My family has been in textiles since 1889. Five generations: a cloth mill in Lusatia, a flight from East Berlin, a fresh start in Prato. I grew up inside that story. And for a long time I assumed my job was simply to keep it going.

I no longer think that. Keeping a 130-year-old trade alive is not about repeating it. It is about translating it into the language of the next decade. For me, that language is AI.

Heritage is not nostalgia

People hear “fifth generation” and picture a museum. But the only reason the business survived this long is that every generation broke something the previous one held sacred. Accessories in the 1980s. Finished garments in 2010. Italian private label in 2015. Standing still was never the family method.

Where AI actually fits

I am not interested in AI as a buzzword. I am interested in what it removes from my day: the follow-ups that slip, the trend research that used to eat a week, the gap between a conversation at a trade fair and a clean proposal on the buyer’s desk. Tools should give me back the hours so I can spend them where the work is actually human — in front of a client, with fabric in hand.

Building in public

So this is what I am going to do here: show the experiments, the ones that work and the ones that embarrass me. German organization, Italian creativity, and a stack of new tools. If you are a maker, a buyer, or just curious how an old trade reinvents itself, stick around.