New Look adopts Fermat AI for product design

New Look announced a partnership with AI visualisation platform Fermat that will give its buying and design teams access to AI-powered tools to create virtual product renders, test multiple design iterations, and explore different prints, colourways, and styling options before physical samples are produced, according to Drapers, FashionNetwork, Retail Gazette, and RetailTechInnovationHub. New Look creative director Anica Wislawski said the tools let designers "bring ideas to life faster, explore more creative possibilities and refine products through multiple iterations before they reach the customer." Retail Gazette reports the announcement sits within New Look's wider digital transformation and notes its loyalty scheme, Club New Look, has passed 1,000,000 members.

Fermat, described in its own materials as a GenAI fashion startup that lets design teams work from moodboards and produce photorealistic renders on high-fidelity virtual models without losing brand consistency, already has a track record with at least one other major UK-based retailer: ASOS announced in February 2026 that it had upskilled more than 100 designers on Fermat, embedding the tool across its design operations to turn sketches into photorealistic visuals in seconds, with Nick Eley, ASOS's Head of Digital Creation, saying it helps the company "reach stronger concepts faster." ASOS reported an average 75-80% time saving across key design processes as a result. New Look's adoption of the same platform suggests this is becoming a repeatable pattern among UK fashion retailers rather than a one-off pilot.

Teams evaluating similar AI-visualisation rollouts should treat ASOS's reported 75-80% time saving as a realistic benchmark to validate against, not assume automatically. The harder engineering work sits downstream of the generative step: keeping rendered colourways and materials consistent with what production can actually deliver, attaching accurate product metadata (fabric, construction, size) to generated visuals so they map to bill-of-materials and PLM records, and building version control so rapid iteration does not produce unapproved or untracked design variants.

Whether New Look discloses its own time- or cost-saving metrics following rollout, whether Fermat expands to further retailers as this pattern repeats, and how retailers using generative visualisation handle fidelity checks between virtual samples and final manufactured product.