WAWWA is extending digital manufacturing across its Manchester operation after committing £120,000 to two technology projects supported by £60,000 of Made Smarter grants. The clothing manufacturer has added 20 jobs over the past two years while shifting more design, pattern preparation, fabric handling, and cutting away from manual processes.
The first project introduced a Vetigraph CAD/CAM system through a £20,000 investment, supported by a £10,000 grant. WAWWA had previously relied on cardboard pattern templates, whiteboards, Post-it Notes, and hand-marked fabric layouts, an arrangement that becomes harder to control as style numbers and production volumes increase. The digital system now stores patterns electronically and handles grading and marker planning within the production workflow.
WAWWA says the CAD/CAM installation has reduced physical pattern storage requirements by 90%, cut grading time by 75%, and improved fabric utilisation by 5%. It has also created capacity for 25% more styles without increasing staffing for that part of production. Those gains are significant in clothing manufacture because small improvements in marker efficiency reduce material consumption across repeated cutting runs, while digital grading removes a repetitive task between design and production.
The second phase is larger. Following further technical support from the Northern Engineering and Robotics Innovation Centre at the University of Salford, WAWWA secured a £50,000 grant towards a £100,000 Assyst Bullmer fabric spreading and cutting system. Once integrated with the Vetigraph software, the equipment is intended to connect garment design with automated spreading and cutting, creating a more continuous route from pattern file to cut pieces.
The company forecasts that the new system will reduce the time required for laying and cutting fabric by more than 90% and almost halve fabric waste. Around 35% of WAWWA’s production is currently outsourced for cutting, so additional in-house capacity is also intended to reduce dependence on external processing as volumes increase. The business is growing at around 30% a year, making production control and usable floor capacity increasingly important alongside labour and material savings.
Bringing cutting back inside the factory changes more than the location of one operation. Digital pattern data can flow directly into spreading and cutting equipment, reducing manual transfer between stages and making production planning easier to standardise. It also gives the manufacturer more direct control over scheduling, quality, material yield, and short production runs, all of which become harder to coordinate when cutting capacity is divided between internal and outsourced operations.
WAWWA’s programme began with a Made Smarter Digital Transformation Workshop in 2024, which mapped people, processes, and technology before major equipment purchases were made. That sequencing reduces the risk of automating an unstable process and reproducing existing inefficiencies at higher speed. Pattern creation and planning were digitised first, with automated physical handling and cutting following once the underlying data flow had been established.
The work is now extending beyond individual machines. Operations coordinator Alex Parry has completed Made Smarter’s Leading Digital Transformation programme, while WAWWA’s longer-term roadmap includes ERP and MRP integration, RFID-based stock management, and further development of its Airtable production platform. Those systems would create a broader data layer across orders, materials, work in progress, and production planning rather than leaving each technology project as a separate digital island.
Made Smarter’s North West programme has engaged more than 2,500 manufacturers since 2019, giving smaller producers access to advice, leadership support, and grant-backed technology projects that would otherwise compete directly with day-to-day capital requirements. WAWWA remains a relatively small manufacturer, but the project shows how digitalisation can be sequenced in businesses where production methods have evolved organically rather than being designed around automation from the outset.
The investment also changes the economics of smaller production runs. Faster digital grading, marker planning, spreading, and cutting can reduce the setup burden attached to introducing new styles, provided the systems remain accurate and the material savings survive at production scale.
The operational test now sits with the Assyst Bullmer system and the wider production plan. The equipment has to deliver the forecast reductions in cutting time and waste while absorbing work that is currently outsourced, and the surrounding data systems must keep pace with a business expanding at roughly 30% a year. If those gains materialise, the useful result will be less about the number of digital tools installed than whether WAWWA can produce more garments with tighter material control and fewer manual hand-offs.
