Newswire Tech Tailor

5 Women at the Cusp of Fashion + Technology Innovation

By Daniella Platt

Meet these five women CEOs innovating at the intersection of fashion, retail and technology—all motivated by their personal shopping hurdles, design limitations and retail challenges to create change.

EverThread is a visualization technology that streamlines image asset production and makes it easy for retailers to offer consumers numerous, high-resolution views of every product. This resembles a real-life experience, while also giving customers the ability to mix and match products across categories.

Nicole Mossman

“My background in product development and design along with a desire to be able to share every view and variation of my products with customer led me to build EverThread, a solution that allows brands and retailers to automate their image production process and dynamically display all views and variations without the heavy lift and high cost of traditional methods of photography, photoshop or 3D rendering,” said Nicole Mossman, founder and CEO of EverThread.  “The ability for a consumer to be able to see exactly what they’re purchasing and envision it with other products is the key to consumer confidence and conversion, the bridge from bricks-and-mortar to e-commerce for a brand.”

With EverThread, companies can offer newness, to market and sell product without producing upfront. The software also provides suppliers production ready files of custom purchases for potential on-demand supply chain.

EverThread was awarded for Best Customer Experience Solution at Remode, November 2018.

Fashwire

Fashwire is an “authentic designer solution,” said Kimberly Carney, CEO and founder of the Seattle-based platform. Owning a local boutique herself, Carney was inspired to create Fashwire to determine what products to purchase for her store. She quickly recognized that an influx of brands needed this data as a solution. Describing the platform as the “tinder of fashion-technology,” she shares, “Fashwire creates a scalable cross-marketing channel for emerging and established brands. Our vision is to leverage the consumer-driven phenomenon of ‘showrooming’ to disrupt the traditional relationships between brands and consumers.”

Fashwire helps fashion designers to improve on their full-price sell-through with instant, targeted user data and feedback on the popularity of new ranges, and even potential future products.

Nineteenth Amendment believes that enabling designers with technology can make brands more efficient, create better products and make more money in a responsible way.

Gemma Sole

Designers themselves, co-founders, Amanda Curtis and Gemma Sole created Nineteenth Amendment as a SMART PLM platform “that gives brands access to on-demand manufacturing and retailing allowing them to sell sustainably with little to no inventory and bring their products to market faster.”

Brands produce what they need, without risk, in four weeks or less.  Production is through a vetted network of no-minimum manufacturers.  Clients include Disney, Macy’s and emerging designers.

What inspired them to create Nineteenth Amendment SMART PLM? “After graduating from Parsons I had immediate success, designing for celebrities and NY Fashion Week. Despite all of this I wasn’t financially successful—read starving artist,” Curtis shared.  “That’s when I decided that we need to use technology to help designers bootstrap or what I like to call ‘stiletto strap’ and test market validation. I want to give other designers a chance to succeed in fashion by lowering the financial bar of entry and letting talent and drive be the determining factors of success.”

You Hafta Have it, don’t you? Hafta Have is a technology that came from a personal in-store shopping pain point. Amanda Latifi, co-founder and CEO, was trying to keep track of items of interest for future reference, eventually missing out on the purchase completely.

Amanda Latifi

Hafta Have was developed as a way to reverse engineer this process, to help customers track what they want and bring people back to shop. We caught up with Latifi at the Remode show in November 2018, where she demonstrated how easy the platform is to use: take a photo of a bar code and the Hafta Have platform will notify you via text when the item shifts in price.

Hafta Have is a SaaS platform that helps brick-and-mortar retailers convert in-store shoppers who want up-to-date information on items they plan to purchase later. Initially launched to solve this consumer shopping challenge, Hafta Have realized it was passively solving a challenge for the retail industry and repositioned themselves as a unique hybrid solution that benefits both the shopper and provides data to the retailer.

“We quickly realized we were the only ones to capture offline product-specific, pre-purchase intent data on an individual and uncompressed user-level,” said Latifi. “We couldn’t ignore the larger opportunity, and so decided early on to pass on playing it safe. We became an app-less solution that runs via SMS and partners directly with the retailers.”

Hafta Have automates data for retailers, all while simplifying the user experience and reducing barriers to increase adoption—no app, no log-in, no profile, no sign-up for in-store shoppers.