Fashion Design : May 2014

Friday, May 9, 2014

OMsignal Opens Pre-Orders For Smart Shirts That Track Activity, Fitness And Stress

After raising $1 million last year and debuting its smartwear clothing-embedded sensor tech, Montreal-based OMsignal is now ready to start accepting orders from customers. Its first product is the OM shirt, with four new models going up for pre-order today including an undershirt, sleeveless shirt, t-shirt and long-sleeved shirt for men.

Each of these new shirts tracks your heart rate, breathing rate, breathing volume, movement (step counter), calories burned movement intensity and heart rate information. They track a lot more information than your average wristband or other type of dedicated device, and they also resemble ordinary shirts and don’t add any additional bulk to accommodate the sensor tech they include. A small module clips into the shirt to provide power (for up to two to three days of normal use) and communicate wirelessly with the OMsignal app on your smartphone, but this is not much larger than your average health tracker and one unit works with multiple OMsignal shirts.

The initial line is designed to appeal to a range of different types of use cases, including worn under clothing for everyday activities, and dedicated sportswear. OMsignal’s shirts are made to offer up more types of information for athletes, including heart rate zone tracking for training, and some proprietary measures, like OM Fuel (how much energy you have remaining before you get tired) and OM RPM (level of focus and stress). All data is tracked and visualized in the OMsignal app for long-term monitoring.

Shirts come in small through extra large sizes, in a few different colors and styles, and are compression garments made with moisture wicking fabric, like high-quality training and running shirts.

OMsignal’s tech comes with heavyweight expertise in health and fitness behind it, including Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the company’s Chief Medical Officer, who is a practicing surgeon. Shantz sees value in OMsignal gear offering up insight into stress levels in doctors performing delicate operations, for instance, though they’re targeting the consumer market first.

I asked CEO and founder Stephane Marceau why they targeted menswear first, and about their plans for offering female-friendly models in the future.

“[With men] the bar on fit and fashion is not as high,” he explained. “Womens’ shapes vary a lot, and the fashion bar is especially high for women. We figured it out in trials, and it came as clear feedback that women expected more personalized preferences than men on that front.”

The company wanted to focus more on nailing the tech and keeping design simple with this initial line, Marceau said. They did work with designers with experience at Nike, Under Armour and Quicksilver for these looks, but the bulk of the work was focused on tackling tough tech problems. A launch of a women’s line is planned for this fall.

The men’s shirts will ship starting this summer, and are available in packages that include the little black box and shirts starting at $199, with each additional shirt retailing on its own for between $100 and $140. The black box on its own is $140. Those prices aren’t all that easy to swallow, even for people with particularly expensive taste in high performance workout wear, but their relatively innocuous exterior does hid some considerable embedded tech so it’s no surprise these aren’t cheaper.

Current wearables are seen by many as an interstitial tech, making the transition between external devices and embedded gadgets easier. OMsignal is among the first to deliver even more invisible wearable hardware, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can pick up some strong consumer traction.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Tamara Mellon’s New Rules of Fashion

BY LAUREN SHERMAN 5 MAY, 2014

After launching her namesake label, the Jimmy Choo co-founder shares her strategy for disrupting fashion.

Tamara Mellon | Photo: Ethan Scott for BoF

NEW YORK, United States — The fashion system is broken, says Tamara Mellon. So broken, in fact, that the Jimmy Choo co-founder — who left the footwear company in 2011 with a $100 million payout — has spent the last year trying to disrupt it. In September 2013, Mellon launched her namesake label, which rewrites the rules of how a fashion brand should be run.

The foundation of her strategy is “buy now, wear now,” an approach that dispenses with shows and aims to realign fashion’s retail seasons with the real seasons, meaning that winter coats hit stores in September, not July, and Spring dresses launch in the Spring. “The last thing that I feel like doing right now is trying on a Spring/Summer dress,” says Mellon on a wintry day at her penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Thanks to her track record at Jimmy Choo, Mellon was able to convince retailers — including Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus in the US, Holt Renfrew in Canada, and Harrods in the UK — to buy her wear-now looks. But while her shoes and accessories were always a safe bet, the designer’s only ready-to-wear experience up until this point was a one-off collaboration with fast fashion giant H&M. What’s perhaps most surprising, then, is that the business is currently split 50-50 between accessories and ready-to-wear.

“I make things that I want to wear and I guess that resonated with the customer,” reasons Mellon. Sales have been swift. Half of Net-a-Porter’s first order of Mellon’s $1,995 “Sweet Revenge” legging-boots was gone three hours after the product hit the site. Here, Mellon shares her new rules for disrupting fashion.

Take Lower Margins

While there are four-figure stilettos in Mellon’s product lineup — exotic skins are exotic, after all — most of Mellon’s product assortment, from shoes to bags to dresses to blazers, hovers around $800. “Nobody wants to spend thousands of dollars for an everyday dress. It’s not realistic,” she says. “I want to give my customer a better price for a better product.” She does this by cutting her margins. Of course, it also helps to have great relationships with factories, which she developed during her Jimmy Choo years.

Ignore Seasons

Most of Mellon’s pieces are seasonless, but her real goal is to ensure the clothes that she’s selling in-store match the weather outside. She sells four times a year and each collection is split into three deliveries, which means — much like a high street operation — there are new clothes available each month. “Now that it’s been on the floor and the retailers have seen the sell-through and how the customers respond, they’re coming back in with a lot more trust and placing bigger orders.”

Focus On E-Commerce

“When you write a business plan, everyone puts e-commerce in at 10 percent of turnover, which is way too small,” she says. “I think they’re looking at it the wrong way. They should be looking at [e-commerce] as a store in every prime location in the world. The volume of business is there and it’s only growing.” In the next five years, Mellon plans to launch as many as 60 brick-and-mortar stores, but expects to do up to half of her business online.

Don’t Court Celebs

Mellon was highly successful in making Jimmy Choo a red carpet staple. “When I took Jimmy Choo to the Oscars, we were the first British brand to go — and the actresses wore them because they loved them,” she recalls. But today, “it’s not authentic. Stars get paid to wear brands. It doesn’t validate anything.” Instead, Mellon believes the best way to reach her audience is via social media. “I love having a direct conversation with the customer.”

Make It Personal

From the “Sweet Revenge” boot — a cheeky reference to her former employers — to the “Submission” sandal, a high-fashion take on
S&M style, each piece in Mellon’s collection has a very specific, entirely original name. And that’s, unsurprisingly, not without reason. “[At Jimmy Choo], it was all just women’s names. The ‘Emily’ or the ‘Jackie.’ This time, we really thought about it and we wanted to have fun with it. We called the pump ‘Addiction’ because as soon as we saw it, we were like, ‘I’m addicted to that pump, I have to have it in every colour.’”

Own It, Literally

“The magic number is 51 percent — never give up control,” says Mellon, who relinquished majority ownership of Jimmy Choo in 2004. “When you give up that equity, you might feel like a guest in your own house. People might be disrespectful of what you’ve done just to increase margins. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. That is a critical lesson I learned.”