London College of Fashion's Centre for Fashion Enterprise (CFE) has announce six new businesses to join its FashTech Pioneer Programme.
Taking full advantage of fashion and technology innovation, non-woven textiles company DOPPELHAUS, jewellery rental service GLITZBOX, high-performance childrenswear brand PETIT PLI, wardrobe management platform SAVE YOUR WARDROBE, location-based retail app SHOPEST, and AI-powered visual search engine TEGGNET, have set out to lead the future of the fashion industry.
The businesses were selected on the basis of bringing together fashion and technology to create a unique and scalable business proposition that will benefit from CFE’s expert advice, guidance and timely interventions over a period of six months.
CFE is London’s pioneering fashion and fashion tech business incubator, whose purpose is to fast-track designers and entrepreneurs into successful businesses. CFE works with designers and creative entrepreneurs to transform talent and ideas into businesses by providing support programmes that facilitate their USP, vision and innovation. By implementing business strategy for creative entrepreneurs, CFE aims to empower growth for individuals and businesses.
“We are beyond excited to be able to join the Fashtech Pioneer Programme. We are confident that the support, mentorship and network from the CFE will deeply challenge us and push Petit Pli to reach its full potential. We look forward to connecting with, and learning from the knowledge and experience of both mentors and fellow participants.” – PETIT PLI
“We are so proud and excited to be part of the CFE FashTech Programme. We are on an exciting journey to change how people feel about their morning routine, and it is invaluable for a start-up like us to be able to benefit from CFE’s endorsement, extensive knowledge and network to help us achieve that.” – SAVE YOUR WARDROBE
The FashTech Pioneer programme is a part of CFE’s Fashion & Technology Emerging Futures (FTEF) project, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) with the vision to support the new eco-system emerging in London, recognising the convergence of fashion and technology SMEs.
The Programme is specifically designed to equip early stage fashion technology entrepreneurs with the skills to transform their innovative ideas into viable and sustainable businesses. This includes a wide range of business support in areas such as branding, storytelling, production, finance, legal, digital strategy and marketing.
Judith Tolley, Head of the CFE commented: “London is known for nurturing the most innovative and authentic creative fashion designers and emerging businesses, and we are proud to continue our 14-year track record in supporting London’s most promising creative talent to grow successful and sustainable fashion businesses.”
Among CFE’s portfolio of alumni and currently supported fashion designers are Wales Bonner, Liam Hodges, Faustine Steinmetz, Molly Goddard, Craig Green, Marques Almeida, Erdem, Peter Pilotto, and Mary Katrantzou.
FashTech businesses who have previously benefited from CFE’s mentorship and support include visionaries such as wearable connected fashion laboratory XO, global fashion database and events platform Chicmi, and the first fashion brand for co-creation and design AwaytoMars.
Learn more about each of the new pioneers below.
GLITZBOX
UK's first jewellery rental subscription service
Think Birchbox meets Netflix for quality jewellery discovery. Glitzbox are pioneering the sharing economy in the jewellery sector by using technology to offer an exciting membership service that is revolutionising the way people buy and discover jewellery. For a monthly subscription fee, Glitzbox’ members get the luxury of wearing three pieces of quality jewellery for a fraction of the retail price, and then decide whether they would like to buy or return any of the pieces. For emerging designers, Glitzbox are also bridging the gap between selling online and offline, allowing designers to stand out in a saturated market. This includes access to invaluable insights, trends and data based on customer feedback and purchasing patterns.
DOPPELHAUS
Taking full advantage of modern non-woven technologies in order to create a sustainable and innovative sheep’s wool textile, which helps relieve increasing pressure on the textile industry to meet ecological standards
Nowadays British wool is struggling to compete in the global market and farmers often make a loss from the sale of their wool. Doppelhaus aims to increase demand for local wool through innovative textile design. Cloudwool™ is a lighter fabric with improved drape and performance qualities, offering an alternative to labour- and resource-intensive felted fabrics such as boiled wool. With the cheaper and more efficient non-woven technologies, it would be possible to establish a transparent, domestic production chain, to support the dwindling British textile industry, as well as offering a positive economic and ecological contribution to the fashion industry.
PETIT PLI
Petit Pli create the most advanced technical children’s clothing in the world.
Children grow 7 sizes in their first 2 years on Earth, and this equates to a lot of wasted clothing. Petit Pli’s versatile waterproof shells are pleated in such a way that they can grow bi-directionally to custom fit a range of sizes. The continuous size adjustment is a new way of approaching garment design, and one that is suitable to high growth rates and discrepancies in children’s sizes. Children are extreme athletes and Petit Pli use technical materials that are ultra-lightweight, rainproof and breathable because to fulfil the needs of this untapped user group.
SAVE YOUR WARDROBE
A digital wardrobe management app
Save your wardrobe is a disruptive digital wardrobe management app which brings together AI (Artificial Intelligence) with IoT (Internet of Things), to create a new and innovative experience that allows users to make the most of their personal wardrobe. Using computer vision and their mobile app, Save your wardrobe are able to create a digital wardrobe from users’ purchase receipts and history from e-mails and retailers’ accounts. The technology offers an integrated approach to wardrobe management, including styling recommendations, dry cleaning and alterations, selling and donating clothes. Using state of the art machine learning, Save your wardrobe are able to automatically create new outfits based on what their customers already own, their lifestyle and needs.
SHOPEST
A location-based technology platform connecting retailers and shoppers in real time, with the view to driving foot fall into brick-and-mortar stores
Shopest is solving the problem of inefficient live inventory search by making nearby retail searchable, discoverable & shoppable on demand. Shopest does this by integrating 3rd party apps with market leading EPOS, store inventory and ecommerce platforms, as well as offering product curation, to allow shoppers to search & find nearby fashion items, stores, sales and retail events on-demand. The technology enables Shopest to track their users’ preferences and convert this into a personalised and integrated digital experience for the consumer, and a hyper-local marketing tool for the retailers.
TEGGNET
A disruptive social ecommerce search engine
Teggnet is a search engine built for shopping, powered by human intuitive AI that delivers relevant results based on user profiles. The platform utilises user-generated image-based content and makes it shoppable directly from images and video – an alternative approach to discovering trends, product recommendations and shopping. Combining this with social networking features, Teggnet is also bringing an unparalleled peer-to-peer ecommerce shopping experience. Users can save time and frustration, whilst reducing the cost of content creation for brands. Teggnet’s mission is to build a collaborative new format of social ecommerce by disrupting social media advertising and ecommerce at the same time.
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