India, Aug. 7 -- India's D2C fashion ecosystem has become exceptionally good at spotting trends. Brands today use AI to generate hundreds of new designs in a matter of hours, identify emerging consumer preferences and launch collections at a speed that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Manufacturing, however, moves at a snail's pace.

Turning a design into a finished garment takes four to five months, forcing brands to lock up crores of rupees in inventory before they know whether a product will sell. As fashion cycles shorten, this mismatch is becoming one of the apparel industry's biggest operational challenges.

Bengaluru-based STCH believes the problem isn't India's manufacturing capacity but the way manufacturing is organ...