Silhouet
AI-native PLM for emerging fashion brands.
Silhouet turns sketches, Shopify products, reference images, and production notes into structured product data, tech packs, BOMs, and factory-ready workflows. The make side of fashion.
The tools are not built for you
Data lives everywhere. Tech packs in Illustrator. BOMs in Excel. Orders in Shopify. Nothing connects, and every collection starts slower than the last.
Manual work, guaranteed errors. Copy-pasting specs across tools and colorways. Chasing vendors over email. One wrong measurement and you are eating a production run.
No institutional memory. Same factory, same fabric, same silhouette, starting over every season. Your past work should make you faster. It does not.
From brand founders in beta conversations: "I spent 4 hours making a tech pack in Excel and the factory still asked 15 questions." "Every season I rebuild everything from scratch. Same hoodie, same factory, starting over like it is my first collection." "I sent 47 emails back and forth with my manufacturer on one style."
Make building product as simple as selling it.
Selling fashion is solved. Making it is not. Silhouet helps emerging fashion brands centralize product development, generate tech packs, organize BOMs, manage colorways and sizing, and keep production details in one structured product record.
The platform, live in production
Product development: one guided workflow from sketch to factory-ready tech pack. Factory-ready tech packs in minutes, not hours. Photorealistic product renders, generated by AI. An AI factory-readiness check before your tech pack ships.
Catalog management: one product database that syncs to Shopify. One structured record for every SKU and colorway. Full Shopify catalog imported in one click. AI enriches every product’s data on import.
Performance insights: sales performance linked to every product you are building. Know what is selling, what is low, and what to produce next. New products pre-loaded with industry-standard specs. Reorder intelligence that sharpens every season.
How it works
Step 1, import and centralize. Import from Shopify, upload existing tech packs, or create with the AI assistant. Silhouet becomes your single source of truth.
Step 2, complete specs. Build detailed product specs, BOMs, and colorways with AI drafting the details for your review.
Step 3, organize your catalog. Manage the full product catalog with structured SKU organization and inventory visibility.
Step 4, streamline production. Generate factory-ready tech packs and keep production details in one place.
Step 5, get smarter over time. Your specs, materials, and sizing carry forward. Every product you create makes the next one faster.
The more you build, the smarter it gets
Your first product: smart from day one. Start a tech pack and the platform fills in industry-standard specs based on what you are making.
Your next collection: start at 80 percent, not zero. Last season’s specs, BOMs, and sizing carry forward. Duplicate, adjust, and ship.
Your growing brand: your catalog becomes your edge. Patterns surface across your product line, and every new product builds on everything before it. This is production memory.
From a drawing to a document a factory can build from
The AI drafts the spec, the BOM, the measurements, and the construction from your sketch and your Shopify data. You review and approve. Nothing is written without your confirmation, and a factory-readiness check flags what a factory would ask about before you send it.
Product record SLH-0042: SS26 Oversized Hoodie, BOM with 12 components linked, 8 points of measure graded, 3 colorways synced to Shopify.
Supported by
Silhouet is a 2026 eBay Circular Fashion Fund finalist, one of eight brands selected globally, with a $50K grant and coverage in Vogue.
Supported by NVIDIA Inception, Google for Startups Cloud, and Columbia. Incubated and built at Columbia University, across Columbia Startup Lab, Columbia Build Lab, Columbia Business School, and Columbia Computer Science.
Who is building this
Founded by Brandon Steidley: a Penn State supply chain background into consulting for Nike and New Balance at Deloitte, then emerging brands, then AI workflow products at Amazon, and a Columbia MBA where he was president of the university’s flagship startup and venture capital conference.
Team: Brandon Steidley (Founder and CEO). Chris Lee (Technical Lead), Columbia CS, who first-authored a study of how people work with what AI generates, presented at the ICML 2026 Human-AI Co-Creativity workshop and accepted to VL/HCC 2026 with Barnard’s Programming Languages Lab, and builds Silhouet’s AI. Mark Hrytchak (Software Engineer), Columbia CS, who won a DevPost hackathon for SkyHigh, an AI rescue robot built on a multi-agent pipeline.
Advisors: Karla Martin (Retail Tech and Growth Strategy), Kevin Mahoney (Retail Supply Chain and AI Strategy), Amelia Granata (Product and Design Strategy).
Join the next wave
We are accepting a limited number of brands into our first beta cohort. Beta access is free during the beta period, with a direct line to the founding team and first access to new features. We onboard in small cohorts to give every brand hands-on support.
Request Beta Access
Silhouet is accepting a limited number of emerging fashion brands for beta access. Beta access is free.