Intel CEO Brian Krzanich foresees a day when a wearable is no longer seen a one-size-fits-all device that you put on your wrist. That day could be coming sooner rather than later, as Intel-based wearable products will likely be shown off in the coming weeks at New York Fashion Week.
“Wearables” is still a nascent product category, but one that Intel has a vested interest in. After all, the companyacquired wearable maker Basis for around $100 million earlier this year.
Intel isn’t alone, however. Everyone from major consumer electronics manufacturers like Samsung and LG to startups like Pebble and Meta, are seeking to create “smart” devices that users can wear.
For the most part, wearables have been split into one of two camps — those targeted at users who want to better connect with and get notifications from their mobile phones and other devices, and others for tracking their activity and fitness levels.
Basis is in that latter category. It is best known for making a smart-watch looking device that tracks a wide range of fitness data, including steps, sleep quality, heart rate, and amount of time spent active during the day. As a result, it generally produces a much more comprehensive data set than most competing wearable products on the market today — after all, the Fitbit Flex, Nike Fuelband, Misfit Shine, and others mostly focus on counting steps and leave things at that.
The $150 Basis B1 had a couple of downsides, however. For one thing, it was bulkier than most of the other fitness trackers out there, and it also had issues with battery life.
The biggest issue with the Basis device, however, might just be that it wasn’t exactly attractive to anyone who cared very much about the fashion of what they wore on their wrist. Unlike the sleek design of the Fitbit or Misfit products, it was too obtrusive to be seen as an accessory. Meanwhile, anyone with a love of watches would dismiss it as a possible replacement due to its design aesthetic.
Intel didn’t buy Basis for its design chops, however. The company was interested in acquiring the smarts built into that device, and making it available to others. At a dinner last week with a handful of press, Krzanich explained the company’s plans to unleash the technology beyond its existing hardware and open up a whole new generation of wearables with partners.
“If you take a look at [the Basis B1], the sensor technology is superb. If you look at their hardware data relative to any of the other hardware data out there, it’s fantastic,” Krzanich said. “They’ve spent a huge amount of time engineering all of the motion of steps and whatever you want to do, and it’s done a very good job of doing that.”
There will be another version of the Basis device coming later this year, Krzanich confirmed at the dinner. The bigger opportunity for Intel and for the industry as a whole, however, could come from working with partners to get that technology embedded into new and different form factors.
“We have a great back end, and a great set of sensors, and all of those things are transferrable to almost any device,” he told attendees. And, well, making its technology available to third parties is what Intel does best.
“I still don’t want to be in the device business. We always do best when we partner,” Krzanich said.
So what kind of partners are we talking about? Surprisingly, it might not be the type of deep-tech consumer electronics brands that you might expect. Instead, it seems like Intel is working with a number of partners that could make wearables more like fashion accessories.
Krzanich said to expect some things from Intel at New York Fashion Week, which begins next weekend and extends through the following week. And Krzanich teased that whatever products are put on display will look more like a fashion accessory than what most users have come to think of as wearables today.
“Watches are like clothes. And all of these wearables, they’re not that different from clothes. So there’s not going to be one pattern or style that fits all,” he said.
That’s important to keep in mind, especially as Intel thinks about opening up a broader market of consumers to buy these products. Most women might scoff at the idea of wearing a Basis watch in its current incarnation, but Krzanich notes that women wear a lot of jewelry — like necklaces and bangles — in which the same sort of “smart” technology could be embedded.
It’ll all depend on the form factor of course, but it seems like only a matter of time before wearables are no longer synonymous with wrist bands. And Intel wants to be there when that happens.
An increasing number of women are sporting yoga pants and dressy sweat pants rather than jeans or slacks. And for many guys, sneakers and hoodies have become workwear.
Under Armour yoga wear | Source: Under Armour
NEW YORK, United States — The U.S. apparel industry, battered by a slowdown in mall traffic and stagnant wage growth, is still seeing one category thrive: athleisure.
The clothing, which combines athletic and leisure wear, is propelling sales for Foot Locker Inc., Gap Inc.’s Old Navy and Under Armour Inc., thanks to more Americans wearing workout-style gear whether they’re working out or not. An increasing number of women are sporting yoga pants and dressy sweat pants rather than jeans or slacks. And for many guys, sneakers and hoodies have become workwear.
That’s led to a shift away from traditional leisure clothes such as denim and brown shoes and toward gear traditionally worn for a pickup hoops or a jog. While this has been happening for a few years, especially in footwear, consumer tastes have recently accelerated toward comfort and no-frills looks. Retailers have taken note, with chains ranging from Macy’s Inc. to Urban Outfitters Inc. pushing deeper into the category.
“You see a lot more women who are wearing tights and exercise pants and exercise tops around,” Ken Hicks, chief executive officer of Foot Locker, said today on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. Women are wearing it outside of the gym because it’s “convenient, and it’s got a better look and is fashionable.”
The broader industry’s sales back this up. While U.S. women’s apparel sales rose 1 percent in the 12 months ended in February, activewear increased 9 percent to $14.5 billion, according to market research firm NPD Group Inc.
More Yoga
Foot Locker, the largest sneaker chain, has improved its women’s business by adding more athletic apparel such as sports bras in its Lady Foot Locker stores. It also started a new chain called SIX:02, which has about 15 locations and is dedicated to yoga and running.
The Lady Foot Locker unit posted a percentage gain in same-store sales in the “high mid-single digits” last quarter, the company said today. That helped Foot Locker post a 7 percent total gain, topping analysts’ estimates.
At Gap, Old Navy was the company’s star performer last quarter, with same-store sales rising 4 percent — thanks in part to its assortment of cropped track pants and tank tops. Gap dove further into this trend in 2011 when it opened its first Athleta store, a mashup of performance gear and street fashion. The chain is slated to have 100 locations by the end of the year.
Athleisure Help
Under Armour also credited the athleisure trend with fueling growth when the company boosted its annual sales forecast last month and posted its 17th straight quarter of increasing revenue by more than 20 percent.
Under Armour, founded by CEO Kevin Plank as a testosterone-laden company focused on football, has been working to broaden its appeal. It unveiled a redesigned store format last year that ditched a locker-room theme for natural light, cheery colors and 10 times as many mannequins, aiming for customers loyal to Lululemon Athletica Inc. Under Armour has grown into the second-largest U.S. sporting-goods maker, with about 75 percent of its revenue coming from apparel.
“Women are increasingly wearing more athletic product outside the gym,” Plank said on a call with analysts last month. The company plans to cater to that shift, he said, as women find “new end uses for Under Armour.”
Nothing elevates your look from lackluster to va-va-voom like perfect-fitting undergarments. Fine lingerie can refine the silhouette, boost the spirit and set the foundation for flawless style. Whether you possess an A-cup or a cup that runneth over, these specialty boutiques have you covered.
Catering to dainty-breasted dames who want the same choices in lingerie styles as their fuller-figured friends. The majority of the inventory is from the boutique’s namesake brand: a nuanced collection of beautiful bras and special-occasion corsets that start at hard-to-find Size AAA. Schedule a private fitting to determine your best size.
Carol Doda, the 1960s North Beach icon and beloved topless entertainer, is now Cow Hollow’s specialty undergarment guru. Her hole-in-the-wall boutique’s array of lingerie and bridal bustiers, combined with Doda’s supernal knack for fitting (she can size you up in a single look), have made her a saving grace for panicked brides in need of unique foundation pieces.
1850 Union St. No 1, S.F. (415) 776-6900.
3. Eres
San Francisco is the latest on a short list of U.S. cities to welcome Eres. The luxury lingerie brand opens its doors in Hayes Valley this week, offering French-made underpinnings that range from everyday bras and panties in soft jersey blends to handmade Callie lace bodysuits and floor-skimming silk robes. Seasonal styles play with colors and fabrications, but the overall aesthetic is sophisticated minimalism.
471 Gough St., S.F.
4. A Revelation in Fit
Until A Revelation in Fit opened four months ago, Bay Area shopping options for the estimated 70 percent of women who fall outside the standard bra size matrix were limited. Using funds raised through a crowdsource campaign, the Oakland boutique stocks high-quality English and Polish lingerie brands (chosen for their superior fit) in a breadth of sizes, from A to KK with bands up to 46 inches.
3974 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. (510) 858-5459.
5. Alla Prima
You won’t find many bows and frills in Alla Prima. The 16-year-old boutique (with locations in Hayes Valley and North Beach) caters to the San Francisco sophisticate who prefers understated elegance to over-embellishment. Knowledgeable staffers help shoppers navigate exclusive designer collections from haute European labels such as La Perla, Andres Sarda and Fleur of England, and even jump behind the fitting-room curtain to assist as needed.
Craving Old Hollywood glamour? Look no further than Dollhouse Bettie. This destination boutique in Haight-Ashbury sells rare vintage pieces and retro lingerie. Its own vintage-inspired line, designed and manufactured in a SoMa atelier, artfully blends pinup and burlesque style with the latest construction techniques to create pieces that fit as darling as they look.
Move over, Fitbit and Up: A trio of Canadian entrepreneurs at Athos in Redwood City think their new line of wearable tech shirts and shorts — with sensors that provide instant feedback about muscle exertion — will blow all other tech fitness devices out of the water, or at least out of the gym.
Athos’ sensors are embedded without wires into the clothing and act as an electronic personal trainer that helps the athlete to correct his or her form and achieve other fitness goals, without an actual drill sergeant looming overhead. Company spokesman Jake Waxenberg, a former European soccer player, said the apparel is as comfortable as any other on the market, a prime consideration along with the technology. ”We want to be a performance apparel company first.”
Said Dhananja “DJ” Jayalath, an Athos co-founder, “For wearables to become commonplace, they need to be able to add value and fit into your life, without just being an interesting gadget.”
On the tech side, the apparel contains sensors as flat as Band-Aids that use electromyography to detect impulses in the body, such as heart rate, breathing and muscle exertion. Jayalath described the sensors as “tiny microphones that sit on every muscle and listen to what’s going on.”
That information is transmitted to an app on your smartphone with a special oblong metal device called the “Core,” which sits in a port on the shirt or the shorts. The Core is described as a brain that presents you with the data, analyzes it, and suggests programs for cardio, muscle building, muscle toning and weight loss.
Athos’ hallmark is providing instant feedback about which muscles groups are working and how hard they are working — as in, how hard the right thigh is working compared to the left in a set of squats and whether the correct right muscles are engaged for the optimal benefit in that exercise.
In early testing, Jayalath noticed that Waxenberg’s thighs produced different readings. Waxenberg, who planted with his right leg and kicked with his left, said despite years of professional sports and injuries, none of his coaches had ever noticed or commented on the fact that his legs were not equally strong, something that the Athos system detected within minutes.
The Golden State Warriors have signed on to use the products, once they hit the market in November (pre-orders are being taken online now), but you don’t have to be a pro to use the technology, which is in the range of affordability for most consumers at $99 per piece of apparel and $199 for the Core device.
“A Fitbit gives you motivation to get off the couch, but there’s no next step to help you get better,” Jayalath said. “You go for a run and you want to know, ‘How am I doing?’ With Athos, you learn you’re doing a lot with your right quad and not with your left, so you work on your left quad to make it stronger, less limiting. It tells you how to improve.”
Like many an invention, Jayalath said he and the other original co-founder, Chris Wiebe , came up with the idea out of personal need. The two were engineering students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who hit the gym but couldn’t afford personal trainers to provide coaching and expertise. They developed crude sensors that they welded onto their clothing. As a trophy of his experimentation, Jayaleth has a scar on his right bicep to prove it. (A third co-founder, Chamath Palihapitya, came in later.)
Their updated technology was presented as a senior thesis for their undergraduate degrees, and as it happened, venture capitalists were in the audience. The company has secured a total of $16 million in funding since 2012, including money from Joe Lacob, the Warriors’ majority owner.
If none of this raises your eyebrows, consider this: The apparel is not only moisture-wicking, but machine washable, too.
You have probably heard about Google Now, the app that sends you ‘the right information at just the right time […] before you even ask’. Based on weather forecasts and your general route to work, it can remind you to take an umbrella or show public transport options when it is time to go home. While Google calls this predictive design, Alistair highlighted that perceptive design is less about managing or failing to predict happenings, but more about addressing your needs in the exact moment, real-time. In that sense, predictive design (showing public transport options) is always a subsequent step of perceptive design (based on your location, time, day, weather, weekly routine, Gmail calendar etc.).
Perceptive Design in Mobile
The process of perceptive design is a permanent state of reinvention. One that starts with sensing variables such as time or location, then making meaning of this information, and finally being able to push out the most relevant advice to the user (before sensing again). In my personal view, sensing is the game changer here. New technologies, particularly mobile, have transformed the extent to what people are tractable. While advertisers targeted customers based on relatively static demographics and psychographics in the past, we are now connected 24/7 and there are new dimensions of data that can be collected. In the future, marketers will not target segments but individuals. Glenn Famy, also of Essence, emphasised seven technologies that can enhance the user experience in more perceptive ways:
Location
Time
Motion and orientation
User media
Battery API
Touch points
Link prefetching
New Opportunities in Wearables and other Technologies
While these seven technologies revolve around the use of smartphones, the scope of perceptive design goes beyond this. Google, for example, recently acquired Nest, a startup that produces digital thermostats for households. Nest can determine additional measures such as temperature or humidity, which may be coordinated with advertising messages for online customers. Another recent trend saw the rise of wearable technologies, particularly in the sports and health sector. The Nike Fuel band can sense heart rate and blood flow; other devices are able to measure fat-percentages or sugar-levels for diabetics. The number of new devices and techniques to sense customer-characteristics mean bigger sets of data that have to be interpreted and understood. It also means that marketers and companies will be able to target customers more directly. Surely, it will bring value and solutions, too, in medicine, for example. The big question, however, is to what extent customers are willing to give away their increasingly private data?
Privacy Concerns: Perceptive Advertising
Over the last couple of years, the age of perceptive design has already started. A significant amount of people use location-based apps such as Google Maps or Uber, and geo-tag their friends in Facebook or Instagram posts on a daily basis. Other apps such as Skype have full access to our mobiles’ cameras and microphone, but most consumers are not even aware of it. We are currently at a phase in which companies could already target consumers better using more perceptive design approaches, but hesitate to do so due to privacy concerns. This is especially applicable to advertising rather than apps that add value to the consumer’s everyday life. Perceptive data could also potentially become much more valuable when advertisers would be able to utilise those new bunches of data. In my eyes, it will not take long until the big corporates will desensibilise our feelings towards that data. I personally believe that perceptive advertising will come in stages, one sense after another. Once consumers significantly value a new sense-dimension in their everyday life (e.g. location-based services for the Nike Running app), they will be willing to receive advertising that is targeted through that sense. Kiss your privacy goodbye; perceptive design is coming. Deal with it.
Rent The Runway's Jennifer Hyman (Photo: Jamel Toppin)
Rent The Runway’s Jennifer Hyman hooked millennials on catch-and-release couture, but the logistics platform she built is sophisticated enough to dominate the sharing economy
Five years ago Jennifer Hyman was a 29-year-old Harvard Business School graduate with no experience in fashion or technology, pitching her startup, Rent the Runway, to a boardroom full of partners at a big-time Boston venture capital firm. The idea then, as now, was to buy designer dresses wholesale and rent them, over the Web, for a night or two for a fraction of the price. When Hyman was about to get to the part where she explained how many inventory turns she could get from a Diane von Furstenberg, one of the men interrupted the presentation, cupped her hand in his and said, “You are just too cute. You get this big closet and get to play with all these dresses and can wear whatever you want. This must be so much fun!”
Hyman now laughs about it, doing an imitation of the guy in a baby-doll octave. But at the time she was floored. Weeks before the patronizing VC trapped her hand in his grip, Hyman had gotten six term sheets from some of the country’s best venture firms, which valued her “big closet” at $50 million. The comment left her more driven than before. “Opposed to screaming and shouting about inherent sexism in this entrepreneurial world, I thought, Let’s work it–let’s build the most kick-ass logistics company in the whole world, and then we’ll reveal what’s under the dress.”
What Hyman and her cofounder, Jennifer Fleiss, have built is the furthest thing from cute. Buzzing around Hyman’s cubbyhole-chic office in an old printing building in lower Manhattan are 280 employees with a strange blend of talents: data scientists, fashion stylists, app developers, apparel merchandisers. It’s as if MIT and FIT threw a mixer.
The operation is downright daunting in its complexity. Each day Rent the Runway and its software algorithms juggle more than 65,000 dresses and 25,000 earrings, bracelet s and necklaces as they zip across the country among its 5 million members. Sixty percent of the dresses fly back out the door the same day they arrive balled up in Mylar UPS return envelopes. Its Secaucus, N.J. warehouse employs more than 200 people who sort returns, remove all kinds of stains, sterilize jewelry and mend tears. This fall the operation moves to a larger, 160,000 square-foot warehouse, at which point Hyman will officially become America’s largest dry cleaner.
Hyman and Fleiss’ idea emerged at the right moment. Millennials are leading a migration away from ownership to subscribing and sharing: Spotify invades our speakers, Netflix our TVs, Uber our curbs, Airbnb our entire homes. Rent the Runway wants to stream your wardrobe.
Fashion is, after all, a rotten investment. Hot colors cool, styles change fast–so can your dress size. For $70 on Rent the Runway you can wear a $2,295 white strapless Calvin Klein Collection gown; $30 rents you a $1,295 Vera Wang Jawdropper dress. The company just launched a new subscription service called Unlimited that lets customers borrow up to three accessories (sunglasses, bags, jackets) for as long as they want for $75 a month. “We’re giving our customer access to things she wouldn’t have otherwise purchased, either because it wasn’t smart to buy it or she couldn’t afford it,” says Hyman, the CEO. Adds Fleiss, who oversees strategy: “Being naive helped. If we knew how hard this was going to be, I doubt we would have done it.”
Rent the Runway cofounders Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman (Photo: Jamel Toppin)
On average, an American woman buys 64 new pieces of clothing a year–half of which she’ll wear once, according to Rent the Runway’s internal research. Facebook and Instagram are making matters worse. “It creates pressure for women,” says Hyman. “Now you can’t repeat outfits because your friends have seen that outfit on social media. As ridiculous as that sounds, that is what drives our business.”
Streaming Halstons turned out to be more painful than Hyman thought. A source says that Rent the Runway hit the $50 million revenue milestone only last year–later than the explosive growth of its first two years would have indicated. A year long slump in between caused it to miss internal and VC growth projections. “It forced a very important come–to–Jesus moment,” says Hyman, who overcame the bump by plowing resources into data science, pricing models and a mobile platform (which today accounts for 40% of traffic).
User numbers, repeat business, rental volume and revenue have doubled in each of the last two years, and Hyman says she has lent out more than $350 million worth of fashion so far in 2014, which would track toward another doubling, $100 million in revenue, this year. Hyman says Rent the Runway would have turned a profit last year if they hadn’t continued to expand infrastructure and systems.
Accordingly, linking fashion into the sharing economy has proved very enriching. A $24.4 million funding round in March 2012 placed a $250 million valuation on Rent the Runway. Hyman is looking to raise another big chunk this fall, likely at a valuation north of $750 million, sources say. (Hyman and Fleiss won’t talk ownership stakes, but ballpark estimates based on similar trajectories would be that they still collectively hold 30%.) Given the current frenzy for these type s of companies, it could run up against the coveted $1 billion mark–an especially rare feat for a New York startup with two female founders in this era of Silicon Valley bros.
Hyman has the frothy pitch to match. Dresses, she argue s, are a Trojan horse: “We started off with the goods that are the most difficult to rent because of the durability of the product and all the services you must build. Now we can rent any product in the world. “She envisions Rent the Runway as a marketplace for retailers and brands to rent unsold inventory instead of shipping it off to discount outlets. Or perhaps a high-end consignment store for the wealthy? At the very least, guys will be able to stream their ties and cuff links.
“The idea,” she says, “is to build the Amazon of rental.”
Rent the Runway has a long way to go before it can call itself the Amazon of anything, but its founders have mastered their industry in a manner that would make Jeff Bezos proud. Hyman grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. Her father was in international trade. Her mother, who had earned an M. B.A. from NYU, was the con troller at a Pirelli Tire subsidiary but quit when Hyman’s younger sister Sherri was diagnosed with autism. “She required 24–hour care, and the whole family had to function as a team and collaborate to survive,” says Hyman. “That philosophy is so critical to who I am.”
A self-described high school nerd, Hyman sang, danced, played volleyball and volunteered with autistic children. She attended Harvard with plans to be a journalist, but after the 9/11 attacks she became interested in the travel industry and eventually launched a wedding registry program for Starwood Hotels that let newlyweds ask friends for experiences instead of picture frames and pots. In 2005 she moved to Los Angeles to run ad sales at Wedding Channel.com and applied to Harvard Business School. That year another sister, Becky — who now oversees Rent the Runway’s four retail stores — had back-to-back surgeries to treat her thyroid cancer. Hyman returned to New York, took a business development job at IMG and deferred her admittance to Harvard, entering the program in 2007.
On her first day at business school Hyman met Fleiss, who had a mutual friend with her sister. “She came up to me with this Post-it that had my name on it,” says Fleiss, who grew up in Manhattan and went to Yale before working in business strategy at Lehman Bros. The two became fast friends and often pitched each other start up ideas over lunch at Harvard’s Spangler Center. Hyman was always going big-picture, while Fleiss was better at figuring out how to get things done.
The dress-rental lightbulb went off when the Hyman sisters were home for Thanksgiving in 2008. Becky was showing off the $2,000 Marches a dress she had bought for a wedding and the huge dent it had made in her credit card balance. “As an older sister I looked at her packed closet and started freaking out on her,” says Hyman. “Becky told me how she wanted something new to feel great and that she had already been photographed in all her outfits on Facebook.”
Hyman put two and two together and told Fleiss about her dress–rental idea. They decided to test it out at Harvard. If it flopped they could always take corporate jobs; Hyman had an offer from NBC Universal, Fleiss at job site The Ladders. In a move that is now an HBS case study, the pair bought and borrowed dresses, running a series of tests at Harvard and Yale to see if women would rent, first, a fancy dress they could try on and, later, one they saw only in a photo. In both cases the answer was yes. Test results in hand, they cold-called investors.
Despite their lack of experience in fashion, technology or start ups, Bain Capital Ventures came in with a $1. 8 million seed investment and a few months later led a $15 million round with Highland Capital Partners. “I meet new entrepreneurs each week, and I’m rarely blown away by people out of the gate,” says Bain managing director Scott Friend. “The structured way they thought through the opportunity was unexpected and super appealing.”
Hyman and Fleiss ran the company out of extra space in a Tribeca architecture firm, using a local dry cleaner to store and turn around dresses. As the business grew, they got another $15 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in April 2011 and moved operations to a floor in their current building, later leasing a second level to store the growing inventory. They lured in college-age women, a core customer base, by deploying hundreds of “runway reps” at campuses and sororities. Says Juliet de Baubigny, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, “We didn’t back them as a fashion start up. It’s the sharing economy meets the Facebook–Instagram generation.”
Hyman had always planned on outsourcing the cleaning and shipping of clothes, but as the business grew, she realized that doing the dirty work wasn’t only a necessity but a competitive advantage. Hyman recruited Charles Ickes, who had run high-end dry cleaner Madame Paulette, to oversee logistics and Vijay Subramanian, a former data scientist at Oracle, to build the computer brain for the whole operation. (Hyman calls the firm “a fashion company with a technology soul.”)
Despite the comparison with Netflix–and there have been many–Rent the Runway i s in a business where the stakes are higher, the problems more complex. Delivering a delicate designer dress is trickier and more expensive than slinging scuffed copies of Breaking Bad across the country. The dresses must arrive on time and in perfect condition. One mistake–a late arrival, an unsightly stain, a poor fit–creates a customer relations nightmare. “If we mess up it’s not just the customer who hates us,” says head of marketing A.J. Nicholas. “Her friends hate us, her sisters hate us, her mom hates us.”
So with every dress it lends, Rent the Runway’s algorithms get a bit smarter about ways to track the location of each item, forecast demand, select shipping methods, set prices and control inventory. Algorithms crawl customer reviews to tabulate which dresses women are renting for certain occasions and then forecast demand to determine if a pre paid shipping label that goes out with a dress should get that dress back overnight or if it can wait for three-day return.
When sizing up a new dress, merchandisers go through a list of 40 data points such as fabric, zippers, stitching and shape to determine whether it will hold up to the rigors of rental. “Our buyers literally try to tear the clothes apart,” says Hyman. After all, the longer the life span, the higher the return on capital. “When I initially went to fundraise,” says Hyman, “I had a Power P oint slide that said the average dress would turn 12 times. They said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and cut that assumption to 8 times, saying if I can do that this is an amazing business.” Today Rent the Runway is averaging 30 turns per dress, which means some get worn many more times. That’s borderline icky, but the fact that an increasing number of women no longer get hung up on such boundaries is a testament to Hyman and Fleiss’ deep understanding of their customers. “The brilliance of what they’ve done is figure how to convince women it’s okay to rent and make it cool to rent and make sure a woman would be satisfied,” says Dan Rosensweig, who runs textbook renter Chegg and sits on Rent the Runway’s board.
In the male-dominated tech world Rent the Runway looks refreshingly like something from an alternative universe. The noxious Silicon Valley HR math (70% male at Facebook and Twitter) is precisely flipped female at Rent the Runway. The second men’ s room was recently converted into a third ladies’ room, and unlike so many female-focused companies with men at the top, the executive suite also includes Beth Kaplan, as president and chief operating officer, and Camille Fournier, who runs engineering, in addition to Hyman and Fleiss.
For the overworked Hyman it’s something she doesn’t obsess over. At 9 a.m. on a scorching summer day in New York, she’s running up the dank stairwell to her conference room, just off the red–eye from London, where she attended a conference with British designers from Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. Hyman has to prepare for the launch two weeks away of the Unlimited subscription service. Then there’s the presentation for an August board meeting and the investor road show for the fall. Hyman remains cheerful and peppy as she marches through meetings–technology infrastructure, dynamic pricing, e–mail marketing, home page redesign and mobile apps.
At 5 p.m. Hyman leads a company wide meeting. Beer from Brooklyn Brewery and Skinny girl Margaritas sit on ice. Hyman takes the mic, reminds everyone that they’ll be locked out of the office for an upcoming mandatory Hamptons beach day and hands the mic to employees who use the air time to give shout-outs to co-workers who they think deserve special recognition and applause. Hyman has been known to belt out Madonna tunes at these meetings. “I can dance to Beyonce, sing karaoke, create strategy, go on dates,” says Hyman. “And build a multi billion company and show the world that women can build big businesses.”
A woman creating in a costume workshop in Prague theater.
The costume design process involves many steps and though they differ from genre to genre a basic method is commonly used.
1.) Analysis: The first step is an analysis of the script, musical composition, choreography, etc. Parameters must be established:
Indication of events happening before the piece took place if applicable
Geographical location
Day, month, year or specific season
Who the characters are regarding relationships and socio economics, government and religious rule, and ethical conduct, marriage or family.
The function of each character in regards to protagonist, antagonist etc.
Dialogue mode of text
Texts action in sequence. This is used to create a Costume Plot or Action Chart, which lists which characters are in what scene.
Theme of the text
2.) Design Collaboration: An important phase in the process is meeting with the director and fellow designers. There must be a clear understanding of:
Script/Text
Budget
Time table/Calendar
3.) Costume Research: Once guidelines are established, the next step is to gather research.
A research outline is important to focus your attention, listing any questions necessary to complete your study.
Use primary sources for the majority of your research; Such as, museums, periodicals, newspapers, sculptures, paintings, etc.
4.) Preliminary Sketching and Color Layout: Once enough information is obtained to begin drawing, a preliminary sketch must be performed. Successful preliminary sketching conveys an accurate depiction of:
Line, which will show the silhouette of the targeted piece of clothing
Proportion, of not only the garment but also the actors body.
Detail, of not specifics but general ideas. Such as the indication of what type of fabric or pattern may be used.
A color layout, using either fabric swatches, or paint samples needs to be represented.
5.) Final Sketches: The final costume sketch can be completed in any medium but must include:
Today, Lawrence Lenihan, founder and managing director of FirstMark Capital, examines the burgeoning interest in fashion-technology startups.
NEW YORK, United States — Fashion is an incredible industry. It’s sexy, it’s glamorous, it’s exciting. But it’s also incredibly complicated and the amount of change the Internet and other technology innovations will bring to this industry in the next decade will be mindboggling. Indeed, our offices have been swamped with business pitches from more than a thousand entrepreneurs who want to transform this industry.
As for the ideas themselves, many look great on whiteboards or in business school competitions: virtual closets, flash sale businesses, new designer “discovery” sites, you-be-the-designer sites, social shopping, user-curated boutiques, subscription sites, custom clothing, and so on that seek to use technology in ‘clever’ ways. But, in the end, they often miss the mark by a wide margin.
There are many flaws to these businesses. But the biggest flaw I see is that these “Internet entrepreneurs” fail to understand how the Internet will fundamentally transform the fashion industry, not just provide another access point to buy something.
In my opinion, the biggest change will be a dramatic shift in the relationships amongst brands, retailers and customers. Going forward, every brand must figure out how to connect directly with its customers and they must structure their business around the relationships they want to have with their customer rather than let their distribution channels define them. The economics are too great not to do so.
If all brands must connect directly with their customers, it also means the roles played by retailers must change. Online retailers will not succeed as customer access points for brands anymore, because the brands can now access these customers directly. So, the online retailer must be more. I would argue that Net-a-Porter is as large a threat to Vogue as it is to Bergdorf Goodman, because of the editorial content and contextual placement they provide. In my mind, making a decision to sell on Net-a-Porter is a branding decision, not a revenue decision. The ramifications of this shift will destroy many large incumbents in this industry, as they realise that they must provide a brand more value than simply aggregating customers and selling their products in unimaginative Sears-catalogue formats.
Another major change will be retailers and brands realizing that there is enormous opportunity to use technology to create shopping experiences that replicate the emotion that a customer feels when they shop an incredible physical store, without resembling the traditional shopping experience in any shape or form. In the current fashion-tech world, many incredible designers and merchants who create amazing physical experiences have created dull online experiences. Too often they try to far too literally recreate physical experiences online: I go into a store, I look for a product that I like, I put it in my bag or cart, I proceed to the checkout, I pay for it and I leave. But fashion is not about process or necessity: I need water but I don’t need that fantastic Tom Ford suit, I only feel like I need that fantastic Tom Ford suit. Simply displaying products like they are in a grocery store (rows and categories) doesn’t work.
Fashion makes you feel. It is about emotion. The web can create amazing experiences using video and images to convey a story. Sites can engage customers and get them to participate in the definition of brands and products. My personal favourites: Net-a-Porter Live which recreates the emotion of sitting in the middle of Bergdorf’s during Christmas, every second of every day of the year; ModCloth’s Be The Buyer program that enables customers to determine buying decisions and take a vested interest in the product’s success; and Miista Shoes, which sets clearance sale pricing based on the Klout scores of its followers.
As an investor, I am putting my money behind brands (people that make stuff!) that are leveraging technology to create a new kind of relationship with their customers. Before the Internet, brands needed retailers to be the vehicle of this relationship by physically aggregating customers. Now brands can aggregate customers themselves, not based on where the customer lives, but on the values, interests and aspirations the brand and its customers share and use technology to create incredibly unique, intimate, personal, interesting and fun relationships.
One of the most brilliant brand concepts that I have seen (and loved so much I invested in) is LollyWollyDoodle. Lolly sells dresses for little girls, but in a unique way: through stories on Facebook. On any given day you can look online and see an offering of several products (full price, limited run items) that engage and excite a passionate set of customers. Founder and CEO Brandi Temple is a brilliant entrepreneur who figured out how to replicate the emotional experience of shopping without replicating the process of going into a store, with daily surprises, stories and emotional connections. In addition, she is able to use the data on the velocity and acceleration rate of product sales on Facebook to predict product demand on the website, thereby being able to manufacture more profitably by not over- or under-producing a given product.
Another company I have invested in is Tommy John which aims to change the men’s underwear industry. And via a personal investment, I helped start a unique high-end luxury fashion brand named Norisol Ferrari which is creating a new type of relationship with customers who are tired of mass “luxury” brands that make up so much of the so-called luxury industry today. The brand I most wish I had invested in is Warby Parker, who is blowing apart the eyewear industry (and Luxottica can’t touch them).
I’m also putting my money behind retailers who recognise that brands can and will go directly to their customers and rather than try to fight and prevent them from doing so, are creating platforms that enable brands to build and strengthen their relationship with their customers. Retailers won’t exist in the future if they can’t provide value – and only a few can provide value through brand and merchandising talent. I think Moda Operandi (another company I wish I had invested in) will be able to carve out their own niche as a direct retailer in addition to their current business, but I believe that they have more potential as a service provider of trunk shows for brands.
I love “retailers” like ModCloth, but the truth is nobody cares about the brands on the site, they care about what founder Susan Koger puts on there and I would bet that they become a direct label brand more and more. I met with the two founders of Of A Kind recently. At first, I cringed, because they were introduced to me as a “designer discovery site” and I figured they would be like the dozens I had seen recently. But they had a unique twist: provide customer acquisition, brand building and data (and maybe technology one day?) to enable new designers to build their own businesses while Of A Kind builds theirs. They are a true brand service provider that recognises how this industry has changed.
One of my companies that sells fashion as part of a broader mix is AHALife. There will be some very interesting developments there that demonstrate what a retailer-as-service-provider can be. And my prediction is that we will see more and more entrepreneurs who understand that it’s the brand that matters and use technology to provide unique value-added services to them.
One thing’s for sure. It will be an exciting next few years as technology transforms the relationships amongst brands, retailers and customers. But the biggest challenge entrepreneurs face might be themselves. Many would-be fashion-tech entrepreneurs have a deep understanding of the fashion industry and no understanding of technology. Or they have a deep understanding of technology and no understanding of fashion. Or, they understand neither!
The entrepreneurs who master both and understand the subtleties of each will be triumphant and realise all the potential that lies in this combination of technology and fashion.
Lawrence Lenihan is the founder and managing director of FirstMark Capital and an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business.
Under Armour yoga wear | Source: Under Armour
