New York Fashion Tech Lab was founded in 2014 with the goal of bringing new technology resources to fashion retailers and brands in order to move the industry forward. Participating lab companies are all women-led and come from around the world to receive exposure to and collaboration with their vast network of industry experts who offer business support, facilitate business connections, and help evaluate potential partnership. Since its inception, over 50 emerging tech companies have gone through the program and have collectively raised over $120 million in funding. This year, the 7^th cohort of companies participated in a virtual demo-day to present their businesses to the industry. New York Fashion Tech Lab identified 8 tech companies that meet the needs of today’s retailers, addressing circular economy, virtual experience, contactless commerce, and hyper personalization.

The CFDA interviewed the graduating cohorts to discuss how their technology will help advance the future of the fashion industry.

THEME: CIRCULAR ECONOMY

REFLAUNT:  Empowering brands with the technology to reclaim the second-hand market and embrace circular economy.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

Reflaunt helps brands and retailers to implement sustainability in their business model by facilitating the extension of product life cycle. We allow brands to leverage the powerful narrative of circular economy while preserving their brand experience. We empower fashion brands with the technology to capture the second-hand market and embrace the circular economy. Net, we help drive their top line while reducing their ecological footprint.

Very concretely, we integrate a “Resell” button in the brand website, next to the customer’s past purchases, when he clicks to RESELL a past purchase, he selects a few options and the piece is pushed simultaneously on our network of second-hand marketplaces. Once the piece is sold, the customer receives shopping credits to purchase again from the retailer online or offline.

There are multiple benefits to partnering up with Reflaunt:

1. We help brands/retailers step-change their customer loyalty
2. We help brands/retailers monetize the second-hand market
3. We help brands/retailers gain visibility and control over the second-hand market
4. We help brands/retailers drive sustainability in the fashion industry.

In the wake of COVID-19, are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

The fashion industry’s current crisis presents a silver lining as it has accelerated the need for sustainable services like ours and has made our service even more relevant. The current context should a) accelerate online penetration b) stimulate ideas around a shift towards positive consumerism, and c) increase the need for retailers/brands to innovate and rethink their model. Indeed, the past few months have shown a dramatic increase in transactions on the second hand market and there are no indications that the trend will change.

Furthermore, we have helped brands resell their excess stock through our network of marketplaces. This has allowed brands to unlock the optimal value for their assortment while avoiding brand erosion with visible promotional initiatives.

THEME: VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

CHANGE OF PARADIGM: 3D solution for product display, digital runway, AR virtual showrooms, and assets for gaming platforms.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

Our platform is the one-stop 3D destination enabling fashion brands and retailers to develop a true digital identity through the ability to virtualize garments in 3D, and from a single 3D asset, to produce content for deployment across platforms and applications. Brands and retailers can harvest the full potential of 3D through product display, editorial content, digital catwalks, AR virtual showrooms and fashion assets for games.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

With COVID-19, we have witnessed a surge of interest in 3D virtualization as an alternative to photo-shoots, live events and brick and mortar shopping experiences. The real challenge is for brands and retailers to change their paradigm in a particularly sensitive time, embrace 3D and reallocate part of their content production, marketing and PR budgets towards 3D virtualization, content production and digital commerce experiences.

ZOOMLOOK: VR “Zoom In” experience to see product detail and discover consumer data insights.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

ZOOMLOOK® will help the fashion design and retail industry create immersive engagement as the standard for digital commerce using ultra-high resolution immersive visual medium delivering limitless resolution photos, 360º/3D products, animation and video content to your customers on every device over any bandwidth. ZOOMLOOK® provides Cloud based multimedia imaging applications and immersion data to companies worldwide

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

In the post COVID-19 reality, a digital experience that is on a par with an in-person experience provides tremendous value to the industry.

Now more than ever, brands must present the most engaging and clear online presence.

THEME: CONTACTLESS COMMERCE

FUTUREPROOF RETAIL: Scan & go mobile checkout platform to digitize the in-store experience.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

We first launched our technology in the grocery industry in 2015. Today, we are bringing to the fashion industry an established mobile checkout platform. Bringing online shopping capabilities into offline stores via a convenient and hygienic no-touch mobile checkout solutions. The platform features both line-free mobile checkout and line-free order-ahead capabilities.  Our touch-free checkout platform gives fashion retailers a trusted and safe solution to offer their shoppers and staff inside their stores.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

COVID-19 inspired many retailers to redesign their in-store experience so it can be cleaner and safer to earn the trust of both shoppers and staff. Most retailers have to balance enabling a healthy social distance without losing too much valuable shopping floorspace. Besides incorporating hygienic products such as sneeze guards, disinfectant wipes, and shields to their daily operations, technologies that enables no-touch checkouts such as mobile payment and mobile checkout plays an increasingly important role in enabling retailers offering both a convenient and hygienic solution for their stores.

HAFTA HAVE: Capture offline shopper data to drive cross-channel conversion, all via SMS.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

The platform allows shoppers to save items they find in-store via SMS, while increasing conversion and collecting data. No apps, no hardware, contactless shopping that connects the offline to online. Imagine knowing exactly what an in-store shopper is thinking about buying – it is the missing data set in the retail industry. Consider us the 1st ‘Offline Add-to-Cart’: we tell retailers exactly what their in-store shoppers are considering buying, and use automated mobile messaging to communicate on a product-level to drive sales. Hafta Have’s patent-pending technology enhances the in-store experience by allowing shoppers to text the tags of the things they are thinking about buying. Hafta Have identifies them, adds the items to their list and links the pre-purchase intent directly to the product page on the retailer’s e-commerce site.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

Contactless shopping experience, less time browsing, and delayed/more conservative spending – all of which we can respond to. With Hafta Have, a shopper uses their own mobile device and doesn’t need to engage a sales associate. And with reduced time spent in-store, we can help capture offline browse to ensure a shopper stays in a retailer’s purchase funnel even after they leave the four walls.

THEME: HYPER PERSONALIZATION

HEURITECH: AI trend and demand forecasting using  consumer data from social media.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

Using advanced artificial intelligence to translate real-world images shared on social media into meaningful insights, Heuritech offers brands data driven trend forecasting. According to Vogue, “Heuritech has turned social media into an artificial intelligence tool that predicts the development of trends.” Our platform allows brands to anticipate products trends one year in advance to adapt stock and sales forecast to the demand – for example, demand for tie dye T-shirts in China will increase by 15 percent for SS21 and in the U.S., it will grow by 34 percent (those figures are examples). The company is built on deep learning and data science technologies, with image recognition scanning millions of images each day on social media, and forecasting algorithms trained on 5 years of historical data, and 4000 trends predicted so far. We work with merchandisers, marketers and designers to give them data-driven insights on their consumers for them to create products that will resonate with their consumers.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

During COVID-19, brands did not have any data from sales in stores which proved how it is crucial to have another source of consumer data. According to MarketsandMarkets, AI in the fashion industry is expected to grow yearly by 40 percent until 2024 to reach 1.2 billion valuation, with key areas of development being the following:

1. “The adoption of AI in fashion solutions is expected to grow owing to increasing influence of social media on fashion industry.”
2. “Need of inventory management and shortening the changing fashion cycle to drive the growth of AI powered solutions.”
3. “End users, including fashion designers, and fashion stores to contribute maximum in terms of adoption of AI solutions in fashion industry.”

BECOCO: Digital client engagement tool and AI driven styling solutions for online and in-store.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

BECOCO supports the retail industry by matching the right clothes to every customer based on their individual body shapes and style. This helps retailers to reduce returns and efficiently allocate surplus inventory to the right customer and it helps the customer to find the right clothes faster.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

One of the challenges that many retailers are facing is that the customer has been moving to the digital world much faster than the fashion industry has – and that has been accelerated by COVID-19. This comes with a big opportunity for brands to reach and inspire the customer at home, through personalized and differentiated ways that BECOCO can offer at scale.

SOZIE: On-demand user and employee generated content for fashion try-on.

How will your platform support the fashion design and retail industry?

By connecting online shoppers to in-store associates for personalized shopping experiences. Sozie’s core product is technology platform that connects e-commerce to store employees, to create employee generated content (EGC) from fashion try-ons on-demand and integrate this onto retailer social channels and websites. We drive revenues from two of the largest expenses that retailers have: employee and inventory costs. We do this by converting employees into ambassadors and inventory into content. Sozie content delivers a 4x increase in sales conversion and 173 percent increase in engagement online.

In the wake of COVID-19 are there any new challenges or opportunities that have materialized that you feel brands should consider when it comes to technology?

In the wake of COVID-19, stores may continue to be quieter than before and brands that have traditionally sold through brick & mortar, should consider how their store staff could be converted into ambassadors to support e-commerce.