Digital pattern making for the modern tailor

CAD stands for computer-aided design, which tells a tailor nothing. Here is the useful description: it is a digital drafting table that remembers - pattern making for the modern shop. You type the customer's measurements, pick the style, and it draws the same pattern a master cutter would draw - to the same rules, at full size, in minutes instead of hours - and then it keeps that draft so the next one comes out identical.

Three things follow from "it remembers", and they are the whole argument:

• The tenth garment is cut like the first. Hand drafting varies by the hour and by the person. A stored draft does not.
• The draft stays when the cutter leaves. This is the risk most shops never price until it happens.
• A correction is permanent. Fix the fit once after a trial, save it, and it applies to every garment for that customer from then on.

Shops are often pointed at a general design or drawing program and told it does the same job. It does not, and the gap only shows after the cloth is cut.

The row that matters is the fourth. A drawing is something you look at. A pattern is something you lay on cloth. Ask any vendor to print theirs full size before you decide - the drafting side is covered in more depth on the pattern making software page. Shops weighing this against Cutting Master will find that comparison on the Cutting Master alternative page.

Two rules decide whether that week holds. Train the cutter, not only the owner - the owner is the person least likely to be drafting at nine at night in December. And train a second person, because the first one will eventually leave, which is the problem CAD was supposed to solve.

It will not fix a bad measurement. The draft is only as good as the numbers typed into it. If two people in the shop take the waist at different places, the stored record is worth nothing. Agreeing where each measurement is taken costs nothing and is the biggest single improvement most shops can make.

It will not cut the cloth. The full-size printed pattern is the output. Cutting is still a skill, and a cutting machine is a separate purchase with its own cost.

It will not replace judgement. Deciding that this customer needs a deeper yoke, or that this fabric will drop after a day, is the cutter's call. The software drafts what it is asked for.

It will not help a shop with spare capacity. The return comes from orders previously refused, alterations that stop coming back, and cloth that stops going in the bin. A shop with none of those three should say so before buying, and any vendor worth dealing with will agree. If you are still weighing options, read our best tailoring software in India buyer's guide first.