV2, indicating a Second-level Tester. freeweɓnovel.cøm

But this non-monetary "medal" sparked a frenzy among Y·Y fans across the United States.

Some enthusiastically lined up each month at Y·Y to buy clothes just to become higher-level "testers."

Moreover, if a designer could provide three consecutive sets of 20 "same quality" limited editions, they would then earn Y·Y’s crowdsourcing credentials.

When the creative director wanted to launch a special design, like the store graffiti version, a designer with crowdsourcing privileges could take on the production order.

Apart from lacking the one-third design fee for the first garment, the 20% share for each garment was guaranteed with a "crowdsourcing order."