Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Founders Factory have announced a third startup selected for its retail accelerator program under their joint venture, Founders Factory Retail.
Texel, a 3D digital fit company, was sourced through Founders Factory’s global network, backed by M&S.
“Texel’s technology opens up many exciting routes for us. Retail is changing and changing faster than ever before,” said Paschal Little, head of clothing and home technology at M&S. “Investing in businesses like Texel puts us at the sharp end of that change and gives us the tools to test and trial new ways to inspire our customers.”
The investment in Texel is part of the retailer’s joint venture with Founders Factory, which enables startups to grow at pace using the company’s experts in design, computer engineering, AI, data science and strategy.
Texel’s technology scans capture and measures people in 3D, creating a digital avatar of the user. It then uses its technology to recommend clothes that will best fit the user’s shape and size.
Texel will complement Optitex which M&S’s design and technology team use to create patterns that are then rendered in 3D to visualize what a garment will look like on an avatar or mannequin without a piece of cloth being cut or sewn.
“Texel is building products designed to simplify, personalize and enrich the offline and online shopping experience and helps to reduce online returns and increase conversion,” said Sergey Klimentyev Texel co-founder.
Founder’s Factory Retail will spend six months working with Texel which it will seek to grow and scale. Texel is the third startup M&S has selected for its retail program along with ChargedUp, a mobile phone battery sharing service and Rocketo, a healthy subscription dog food service.
“The breadth of the businesses backed by M&S so far — from solving the challenge of on-the-go mobile phone charging (ChargedUp) to improving the way we feed our pets (Rocketo) — is testament to M&S’s commitment to partnering with startups across all business units to transform [its] offer to [its] customers,” said Isabela Chick, managing director of retail for Founders Factory. “We will see benefits to the startups and to M&S through these collaborations.”
These investments are in addition to M&S’s strategic partnership with Microsoft, which is testing the capabilities of technology and artificial intelligence in a retail environment.
