Fashion
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Virtual dressing room startup Revery.ai applying computer vision to the fashion industry
Figuring out size and cut of clothes through a website can suck the fun out of shopping online, but Revery.ai is developing a tool that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a better online dressing room experience.
Under the tutelage of University of Illinois Center for Computer Science advisrr David Forsyth, a team consisting of Ph.D. students Kedan Li, Jeffrey Zhang and Min Jin Chong, is creating what they consider to be the first tool using existing catalog images to process at a scale of over a million garments weekly, something previous versions of virtual dressing rooms had difficulty doing, Li told TechCrunch.
Revery.ai co-founders Jeffrey Zhang, Min Jin Chong and Kedan Li. Image Credits: Revery.ai
California-based Revery is part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort gearing up to complete the program later this month. YC has backed the company with $125,000. Li said the company already has a two-year runway, but wants to raise a $1.5 million seed round to help it grow faster and appear more mature to large retailers.
Before Revery, Li was working on another startup in the personalized email space, but was challenged in making it work due to free versions of already large legacy players. While looking around for areas where there would be less monopoly and more ability to monetize technology, he became interested in fashion. He worked with a different adviser to get a wardrobe collection going, but that idea fizzled out.
The team found its stride working with Forsyth and making several iterations on the technology in order to target business-to-business customers, who already had the images on their websites and the users, but wanted the computer vision aspect.
Unlike its competitors that use 3D modeling or take an image and manually clean it up to superimpose on a model, Revery is using deep learning and computer vision so that the clothing drapes better and users can also customize their clothing model to look more like them using skin tone, hair styles and poses. It is also fully automated, can work with millions of SKUs and be up and running with a customer in a matter of weeks.
Its virtual dressing room product is now live on many fashion e-commerce platforms, including Zalora-Global Fashion Group, one of the largest fashion companies in Southeast Asia, Li said.
Revery.ai landing page. Image Credits: Revery.ai
“It’s amazing how good of results we are getting,” he added. “Customers are reporting strong conversion rates, something like three to five times, which they had never seen before. We released an A/B test for Zalora and saw a 380% increase. We are super excited to move forward and deploy our technology on all of their platforms.”
This technology comes at a time when online shopping jumped last year as a result of the pandemic. Just in the U.S., the e-commerce fashion industry made up 29.5% of fashion retail sales in 2020, and the market’s value is expected to reach $100 billion this year.
Revery is already in talks with over 40 retailers that are “putting this on their roadmap to win in the online race,” Li said.
Over the next year, the company is focusing on getting more adoption and going live with more clients. To differentiate itself from competitors continuing to come online, Li wants to invest body type capabilities, something retailers are asking for. This type of technology is challenging, he said, due to there not being much in the way of diversified body shape models available.
He expects the company will have to collect proprietary data itself so that Revery can offer the ability for users to create their own avatar so that they can see how the clothes look.
“We might actually be seeing the beginning of the tide and have the right product to serve the need,” he added.
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Little Black Door launches app on iOS/Android allowing women to share wardrobes, online and off
Our relationship with fashion has changed, and not just because of the pandemic. Months in lockdown means people are probably more aware of their fashion purchases and how they consume, given its been such a long time without socializing. But the oft-talked about “Clueless” wardrobe, which would allow women to both see into their collections, as well as share and potentially borrow from friends, has yet to go mainstream. Now a U.K. startup aims to change this.
The Little Black Door app, previously in closed beta, has just launched on the Apple iOS store here and on Android.
The app allows women to share the content of their wardrobes in an Instagram-like manner by creating collections (“Lookbooks”), as well as curate their private wardrobe for their own use, with a focus on premium and luxury fashion. Women, says LBD, can “see, style and share”, as well as resell and borrow clothes offline.
The Lookbook feature allows women to share wardrobes collections with friends or followers in a controlled way, a feature that lets users borrow from each other.
Co-founder Lexi Willetts tells me: “We’d simply gotten to a point where we didn’t know what fashion we owned, given that almost every other area of life allows this. Most fashion can be easily dash-boarded on our phones — we couldn’t understand why our wardrobe wasn’t! Equally the effort required to list an item on resale was also super hard.”
Willetts and co-founder Marina Pengilly came up with the app when they realized they could make as much as £30,000 a year reselling their luxury clothes and accessories online. LBD is going after four key trends: the rise of resale (Depop etc); rentals like Rent the Runway; AI in e-commerce; and re-receipts.
Users upload their wardrobe by taking a photo of an item. The app will then recognize the item using computer vision. Lookbooks showcases fashion collections; new and old also have an “I have this” button, allowing users to add items to their own wardrobes, or add as they buy automatically via links to retailers.
Another key feature allows users to see into their own wardrobes to see what they have, and, crucially, see how much they’ve spent, and own, in value.
Users can also create a Lookbook, not unlike on Pinterest, which can be shared with friends or a wider fashion community in a public or private group-controlled way. Lookbooks can be shared with a user’s network to allow them to see your style, or borrow the outfit in real life. As well as this, LBD itself also curates a feed of fashion/lifestyle news and surveys.
Willetts says partnerships with retailers and supplier deals for sales and fashion repairs are also in the offing.
LBD competes with the Save Your Wardrobe’ app.
But it is pushing the fact that it places a greater emphasis on sharing the wardrobe as well, also allowing people to borrow items With this focus on premium and luxury fashion this makes it a truly social wardrobe, says LBD.
The business model is likely to be a Premium version that unlocks extra features, affiliate revenues, advertising, and resale commissions.
Disclosure: Mike Butcher was an early, informal, adviser.
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Newly funded Maisonette is becoming a go-to brand for fashion-conscious families; here’s how
Maisonette, a four-year-old, New York-based company, has aimed from the outset to become a one-stop curated shop for everything a family might need for their young children.
That plan appears to be working. Today, the company — which launched with preppy young children’s apparel and has steadily built out categories that include home décor, home furniture, toys, gear and accessories — says it doubled its number of customers last year and tripled its revenue. Indeed, even as COVID could have crimped its style — sales of children’s dress-up clothes slowed for a time — its DIY and STEM toy sales shot up 1,400%.
Though the company keeps its sales numbers private, its growth is interesting, particularly given the unabated growth of Amazon, which became the nation’s leading apparel retailer somewhere around the end of 2018.
Seemingly, much of Maisonette’s traction owes to the trust it has built with customers, who see its offerings as high-end yet accessible relative to the many luxury fashion brands that are also increasingly focused on the children’s market, like Gucci and Burberry.
Specifically, the 75-person company has a merchandising team that prides itself on working with independent brands and surfacing items that are hard to find elsewhere.
Maisonette also launched its own apparel line roughly 30 months ago, called Maison Me. Focused around “elevated basics” at a more reasonable price point, the line, made in China, is seeing brisk sales to families who buy items time and again as their kids outgrow or wear holes in them, says the company.
It helps that Maisonette’s founders have an eye for what’s chic. Co-founders Sylvana Ward Durrett and Luisana Mendoza de Roccia met at Vogue magazine, where Durrett spent 15 years, joining the staff straight from Princeton and becoming its director of events (work that earned her a high profile in fashion circles). Roccia joined straight from Georgetown the same year, 2003, and left as the magazine’s accessories editor in 2008.
For those who might be curious, their former boss, Anna Wintour, is a champion of theirs. Yet they also have some other powerful advocates, including NEA investor Tony Florence, a kind of e-commerce whisperer who on behalf of his firm has also led previous investments in Jet, Goop, and Casper.
NEA is an investor in Maisonette, as is Thrive Capital and the growth-stage venture firm G Squared, which just today announced it led a $30 million round in the company that brings its total funding to $50 million.
Another ally is Marissa Mayer, who first met Durrett back in 2009 when Mayer was still known as Google’s first female engineer and its most fashionable executive. Not only has their friendship endured — Mayer says she named one of her twin daughters Sylvana because she adored the name — but Mayer is on the board of Maisonette, where she has presumably helped refine its data strategy, including around an inherent advantage that the company enjoys: its very young customers.
“One of the things that’s really helpful when it comes to data and e-commerce is when you can capture people at a particular life stage,” Mayer explains. “It’s why people liked wedding registries. You get married, then you have children and [the retailer] can follow the children’s ages and start anticipating that customer’s needs and what they’re going to want two years from now.”
In terms of “predictable supply chain, for inventory selection, for just being able to meet that moment, having insight into those stages is really important and helpful,” she says. It can also be very lucrative for Maisonette as it continues to build out its business, notes Mayer.
Certainly, much is working in the company’s favor already. To Mayer’s point, Roccia says that more than half of Maisonette’s sales last year came from repeat customers. More, it already has an audience of more than 800,000 people who either receive emails from the company or follow its social media channels. (Maisonette also features a healthy dose of content at its site.)
Unlike some e-commerce businesses, Maisonette is asset-lite, too. Though it has opened a handful of pop-up stores previously and was contemplating a bigger move into retail (“that’s now on pause,” says Durrett), the company doesn’t have warehouses to manage. Instead, items are shipped directly to customers from the various retailers featured at its site.
Perhaps most meaningful of all, the company is competing in what is a massive and growing market. In the U.S. alone, the children’s apparel market is estimated to be $34 billion. Meanwhile, the children’s market is $630 billion globally. While Maisonette is selling to U.S. customers alone right now, it plans to use some of that new funding to move into international markets, says Roccia, who has been living in Milan with her own four children during the pandemic, while Durrett began working out of Maisonette’s mostly empty Brooklyn headquarters in January to create a bit of space from her three.
Indeed, on a Zoom call from their far-flung locations, they talk at length about parents needing to create new space to work from home right now, as well as to update rooms for kids attending virtual school. While no one asked for a global shutdown, home décor is a “category that has picked up due to the COVID effect,” notes Roccia.
Asked what other trends the two are tracking — for example, Maisonette features the mommy-and-me clothing pairings that have become big business in recent years — Roccia says that even with the world shut down, it remains a “huge” trend. “It started with holiday pajamas — that was kind of the catalyst to this whole movement — and now swimwear and just casual dressing has become a pretty big piece of the business, too.”
As for what Durrett has noticed, she laughs. “Llamas are big. We sell a llama music player that we had to bring back on the site several times over the holidays.” Also “rainbows and unicorns. As cliché as it sounds, we literally can’t keep them in stock.”
Unicorns, she adds, “are a thing.”
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Sneaker enthusiast group SoleSavy raises $2M, setting the stage for a community-driven commerce boom
SoleSavy, a community built around buying hot sneakers and related items that are increasingly hard to acquire at retail, raised $2 million in a round that closed late last year. SoleSavy is a group of communities that is currently mostly hosted on Slack.
SoleSavy’s co-founders Dejan Pralica and Justin Dusanj founded the company in 2018 as a paid community for collectors and enthusiasts seeking pairs that were getting snapped up by bots or resellers. Pralica previously co-founded Kicks Deals, a sneaker shipping site focused on less than retail pricing and Dusanj is the former director of Operations at New Age Sports, a Nike retailer.
SoleSavy’s $2 million party raise includes investment from Panache Ventures, Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH, Turner Novak, Ben Narasin, Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief, Tiny Capital, Wesley Pentz (yes, Diplo), Matthew Hauri aka Yung Gravy, Ryan Holmes, Roham Gharegozlou and Bedrock Capital.
SoleSavy has built an engaged community (several communities, really) around the ebb and flow of the sneakerhead consumer universe (SCU). I just coined that, by the way, please make it a thing. The SCU is an interesting place filled with fascinating characters and behaviors. Every once in a while it pokes its head into the mainstream, whether via a documentary, a hot shoe release or a strong-arm robbery attempt. In 2021, I believe that we will see more of this world breaking out of its box into the larger consumer consciousness.
The trends that are leading us to this place are varied, but some of them have been front and center during the pandemic, as a decade’s worth of consumer behavioral change has occurred in the space of a few months. You only have to look at how hard it was to get a PS5 or Xbox One X or a GPU for the holiday season, and how many services, Twitter accounts and monitor groups rose up to try to help people do that to see what the future of shopping looks like.
I joked about not being able to buy butter without a bot, but it’s not far from the truth — nearly every category of goods has had its own shortages over the last year. But the mother of all limited goods category for decades now has been sneakers.
Every release is hotly anticipated and eagerly purchased by people looking for the latest shoe. The massive increase in interest in the sneaker as the marquee desirable item and the unwillingness of the biggest manufacturers to lose the hype halo has led to each drop being harder to get than the last. Second-market startups like StockX and GOAT have sprung up to facilitate those who don’t mind paying 30%-200% premiums on each release.
The solution for many lies in the countless “cook groups” that help buyers anticipate demand and stock for each drop and plan to purchase them on release date.
SoleSavy’s function is ostensibly to do just that: help regular enthusiasts to strategize and execute the release-day cop. But beyond that, Pralica says that the group has come to be about the community of people around those shoes more than the purchase itself.
Image Credits: SoleSavy
SoleSavy is at its heart a Slack group (a series of groups actually that act as cohorts, leading people through the tiers of community that the team has built) with rooms that help people to understand what’s happening in sneakers, get the releases and commiserate around the culture. Pralica says that they’ve built that community out slowly (the waitlist for the group grows by 400 people per day) in order to maintain a positive atmosphere and to properly onboard new people to the group. They also have an app that drives push notifications and a podcast.
That positive community vibe is what Pralica says is SoleSavy’s long-term focus and differentiating factor that keeps the 4,000 members across the U.S. and Canada interacting with the group on a nearly daily basis.
I’ve been in a dozen or so different groups focused on buying large quantities of each release to re-sell over the years and many of them are, at best, rowdy and at worst toxic. That’s an environment that SoleSavy wanted to stay away from, says Pralica. Instead, SoleSavy tries to court those who want to buy and wear the shoes, trade them and yes, maybe even resell personal pairs eventually to obtain and wear another grail.
Though cook groups have been the “core” of the Discord and Slack-based communities in the sneaker world, other iterations have been booming too. Entrepreneurial communities based in the same hustle principles like Tyler Blake’s In This Economy and fanbase-focused groups around popular streamers top the Disboard. And bets on social token outfits like Zora are also focused on community as the glue that holds together a user base.
Community is the future of all commerce, whether you’re looking for a specific product (see the huge PS5 monitors) or want to steep yourself in a particular universe of product interest (the SCU). The trends that I’ve been seeing all point to 2021 being the year that community-driven purchasing breaks out of the underbelly of fandom and becomes officially “a thing.”
Image Credits: SoleSavy
SoleSavy has been experimenting with a variety of ways to keep the community knit going, including live chats, get-togethers and even a handsome custom community-designed Jordan 1. These efforts have driven the previously bootstrapped company to some impressive early numbers. Pralica says that SoleSavy is currently profitable, with $1.5 million ARR on $33 monthly subscriptions plus affiliate revenue and that their DAUs are at 90% — an engagement number that would make any retailer salivate.
Though the funding closed (very) late last year I thought that this would be a great kick-off story for the year ahead. Though SoleSavy seems to have a really compelling story and a great growth curve, I think they’re at the tip of a very large trend, one that we will see continue to build throughout the year.
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At $35 to $39 per share, Poshmark’s IPO could 5x its last private valuation
The new year is off to a busy IPO start. As The Exchange reported a few weeks ago, investors anticipate a busy Q1 IPO cycle, followed by a slower Q2 and a busy Q3 and Q4.
With Affirm releasing an initial IPO price range last night and Poshmark repeating the feat this morning, private-market investor expectations are holding up thus far.
Secondhand fashion marketplace Poshmark anticipates its IPO could price between $35 and $39 per share. Using its simple share count, the former startup could be worth nearly $3 billion. So, we’ve seen two multiunicorns set early pricing terms this week. That’s comfortably busy.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
As we did with Affirm, we’ll dig into Poshmark’s new pricing interval, calculate valuations for the company using both simple and fully diluted share counts, and figure out how they compare to its most-recent financial results and final private valuation. For the last bit, we’ll pull from PitchBook data and the S-1/A filing itself.
But for those of you in a hurry, the short gist is that for Mayfield, GGV, Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital and Temasek, the company’s first pricing estimate looks like a win.
If you want to read our first dig into the company’s IPO filing that is more focused on performance than pricing, head here. Let’s go!
Poshmark’s hugely “up” IPO
Poshmark’s $35 to $39 per-share IPO price interval could change, but even if it fails to rise, the company’s implied valuation is a dramatic step up from prior rounds.
For example, the company’s S-1 filings note that during its 2017 venture round — the last that it raised per the IPO filing and PitchBook data — Poshmark sold shares at $8.37 per share. That’s a fraction of the price that the company now expects public-market investors to pay.
As with Affirm, let’s calculate Poshmark’s valuation using both simple and fully diluted share counts. The latter takes into account shares that have been earned, but not yet exercised or converted.
Here’s the company’s valuation range using a simple share count, inclusive of its underwriters’ option to purchase 990,000 shares at its IPO price:
- Poshmark valuation, low-end of range: $2.6 billion.
- Poshmark valuation, high-end of range: $2.9 billion.
If we expand the company’s share count to include vested options and RSUs, the numbers go up. Again, the following math is inclusive of the underwriters’ option:1
- Poshmark valuation, low-end of range: $2.95 billion billion.
- Poshmark valuation, high-end of range: $3.29 billion.
So, are those good numbers? Yes.
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Psykhe secures seed funding to match consumer personalities to fashion products
In an overcrowded market of online fashion brands, consumers are spoilt for choice on what site to visit. They are generally forced to visit each brand one by one, manually filtering down to what they like. Most of the experience is not that great, and past purchase history and cookies aren’t much to go on to tailor user experience. If someone has bought an army-green military jacket, the e-commerce site is on a hiding to nothing if all it suggests is more army-green military jackets…
Instead, Psycke (it’s brand name is “PSYKHE”) is an e-commerce startup that uses AI and psychology to make product recommendations based both on the user’s personality profile and the ‘personality” of the products. Admittedly, a number of startups have come and gone claiming this, but it claims to have taken a unique approach to make the process of buying fashion easier by acting as an aggregator that pulls products from all leading fashion retailers. Each user sees a different storefront that, says the company, becomes increasingly personalized.
It has now raised $1.7 million in seed funding from a range of investors and is announcing new plans to scale its technology to other consumer verticals in the future in the B2B space.
The investors are Carmen Busquets, the largest founding investor in Net-a-Porter; SLS Journey, the new investment arm of the MadaLuxe Group, the North American distributor of luxury fashion; John Skipper, DAZN chairman and former co-chairman of Disney Media Networks and president of ESPN; and Lara Vanjak, chief operating officer at Aser Ventures, formerly at MP & Silva and FC Inter-Milan.
So what does it do? As a B2C aggregator, it pools inventory from leading retailers. The platform then applies machine learning and personality-trait science, and tailors product recommendations to users based on a personality test taken on sign-up. The company says it has international patents pending and has secured affiliate partnerships with leading retailers that include Moda Operandi, MyTheresa, LVMH’s platform 24S and 11 Honoré.
The business model is based around an affiliate partnership model, where it makes between 5-25% of each sale. It also plans to expand into B2B for other consumer verticals in the future, providing a plug-in product that allows users to sort items by their personality.
How does this personality test help? Well, Psykhe has assigned an overall psychological profile to the actual products themselves: over 1 million products from commerce partners, using machine learning (based on training data).
So for example, if a leather boot had metal studs on it (thus looking more “rebellious”), it would get a moderate-low rating on the trait of “Agreeableness”. A pink floral dress would get a higher score on that trait. A conservative tweed blazer would get a lower score tag on the trait of “Openness”, as tweed blazers tend to indicate a more conservative style and thus nature.
So far, Psykhe’s retail partnerships include Moda Operandi, MyTheresa, LVMH’s platform 24S, Outdoor Voices, Jimmy Choo, Coach and size-inclusive platform 11 Honoré.
Its competitors include The Yes and Lyst. However, Psykhe’s main point of differentiation is this personality scoring. Furthermore, The Yes is app-only, U.S.-only, and only partners with monobrands, while Lyst is an aggregator with 1,000s of brands, but used as more of a search platform.
Psykhe is in a good position to take advantage of the ongoing effects of COVID-19, which continue to give a major boost to global e-commerce as people flood online amid lockdowns.
The startup is the brainchild of Anabel Maldonado, CEO & founder, (along with founding team CTO Will Palmer and lead Data Scientist, Rene-Jean Corneille, pictured above), who studied psychology in her hometown of Toronto, but ended up working at the U.K.’s NHS in a specialist team that made developmental diagnoses for children under 5.
She made a pivot into fashion after winning a competition for an editorial mentorship at British Marie Claire. She later went to the press department of Christian Louboutin, followed by internships at the Mail on Sunday and Marie Claire, then spending several years in magazine publishing before moving into e-commerce at CoutureLab. Going freelance, she worked with a number of luxury brands and platforms as an editorial consultant. As a fashion journalist, she’s contributed industry op-eds to publications such as The Business of Fashion, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and Marie Claire.
As part of the fashion industry for 10 years, she says she became frustrated with the narratives which “made fashion seem more frivolous than it really is. “I thought, this is a trillion-dollar industry, we all have such emotional, visceral reactions to an aesthetic based on who we are, but all we keep talking about is the ‘hot new color for fall and so-called blanket ‘must-haves’.”
But, she says, “there was no inquiry into individual differences. This world was really missing the level of depth it deserved, and I sought to demonstrate that we’re all sensitive to aesthetic in one way or another and that our clothing choices have a great psychological pay-off effect on us, based on our unique internal needs.” So she set about creating a startup to address this “fashion psychology” – or, as she says “why we wear what we wear”.
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Bolt Threads partners with Adidas, owners of Balenciaga and Gucci, and Stella McCartney on mushroom leather
Bolt Threads has brought together some new and existing partners, including Stella McCartney, Kering (the fashion house behind brands like Balenciaga, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta), Lululemon and Adidas to create a consortium that will explore the company’s use of its mushroom-based leather substitute in products, the company said.
These companies will be among the first to bring products made with Bolt Threads’ mushroom-based leather substitute to market in 2021, the company said.
“I have always been convinced that innovation is key to addressing the sustainability challenge that luxury is facing. Finding innovative, alternative materials and fabrics can potentially drastically reduce the environmental impact of our industry over the long term,” François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of Kering, said in a statement.
The announcement is the culmination of at least two years of work from Bolt Threads, which first announced it would join the hunt for a leather substitute in 2018. The company announced its first product soon after — a $400 “Driver Bag” designed in conjunction with the Portland-based bag company, Chester Wallace.
The company, which has raised over $200 million since its launch nearly 11 years ago, faces some pretty tough competition. Companies like MycoWorks and Modern Meadow both have alternative leather products in the works. However, these partnerships may go a long way toward separating Bolt from the rest of the herd.
Swatches of Bolt Threads mushroom leather product, “Mylo.” Image Credit: Bolt Threads
Investors in Bolt Threads include Foundation Capital, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, Formation 8 and the Nan Fung Group, a privately held, Hong Kong-based conglomerate with significant holdings in the textile and fashion industry.
What the redoubled interest in leather goods means for the alternative spider silk that was the company’s original product is unclear. There hasn’t been much news on the silk front since the company debuted its $314 necktie back in 2017.
There’s clearly interest in the fashion industry’s ability to clean up. Consumers are demanding it, and new brands focused on sustainability are launching regularly.
As Reducetarian Foundation president and co-founder Brian Kateman wrote last year, “traditional fashion is killing the planet”:
Every year, the textile industry alone spits out 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases — more than all marine shipping vessels and international flights combined — and consumes 98 million tons of oil. Textile dyeing is the second-largest polluter of clean water, and on the whole, the apparel industry accounts for 10 percent of all greenhouse emissions worldwide. Worst of all, the clothes produced by this massive resource consumption produces clothes are rapidly discarded: In 2015, 73 percent of the total material used to make clothes ended up incinerated or landfilled, according to a study by the Ellen MacArthur foundation.
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What does accountability look like in 2020?
Rae Witte is a New York-based freelance journalist covering music, style, sneakers, art and dating, and how they intersect with tech. You can find her writing on i-D, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and Forbes, among others.
“What happens after a company gets called out?” he asked over the phone. “Do you know what happens to the people in-house that come forward?”
I didn’t.
A Black male engineer at a fashion tech company who wished to remain anonymous was telling me how he’d been passed over for promotions white counterparts later received after they’d pursued risky and unsuccessful projects. At one point, he said management tasked him with doing recon on a superior who made disparaging comments about women because his subordinates were uncomfortable reporting it directly to HR.
When human resources eventually took up the matter, the engineer said his participation was used against him.
More recently, his company brought furloughed employees back and managers promoted a younger, white subordinate over him. When he asked about the move, his direct supervisor said he was too aggressive and needed to be more of a role model to be considered in the future.
In the absence of industry leadership, there’s no blueprint to remedy institutional problems like these. The lack of substantial progress toward true representation, diversity and inclusion across several industries illustrates what hasn’t worked.
Audrey Gelman, former CEO of women-focused co-working/community space The Wing, stepped down in June following a virtual employee walkout. Three months earlier, a New York Times exposé interviewed 26 former and current employees there who described systemic discrimination and mistreatment. At the time, about 40% of its executive staff consisted of women of color, the article reported.
Within days, Refinery29’s EIC Christene Barberich also resigned after allegations of racism, bullying and leadership abuses surfaced with hashtag #BlackatR29.
In December 2019, The Verge reported allegations of a toxic work environment at Away under CEO Steph Korey. After a series of updates and corrections in reporting, it seemed she would be stepping away from her role or accelerating an existing plan for a new CEO to take over. But the following month, she returned to the company as co-CEO, sharing the statement: “Frankly, we let some inaccurate reporting influence the timeline of a transition plan that we had.”
Last month, after Korey posted a series of Instagram stories that negatively characterized her media coverage, the company again announced she would step down.
Bon Appétit former editor-in-chief Adam Rapaport resigned his position the same month after news broke that the cooking brand didn’t prioritize representation in its content or hiring, failed to pay women of color equally and freelance writer Tammie Teclemariam shared a 2013 photo of Rappaport in brown face.
In a public apology, staffs of Bon Appétit and Epicurious acknowledged that they had “been complicit with a culture we don’t agree with and are committed to change.”
Removing one problematic employee doesn’t upend company culture or help someone who’s been denied an opportunity. But with so much at stake when it comes to employing Instagram-ready branding, the lane is wide open for companies to meet the moment when it comes to doing the right thing.
A 2017 report by the Ascend Foundation found few Asian, Black and Latinx people were represented in leadership pipelines, and at that point, the numbers were actually getting worse. Seemingly, in an effort for transparency and accountability to do better, 17 tech companies shared diversity statistics and their plans to improve with Business Insider in June 2020. The numbers were staggering, especially for an initiative supposedly prioritized industry-wide in 2014:
Underrepresented minorities like Black and Latinx people still only make up single-digit percentages of the workforce at many major tech companies. When you look at the leadership statistics, the numbers are even bleaker.
While tech’s shortcomings show up clearly in a longstanding lack of diversity, companies in other industries polished their brands sufficiently to skate by — until COVID-19 and the call for racial justice after George Floyd’s murder called for lasting change.
In June, Adidas employees protested outside the company’s U.S. headquarters in Portland, Oregon and shared stories about internal racism. Just a year ago, The New York Times interviewed current and former employees about “the company’s predominantly white leadership struggling with issues of race and discrimination.”
In 2000, an Adidas employee filed a federal discrimination suit alleging that his supervisor called him a “monkey” and described his output as “monkey work.” When spokesperson Kanye West said in 2018 that he believed slavery was a choice, CEO Kasper Rorsted discussed his positive financial impact on the brand and avoided commenting on West’s statement.
In response to the internal turmoil at Adidas, the brand originally pledged to invest $20 million into Black communities in the U.S. over the next four years, increasing it to $120 million and releasing an outline of what they plan to do internally, Footwear News reported.
On June 30, Karen Parkin stepped down from her role as Adidas’ global head of HR in mutual agreement with the brand. In an all-employee meeting in August 2019, she reportedly described concerns about racism as “noise” that only Americans deal with. She’d been with the brand for 23 years.
Routinely protecting employees perceived as racist, misogynistic or abusive is bad for business. According to a 2017 “tech leavers” study conducted by the Kapor Center, employee turnover and its associated costs set the tech industry back $16 billion.
POC experience-centered social and wellness club Ethel’s Club invested into its community’s well-being and has not only managed to stay open (virtually) through the COVID-19 pandemic, it has managed to grow. Meanwhile, The Wing lost 95% of its business.
So, what really happens after the companies are called out? Often, the bare minimum. While the perpetrators of the injustice may endure backlash, abusers in corporate structures are often shifted into other roles.
Tiffany Wines, a former social media and editorial staffer at media/entertainment company Complex, posted an open letter to Twitter on June 19 alleging that Black women at the outlet were mistreated, sharing a story in which she claimed to have ingested marijuana brownies left in an office that was billed as a drug-free environment. Wines said she blacked out and accused superiors of covering up the incident after she reported it.
Her decision to speak up prompted other former employees to share stories alleging misogyny, racism, sexual assault and protection of abusers. One anonymous editor said she was asked if she would be comfortable with a workplace that had a “locker room culture” during a 2010 interview. (She did not end up working there.)
Complex Media Group put out a statement four days later on its corporate Twitter account, which had approximately 100 followers — as opposed to its main account, which has 2.3 million followers.
“We believe Complex Networks is a great place to work, but it is by no means perfect,” read the statement. “It’s our passion for our brands, communities, colleagues, and the belief that a safe and inclusive workplace should be the expectation for everyone.” It went on to state that they’ve taken immediate action, but it’s unclear if anyone has been terminated. [Complex is co-owned by Verizon Media, TechCrunch’s parent company.]
Members of the fashion community have formed multiple groups to combat systemic racism, establish accountability and advance Black people in the industry.
Set to launch in July 2020, The Black In Fashion Council, founded by Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner and fashion publicist Sandrine Charles, works to advance Black individuals in fashion and beauty.
The Kelly Initiative is comprised of 250 Black fashion professionals hoping to blaze equitable inroads, and they’ve publicly addressed the Council of Fashion Designers of America in a letter accusing them of “exploitative cultures of prejudice, tokenism and employment discrimination to thrive.”
Co-founders of True To Size, Jazerai Allen-Lord and Mazin Melegy, an extension of the New York-based branding agency Crush & Lovely, started offering their Check The Fit solutions to the brands they were working with in 2019. The initiative is an audit process created to align in-house teams and ensure sufficient representation is in place for brands’ storytelling.
Check The Fit determines who the consumer is, what the internal team’s history is with that demographic and the message they’re trying to communicate to them, and how the team engage’s with that subject matter in everyday life and in the office. Melegy says, “that look inward is a step that is overlooked almost everywhere.”
“At most companies, we’ve seen a lack of coherence within the organization, because each department’s director is approaching the problem from a siloed perspective. We were able to bring 15 leaders across departments together, distill through a list of concerns, find points of leverage and agree on a common goal. It was noted that it was the first time they were able to feel unified in their mission and felt prepared to move forward,” Lord says of their work with Reebok last year.
Brooklyn-based retailer Aurora James established the 15 Percent Pledge campaign, which urges retailers to have merchandise that reflects today’s demographics: 15% of the population should represent 15% of the shelves.
During the melee that transpired largely on Twitter and Instagram only to attempt to be reconciled in boardrooms, one Condé Nast employee and ally has been suspended. On June 12, Bon Appétit video editor Matt Hunziker tweeted, “Why would we hire someone who’s not racist when we could simply [checks industry handbook] uhh hire a racist and provide them with anti-racism training…” As his colleagues shared an outpouring of support online, a Condé Nast representative said in a statement, “There have been many concerns raised about Matt that the company is obligated to investigate and he has been suspended until we reach a resolution.”
Simply reading through accusers’ first-person accounts, it often seems like these stories end up on public forums because little to nothing is done in favor of the people who step forward. The protection has consistently been of the company.
The Black engineer I spoke to escalated his concerns to his company’s CEO and said the executive was unaware of the allegations and seemed deeply concerned.
Seeing someone who seemed genuinely invested in doing the right thing “obviously, means a lot,” he said.
“But at the same time, I’m still really concerned knowing the broader environment of the company, and it’s never just one person.”
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Former Stitch Fix COO Julie Bornstein just took the wraps off her app-only e-commerce startup, The Yes
After teasing the launch of their new startup last year, e-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein and her technical co-founder, Amit Aggarwal, are today launching The Yes, a women’s shopping platform that they’ve been quietly building for 18 months and they say will create tailor-made experiences for each user, courtesy of its sophisticated algorithms.
Bornstein’s experience and vision alone attracted $30 million in funding to the venture last year from Forerunner Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and True Ventures, among others. To learn more about how it breaks through in a world rife with e-commerce companies, we talked with Bornstein, who previously spent four years as COO of the styling service Stitch Fix and before that spent years as a C-level executive at Sephora. We wondered specifically how The Yes differs from Stitch Fix, given that both companies use data science to discover clothing for shoppers based on their size, budget and style.
Aside from the fact that The Yes is taking an app-only approach (unlike Stitch Fix), and doesn’t have a subscription model, Bornstein says that The Yes is very much focused on people “who want to shop” versus those who want their shopping done for them. Yet that’s just the start of what makes The Yes different than its other predecessors, said Bornstein in a conversation that follows below, edited lightly for length.
TC: You’re building what you call a store around each user, who downloads the app, answers questions that provide a lot of “signal” about that person’s style and brand preferences and size and budget, and that’s adaptive, meaning the algorithm is always re-ranking products as it learns better what a person likes. What demographic are you targeting?
JB: It’s women of a very broad age range, from 25 to 75, who care about fashion, whether they’re an in-the-know-on-everything fashionista or they just want to look great. And you can shop high/low, which is how most women shop these days. So it depends what you’re looking for.
TC: It sounds like you’re selling women’s apparel exclusively to start. Are you also selling handbags? Jewelry? Accessories?
JB: We’re focused on fashion and footwear, and we have accessories and handbags. A lot of our brands have great handbags. Then we will be expanding more to jewelry and other accessory categories over time.
TC: What brands can shoppers find on the platform?
JB: We have 145 brands at launch, ranging from Gucci, Prada and Erdem to contemporary brands like Vince and Theory to direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and La Ligne to everyday brands like Levis. When a brand integrates with The Yes, the platform sells each brand’s full digital catalog.
TC: Why go app only?
Most of the e-commerce sites that have mobile presence really feel like a website converted to a small screen. We [thought if we] challenged ourselves to leverage the technology of the native app environment, [we] could build a much slicker experience for the user. We also know that mobile is growing. It’s about 50% of total purchases now in fashion and growing faster, so while we know that web will be important to add, we really felt like mobile and iOS were the places to start.
TC: Stitch Fix uses machine learning to analyze customer tastes, but it ultimately relies on human stylists to choose items. What new advances have been made in AI that can allow The Yes to actually pick products using artificial intelligence? Isn’t fashion, like music, a “noisy” problem, with consumers often not knowing what they want?
JB: It’s such a nuanced area and really hard to do in the form of recommendations, but there are a number of reasons that enable us to do it. One is we had to build the most extensive taxonomy that exists in fashion. We did think a lot about the music genome project that Pandora did and all the work that Spotify has done. Music is definitely one of our inspirations. And if you look at what they did, they had some human expertise in the beginning, creating these categories, and then the machine learned on top of it, and we have done the same in fashion. So we had fashion expertise build our initial taxonomy.
Then we leveraged both machine learning and computer vision to train models to understand how to absorb all pieces of data related to a product, as well as the image itself and how to read images. And it gave us a really strong understanding of 500 dimensions for every single item. [Meanwhile] to understand what the consumer cares about, we spent a lot of time testing and learning which questions [to ask] when it comes to brand and price and things like color and style and size and fit…
TC: Because of your background, comparisons are probably going to be made between The Yes and Stitch Fix. What was the impetus for this new business? Was it a matter of eliminating that personal touch?
JB: I had such a great experience at Stitch Fix, and I’m still a shareholder and a big fan of the company and the team. And I think what they’re doing, what they continue to do, is terrific in really pushing the boundary on this concept of shopping-as-a-service.
What I am working on, and our team is really focused on, is the actual consumer shopping experience for consumers who want to shop. There’s a strong percent of the population who really loves to shop and wants agency in their own selection, and that is really the consumer we’re going after.
TC: You’re launching with roughly 150 brands. What is your relationship with them? Are you taking a cut of a transaction? Are you ever taking possession of their products? Do you have a warehouse or warehouses?
There were two things coming into this business that I wanted to avoid based on my personal experience, which was one, owning inventory, and two, reshooting every item for its own new photographs on the site. Pinterest and Instagram and all these other visual sites have shown us that the brands spend a lot of money shooting images to look a certain way to help communicate what their brand is all about. So leveraging those assets has been terrific.
[Regarding inventory], there’s no reason to ship the product from the brand to another warehouse and then to the consumer. We’re cutting out that stuff and shipping it direct from the brand. From a consumer standpoint, you order on our app, and everything is one-click, and you are charged by [us]. But then the order is placed through the brand and is shipped from the brand to you. Then we will communicate to you when it’s shipped, when it’s arriving, and if you have any customer service issues, we take care of it.
And we take a flat commission [on sales].
TC: Returns are free. But isn’t that a huge cost center, and might it deter people from returning items if you charged something for returns?
JB: My feeling is that free shipping and free returns is a baseline requirement to offer a great service. And it’s our job to help match [shoppers] to product that you’re not going to return. We have an enormous goal to have the lowest return rate in the industry. It will obviously take us some time to get there. But we believe that by making sure that we understand what works for you and what doesn’t, we can get [there].
TC: You raised $30 million last year. Are you in the market for a Series B? What will you have to show investors toward that end?
JB: The logic behind the dollar amount that we raised was: how much do we need to build what we want to build, and then bring it to market and get traction? And so that is our goal that starts tomorrow. . .
TC: How has this current reality altered your plans? Launching during a pandemic isn’t what you were imagining, obviously.
JB: No, it is not. [Laughs.] I don’t know that any of us could have possibly. We did delay our launch; we were originally launching in March, and once COVID hit, we needed to make sure we could see straight and understand the impact. I think as time has passed, we have felt more and more compelled to get out there to help our brands, all of whom are feeling the impact of the retail stores closing, or orders being canceled by their retail partners. They’re all businesses and many of them small businesses, so we want to help them.
It’s also an interesting time because we all need a little bit of levity and escape. And the app really is a fun escape.
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Vestiaire Collective raises $64.2 million for its second-hand fashion platform
Vestiaire Collective just closed another big round of funding in the middle of an economic crisis — the round closed in early April. The startup raised $64.2 million (€59 million) and the company has raised more than $240 million over the year, according to Crunchbase. Vestiaire Collective operates a marketplace of pre-owned fashion items. Users can both sell and buy clothes and accessories on the platform.
There’s a huge list of investors in today’s round — Korelya Capital, Fidelity International-managed funds, Vaultier7, Cuit Invest and existing investors Eurazeo (Eurazeo Growth and Idinvest Venture funds), Bpifrance, Vitruvian Partners, Condé Nast, Luxury Tech Fund and Vestiaire Collective CEO Max Bittner are all participating.
With 9 million members across 90 countries, Vestiaire Collective has become a huge marketplace. And it makes sense that an e-commerce website focused on pre-owned items is working well. There has been a ton of backlash against fast fashion over the past few years.
People now also value circular business models as it becomes more affordable to refresh your wardrobe, especially during an economic crisis, and it is better for the environment.
As always, Vestiaire Collective will use the new influx of cash to expand to more countries. In particular, with Korelya Capital as a new backer, the company will expand to South Korea and Japan this year. While the company started in France, 80% of transactions are now cross-border transactions.
Originally, Vestiaire Collective asked you to send your items to its warehouses to check them before putting them on sale. The startup has been betting on direct shipping from the seller to the buyer in Europe and it has been working well. You can get reimbursed if there’s something wrong with what you ordered though.
Direct shipping has been available in Europe since September 2019 and it now represents over 50% of orders in the region. Up next, Vestiaire Collective will introduce direct shipping in the U.S. this summer and in Asia by the end of 2020.
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