
Mechanical engineer turned software founder. I started out designing aerospace manufacturing facilities in VR at DAHER, then founded Konfigear in 2019 to bring the same visualization tools to the way configurable products are sold. Today the platform serves more than 200 organizations across 20+ countries, and Konfiwear applies it specifically to custom apparel.


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Founder & CEO, Konfigear and Konfiwear

Yassine Ait Oufkir


[South Summit](https://www.southsummit.co/) 2024 ran 5–7 June at La Nave in Madrid. I was there with Konfigear on two clocks at once: the stand, and a talk. The talk was the clearer of the two. Traditional online shopping still forces a customer to describe a product that does not exist yet. That is the problem on the slide. Configuration is the answer we sell.

The stand existed because [CEEI Asturias](https://www.ceei.es/) and [ASTUREX](https://www.asturex.org/) put the region in one room — Asturias Paraíso Startup — next to companies I would rather share a floor with than a keynote hall. People came to the booth. People came to the talk. That is the whole report.

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-konfigear-south-summit-2024-madrid.jpg" alt="Yassine Ait Oufkir pitching Konfigear on the South Summit 2024 stage in Madrid, with Start in Asturias and CEEI Asturias on the screens" width="1024" height="682" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>South Summit 2024, La Nave — Konfigear on the Start in Asturias stage. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aitoufkiir_configuraciaejn-personalizada-configuraciaejn-activity-7204903257788313601-6YkL" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Original post on LinkedIn</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-south-summit-2024-la-nave-madrid.jpg" alt="Yassine Ait Oufkir at the South Summit 2024 entrance installation at La Nave, Madrid" width="1024" height="473" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Outside La Nave, June 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/south-summit-2024-asturias-startup-paradise-delegation.jpg" alt="Asturias Startup Paradise delegation group photo at South Summit 2024 in Madrid, with CEEI Asturias and ASTUREX branding" width="1024" height="550" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>The Asturias delegation at stands 158–159.</figcaption>
</figure>

Three days is not enough to close anything serious. It is enough to find out who already understands why a product configurator is not a nicer product page. I will go back.


Yassine Ait Oufkir at South Summit 2024 in Madrid — pitching Konfigear on the Start in Asturias stage, and three days on the Asturias Startup Paradise stand.

South Summit 2024: Pitching Konfigear at La Nave


[MWC Barcelona](https://www.mwcbarcelona.com/) is sold as a mobile show. Walk the halls in 2024 and it was an AI show with phones attached. I started the year there with Konfigear — less to collect brochures than to see what the rest of the industry had decided was no longer optional.

I was there because [ASTUREX](https://www.asturex.org/) and [CEEI Asturias](https://www.ceei.es/) put a regional delegation on the floor: Asturias Startup Paradise next to the Spain Pavilion. That is the useful version of a trade fair. You do not wander 100,000 people hoping to get lucky. You stand with people who already know why you are in the building.

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-mwc-2024-barcelona.jpg" alt="Yassine Ait Oufkir, founder of Konfigear, at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona between the UK and Spain flags" width="768" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>MWC 2024, Fira Gran Via, Barcelona.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/mwc-2024-barcelona-entrance-fira-gran-via.jpg" alt="Crowd of attendees outside the MWC 2024 entrance at Fira Barcelona Gran Via" width="768" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>The plaza outside Fira Gran Via — MWC still looks like a city arriving at work.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/mwc-2024-asturias-startup-paradise-pavilion.jpg" alt="Asturias Startup Paradise pavilion at MWC 2024, with ASTUREX, CEEI Asturias and SEKUENS branding" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Asturias Startup Paradise — ASTUREX, CEEI Asturias, SEKUENS.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/mwc-2024-spain-pavilion-barcelona.jpg" alt="Spain Pavilion at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, viewed from above the hall" width="768" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>The Spain Pavilion on the MWC floor.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/mwc-2024-connected-industries-stand.jpg" alt="Connected Industries stage at MWC 2024 in Barcelona, lit in blue with presentation seating" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Connected Industries — the part of the show that was no longer about handsets.</figcaption>
</figure>

I came back with a shorter list than I expected. AI was not a side stage. It was in every demo that mattered, including the industrial ones. For Konfigear that confirmed the same bet we started after Lisbon: configuration software that cannot reason about a product will look dated faster than the hardware around it. 2024 was for making that real, not announcing it.


Yassine Ait Oufkir at MWC 2024 in Barcelona — Konfigear with the Asturias delegation, and what a week of AI-heavy product demos changed in how we think about configuration.

MWC 2024: Konfigear at Mobile World Congress Barcelona


[Web Summit](https://websummit.com/) 2023 in Lisbon is still the largest room I have stood in as a founder. I was there with Konfigear, as a partner, on the Spanish Pavilion — talking to people who already sell configurable products and were trying to decide what AI actually changes in that work.

The pavilion exists because of the Asturias and Spanish trade stack behind us: [CEEI Asturias](https://www.ceei.es/), [ASTUREX](https://www.asturex.org/), [ICEX](https://www.icex.es/), and [Cluster TIC Asturias](https://clustertic.net/). They do not just book a stand. They put you next to operators who will tell you, in ten minutes, whether your product is a demo or a tool.

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-konfigear-web-summit-2023-lisbon.jpg" alt="Yassine Ait Oufkir, founder of Konfigear, wearing a Web Summit 2023 Partner badge in the Lisbon arena" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Web Summit 2023, Lisbon — Konfigear, Partner badge. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aitoufkiir_websummit2023-ai-innovation-activity-7130857062032392192-F_M-" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Original post on LinkedIn</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/web-summit-2023-spain-pavilion-delegation-lisbon.jpg" alt="Spanish delegation group photo at the Spain Pavilion, Web Summit 2023 in Lisbon, including Konfigear" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>The Spanish Pavilion delegation at Web Summit 2023.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/web-summit-2023-spain-pavilion-networking.jpg" alt="Conversations at the Spain Pavilion green-wall stand during Web Summit 2023 in Lisbon" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>On the floor at the Spain Pavilion — the useful part of the week.</figcaption>
</figure>

The conversations kept landing in the same place: configuration is still a reasoning problem. A CPQ system that only stores options is not enough when the customer wants a product that does not exist yet. After Lisbon I started putting more AI into how Konfigear builds those paths — not as a slogan on a slide, as part of the configurator itself.


Yassine Ait Oufkir at Web Summit 2023 in Lisbon — representing Konfigear at the Spanish Pavilion, and why we started putting more AI into CPQ and product configuration.

Web Summit 2023: Konfigear at the Spanish Pavilion


Here is a workflow I have watched in some version at nearly every custom apparel business I have visited.

A club wants twenty jerseys. Someone in sales mocks up a design — often in Illustrator, sometimes in a web tool, occasionally in PowerPoint. It goes to the customer as a flat image. The customer says the blue is wrong. Round two. The customer says the sponsor logo should be higher. Round three. Eventually: approved.

Then the approved file goes to production, and somebody spends the next hour rebuilding it.

Not adjusting it. **Rebuilding it.** Correct colour profile, correct separations, correct placement on the actual pattern pieces, correct sizing per garment size, names and numbers laid out from a roster that arrived as a spreadsheet with inconsistent capitalisation.

That hour is the real cost of a custom order, and almost nobody prices it in.

<figure class="story-figure story-figure--portrait">
  <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-ctco-print-lyon-client.jpg" alt="Ait Oufkir Yassine presenting Konfiwear at a custom apparel stand in Lyon" width="792" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>On the floor at CTCO Lyon, where production teams describe the same approval-to-prepress gap in their own workflows.</figcaption>
</figure>

### Why the mockup and the print file are different objects

The mockup exists to close the sale. It is optimised for looking convincing on a screen. It does not need to know that the garment is cut from six pattern pieces, that the sublimation transfer needs bleed past the seam allowance, or that the customer's RGB blue does not exist in the ink set you are running.

The print file exists to drive a machine. It has to know all of those things.

They are made by different people, in different software, for different purposes. So the handoff between them is manual by construction — and manual handoffs are where errors enter.

The errors are not evenly distributed either. Most of them are invisible until the press runs:

- A logo that looked crisp at screen resolution is 90 DPI when scaled to actual chest width
- A colour approved on a customer's uncalibrated laptop is two shades off the club's brand blue
- A design placed near a seam that shifts when the panel is cut
- A roster where "MCDONALD" and "McDonald" are two different players

You find these on press, on the garment, after you have consumed material and machine time. Then you eat the reprint, or you ship it and eat the complaint.

### The usual fixes, and why they only half work

**Hire better prepress people.** This works, and it is expensive, and it does not scale. Your throughput is now capped by how many skilled operators you can hire in your city. It also means your best technical people spend their day on repetitive rebuilds instead of the genuinely hard jobs.

**Lock down the templates.** Restrict customers to a few fixed layouts. This reduces errors and it reduces orders, because the reason people buy custom is that they want something specific. You have solved a production problem by making the product worse.

**Add approval steps.** More sign-offs catch more errors, and every sign-off adds a day. In teamwear, where the order has to arrive before the season starts, added days lose deals outright.

Each of these treats the symptom. The disease is that the file the customer approved is not the file that goes to production.

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/konfiwear%20stand%20in%20berlin%20fespa.jfif" alt="The Konfiwear customization software stand at FESPA Berlin" width="819" height="819" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Demonstrating the customer-to-production workflow at FESPA Berlin.</figcaption>
</figure>

### Closing the gap instead of managing it

The alternative is to make the customer's design _be_ the production file — same object, two views.

That means the customer designs on the real garment: actual pattern geometry, actual print areas, actual constraints. Colours are constrained to what you can genuinely produce, so an approved colour is a producible colour. Logo placement is validated against seams and safe zones as the customer moves it. Minimum resolution is enforced at upload, not discovered at output. Rosters are structured data, not a pasted spreadsheet.

Then the order produces the print-ready output automatically — separations, bleed, per-size scaling, correct profile for DTG, sublimation, screen print or embroidery.

This is what we built Konfiwear to do, so I am obviously not a neutral party. But the principle stands regardless of whose software you use: **if a customer can approve something you cannot produce, your workflow has a manual repair step in it, and you are paying for that step on every single order.**

### What it changes

The hour of rebuild goes away. That is the obvious one, and it is not the important one.

The important one is what happens to the front of the process. When the customer is looking at their actual garment rather than an approximation, the approval rounds collapse — usually to one. The uncertainty that caused round two and round three was never really about the design. It was the customer not trusting that what they saw was what they would get.

Custom apparel buyers do not abandon orders because of price. They abandon because they are not sure, and the cost of a wrong order of 200 jerseys is high enough that not-sure means not-yet.

Remove the doubt at the point of design, and you get the production saving as a side effect.

### A question worth asking your own team

Not "how do we make prepress faster?" but:

_How many hours a week does this business spend converting files a customer already approved into files a machine can actually run — and what would we do with those hours instead?_

Most operations I ask have never counted it. The number is usually larger than they expect.

<div class="story-gallery story-gallery--wide">
  <figure>
    <img src="/images/ctco%20print%20expo.jpg" alt="The main entrance to the CTCO Print expo at Eurexpo Lyon" width="1024" height="512" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
    <figcaption>CTCO Print at Eurexpo Lyon.</figcaption>
  </figure>
  <figure>
    <img src="/images/belin%20fespa.jpg" alt="Visitors arriving at Messe Berlin for FESPA" width="1024" height="512" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
    <figcaption>FESPA at Messe Berlin.</figcaption>
  </figure>
</div>


Your customer approved a flat mockup. Your production team received something they have to rebuild by hand. That gap is where the margin goes.

The Expensive Part of Custom Apparel Isn't Design. It's Prepress.


Before I wrote a line of software, I designed factories.

At DAHER I worked on the layout of a 14,000 m² aeronautics plant. Not on paper — in virtual reality, with full 3D simulation. We put on headsets and walked the production lines before the ground was broken. We watched parts move between stations. We found the aisle that was too narrow for the transport we had specified, and the workstation where an operator would have been reaching across a moving line every ninety seconds.

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/usine%20daher%203D%20VR.png" alt="3D simulation of the 12,000 m² composite manufacturing plant designed for Daher Aerospace" width="1187" height="708" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>Full composite plant simulation of 12,000 m² for Daher Aerospace, 2016–2017. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aitoufkiir_full-composite-plant-simulation-of-12-000m2-share-6347018886331789313-lDko/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Original post on LinkedIn</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>

<figure class="story-figure">
  <img src="/images/using%20daher%203D%20vr%20salle%20blanche.png" alt="Side-by-side comparison of the 3D factory simulation and the finished clean-room assembly lines" width="1184" height="659" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
  <figcaption>The same clean-room lines in simulation and after construction — the model became the built factory.</figcaption>
</figure>

All of it before a single wall went up.

### The technology was not the interesting part

VR was the novelty, and the novelty wore off in about a week. What did not wear off was what it did to the meetings.

Before, a layout review was a group of experienced people arguing over a 2D drawing. The production manager had one picture in his head. The safety officer had a different one. The industrial engineer had a third. Everyone was fluent in reading plans, and everyone was still reading a slightly different building.

After, we were all standing in the same room. Not metaphorically — the same simulated room, at the same scale, looking at the same aisle. The argument stopped being about whose mental model was right and started being about what to do. That is a categorically different conversation, and it is faster by an order of magnitude.

The value was not visualization. The value was **shared reference**.

### The same problem, in a completely different industry

Years later I was looking at eCommerce product pages for configurable goods — modular furniture, industrial profiles, custom uniforms — and it was the same failure in a different costume.

A customer wants a sofa in a specific fabric, in a specific configuration, for a specific wall. The website offers eight swatch thumbnails and a photo of a different sofa. The customer builds a picture in their head. The manufacturer has a different picture. Nobody finds out they disagreed until the thing arrives in a box.

That gap has a name in retail: returns. In B2B it shows up as quote revisions, sample rounds, and deals that quietly stall because the buyer is not confident enough to sign.

I had spent years watching that exact gap get closed on a factory floor. It seemed obvious that the same tooling belonged on the buying side.

That is why I founded Konfigear in 2019.

### What actually transfers

Not everything from industrial simulation is useful in commerce. Three things are.

**Scale and constraint have to be real.** A factory simulation that ignores turning radii is worse than no simulation, because it produces confident wrong answers. The same is true of a product configurator that lets a customer build something the factory cannot make. If the tool permits an impossible configuration, you have not removed uncertainty — you have moved it downstream to the person who has to phone the customer back. Rule-based configuration is not a feature. It is the difference between a demo and a system.

**Fidelity matters exactly as much as the decision requires.** We did not photorealistically render that plant. We did not need to. We needed accurate geometry and accurate distances. Commerce is the opposite — a buyer choosing a fabric needs the colour to be right far more than they need the polygon count to be high. Pantone accuracy beats ray tracing. Knowing which kind of fidelity your decision actually depends on saves an enormous amount of work.

**The output has to be usable downstream.** The plant model was not a picture. It fed real planning. A configurator that produces a pretty preview and then hands production a screenshot has solved the easy half of the problem. What the customer approved has to become what manufacturing receives, automatically, or you have just added a step.

That last one took us the longest to get right, and it is the one customers care about most.

### Where this ends up

Twelve years on, the platform runs for more than 200 organizations across 20-plus countries — industrial profile systems, solar mounting, furniture, medical equipment, and, through Konfiwear, custom apparel.

<div class="story-gallery">
  <figure>
    <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-ceei-asturias.jpg" alt="Ait Oufkir Yassine with the Asturias CEEI team" width="706" height="650" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
    <figcaption>With the Asturias CEEI team in Spain, where Konfigear is now headquartered.</figcaption>
  </figure>
  <figure>
    <img src="/images/yassine-ait-oufkir-icex.jpg" alt="Ait Oufkir Yassine meeting with the ICEX Invest in Spain team" width="1024" height="1024" loading="lazy" decoding="async" />
    <figcaption>Meeting the ICEX Invest in Spain team as the company expanded internationally.</figcaption>
  </figure>
</div>

The products could not be less alike. The underlying problem is identical every time: somebody is about to commit to something that does not exist yet, and they cannot picture it well enough to be sure.

Buyers do not usually walk away from configurable products because of price. They walk away because they cannot picture what will actually arrive, and the cost of being wrong feels higher than the cost of doing nothing.

Removing that uncertainty before the order is placed is the entire job. It was the job on the factory floor too. I just did not realise at the time that I was learning it.


Before I wrote software, I laid out an aeronautics plant in virtual reality. The most valuable thing it produced was not a better factory — it was better arguments.

3d Configuration

South Summit 2024: Pitching Konfigear at La Nave

MWC 2024: Konfigear at Mobile World Congress Barcelona

Web Summit 2023: Konfigear at the Spanish Pavilion

The Expensive Part of Custom Apparel Isn't Design. It's Prepress.

What Designing a Factory in VR Taught Me About Selling Products Online