The Fung Global Retail & Technology team attended the New York Fashion Tech Lab Demo Day 2016 event on Wednesday, June 8. Founded in 2014, the New York Fashion Tech Lab is a community-driven, relationship-building collaboration and business development platform. The program was founded to support women-led companies that have developed innovations at the intersection of fashion, retail and technology. I serve as an informal advisor within New York Fashion Tech Lab’s Expert Network. On Demo Day, the founders of each participating company in this year’s 12-week accelerator program presented their businesses to fashion retail executives, investors and press.
Source: Fung Global Retail & Technology
DEMO DAY 2016 PARTICIPANTS
The eight companies that participated in the 2016 accelerator program and presented on Demo Day were:
Claire is an A/B testing platform for fashion products and price points that provides clarity on what brands and retailers should sell next and how much they should charge for them. Claire helps companies minimize inventory risk and maximize sell-through, all while building stronger relationships with their customers.
Closet Collective is a peer-to-peer fashion community where women can list, discover and rent everyday designer fashions. The platform allows women to access and afford an endless designer closet and discover unique emerging designers. Through a combination of technology and advanced logistics, the community connects any woman to any closet, giving her access to the $100 billion worth of clothing hanging, unworn, in closets across the country. Closet Collective also enables women to monetize their closets in a new way, so they can reinvest in new pieces they love.
Elemoon invented the first consumer-ready, flexible computer, which adds substantial technology and style to existing wearables and the Internet of Things. Its applications range from wearables and fashion products to sports equipment and medical devices. The company’s first application—a bracelet that offers step tracking and other functionality, and that changes color to match the wearer’s outfit—marries a $70 billion wearable business with a $260 billion jewelry market.
Fittery is addressing the biggest opportunity in online clothing shopping: fit. Poor fit is the number-one driver of the 30%–40% of online purchases that are returned, creating $18 billion in lost sales opportunity for retailers. Fittery’s mission is to eliminate the hassles of fitting rooms and online returns and make clothing shopping smarter. The company’s big data solutions create merchandising tools for retailer sites that guide shoppers to items that fit them best, while delivering sales and product insights to better inform retailer strategies. The company says that its offering helps retailers drop their return rate to only .6%.
Genostyle centralizes and augments customer insights to quickly deconstruct style and recommend revenue-driving activities across the customer’s business. The company’s proprietary algorithms break style down into quantifiable data (“genostyles”). Its solutions and data sets infuse and amplify existing customer data analytics, providing not-seen-before style insights to broaden and deepen retailers’ understanding of their customers and the styles that they consume, and how those drive margins. Genostyle helps retailers see whether certain customer profiles and styles are up and coming, waning or about to be “the next big thing.” The company helps merchants and planners gain a quantifiable competitive advantage through forecasting, managing returns, and making better business decisions on merchandising, price markdowns and distribution.
Siren has created a new category of protective accessories for women, discreetly equipped with a directional 114-decibel alarm that activates instantly during an emergency. Its introductory product, the Siren Ring, has been recognized by leading technology, self-defense and security leaders, as well as by global retail and fashion tastemakers, as a revolutionary safety device that effectively utilizes the power of sound to disrupt and repel an imminent physical threat. Siren’s patented modular technology has been used to create the leading portable security platform, which spans the industrial, consumer and first-responder markets, creating a universal resource for effortless wearable protection.
Smartzer has created a video player that allows consumers to click on items within a video in order to make purchases or sign up for notifications. The company’s offering includes an extensive analytics component that provides demand-prediction analytics and helps retailers and brands understand how consumers interact with video content. Merchants benefit from the ability to use videos to generate measurable sales, build on customer preference data, and use the analytics on how consumers interact with videos to shape future video strategies.
Thursday Finest is transforming the experience of fashion by manufacturing individual apparel, on demand, in minutes. The company uses proprietary technology and 3D-knitting machines to create perfect-fitting sizes and support an array of style and color combinations. The company designs, manufactures and ships knitted products from Brooklyn, NY.
Get more details on the NYFTL Demo Day in our report.
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