In today’s fast-moving retail world, the journey from a designer’s initial sketch to a finished garment on a retail rack remains archaic. While consumer trends shift at the speed of a TikTok scroll, the apparel industry’s infrastructure drags behind. Supply chain friction, endless revisions to technical documentation, language barriers across global factories and long sampling cycles often mean bringing a single clothing item to market takes months or over a year.
Industry insiders know this age-old operational headache all too well. As one industry veteran famously put it, “you can make two babies in the time it takes to make one garment.”
Enter Calico AI, a Toronto-based technology company aiming to overhaul how apparel brands source, price and produce their lines. Fresh off a $15 million Series A funding round, Calico positions itself as an end-to-end product-creation engine designed to replace outdated software, messy spreadsheets and fragmented email threads with streamlined, agentic AI.
To accelerate expansion, Calico recently appointed Derek Galkin as chief momentum officer, a new role aimed at deepening brand partnerships and driving commercial growth. Galkin, an entrepreneur best known as a founding partner of California footwear brand SeaVees, brings over two decades of brand-building and executive experience. His career includes work with Deckers, Oakley, Todd Snyder and James Perse.
Galkin’s arrival strengthens a leadership team focused on combining tech-driven innovation with deep operational industry experience. He joins Anders Bergstrom, chief brand officer, an industry veteran who spent 22 years at Deckers Brands. For Calico, this blend of insider experience and technological innovation is key: software built not by distant tech developers but by people who have lived through the supply chain grind.
“[Galkin] has spent his career inside the brands he’s building for—he knows exactly what it takes to get a product from concept to shelf, and exactly where that process breaks down,” said Kathleen Chan, founder and CEO, in a statement at the time of Galkin’s appointment. “That kind of instinct can’t be taught. It’s exactly what we need as we scale Calico to serve more brands across more categories.”
Calico’s origins trace to Chan, who launched the company after experiencing intense friction and manual spreadsheets as well as astonishingly slow lead times (often taking 18 months from concept to shelf) that was required to run direct-to-consumer and fashion supply chains. It was an operational landscape riddled with broken communication, redundant steps and high costs. Recognizing it as a systemic problem, AI was used to reimagine the entire product development process.
According to Galkin, legacy production management tools have failed to keep pace with modern digital demands. Most software in the field is stuck in the 1990s and offers little modern infrastructure to manage workflows efficiently. After learning about Calico’s engine, Galkin recognized its potential to reshape daily brand operations.
“When [Anders Bergstrom] introduced me to Calico, I was like, wait a minute, if that really works, it’s going to revolutionize the way that we build things,” Galkin told Sourcing Journal. “And it’s been an absolute joy to introduce this. I mean, we’ve both been in this industry for 30 years—it’s the only industry I know. But what a joy to bring it to friends and colleagues that I’ve known, bringing them a solution that helps make their business better, faster, stronger.”
At the heart of Calico’s technology is an agentic AI system powered by extensive domain data. Unlike generic AI models, Calico is trained on a proprietary network of 150 vetted factories across 10 countries, including key manufacturing hubs in Asia, Europe, South America and Mexico. By observing millions of factory interactions and manufacturing workflows for nearly a decade, Calico acts as an automated product development assistant that understands garment construction, common production pitfalls, and material requirements from day one.
The real-world impact shows in the technical design phase. Typically, turning a design concept into a technical specification package—or “tech pack”—takes four to six weeks. Tech designers must map out dimensions, points of measure, trims and fabric compositions before sending anything to a factory.
Through Calico, users can upload a basic image or design sketch, and the system automatically deconstructs the garment, extracts structural details, populates standard points of measure and generates a production-ready tech pack in about one minute.
Crucially, the system resolves the administrative nightmare of design revisions. In traditional setups, altering a size scale or removing a garment variation requires manual updates that risk miscommunication with overseas factories, often causing costly sampling errors and weeks of delays. Within Calico, simple prompts let teams modify technical specs in seconds, instantly updating records and notifying relevant partners across the supply chain.
Beyond technical documentation, Calico provides open-network sourcing and real-time pricing transparency. By entering target costs, production volumes, and timelines, brands can query Calico’s global factory network to receive instant, itemized cost breakdowns down to the penny, accounting for fabric usage, labor, trims, overhead and expected yield wastage.
This operational visibility eliminates weeks of back-and-forth negotiation and guesswork for brands and factory managers. Built-in communication tools translate technical specs and daily messages across 120 languages, bridging gaps between design offices in North America and factory floors in Asia or Europe. The platform’s automated feature, ‘Pulse,” monitors factory communications overnight and surfaces priority action items for production teams each morning.
Calico’s customer roster already includes a diverse range of market players, spanning mass-market brands like Everlane, elevated labels like AYR and performance gear companies such as Mission Headwear.
As the retail landscape grows increasingly competitive, the company bets that speed, transparency and centralized data will become non-negotiable for fashion brands of all sizes. With new capital and a leadership team anchored by industry veterans, Calico aims to prove that apparel product creation can finally keep pace with modern market demand.
“I’ve spent my career building and reviving brands, and the one constant challenge has always been speed—getting the right product to market before the window closes,” said Galkin. “Calico is the solution for the efficiency problem in the apparel industry. I’m excited to help bring this to more brands and prove what’s possible when product creation finally moves at the speed the industry needs.”