#SustainableAfter, Episode 4

Three building blocks for brands to start on their journey towards circularity: customer experience reassessment, choosing the right resell partner and a reliable traceability solution

In conversation with Vanina Farber 🏠, elea Professor for Social Innovation at IMD Business School, Sabrina Vilhena, Advisor to the Funds, Social Starts and Joyance Partners, Jeroen Muijsers, Owner, Pro Flocus, Andre Van der Wolde, CFO at Pro Flocus

#SustainableAfter, Episode 3

Three building blocks for brands to start on their journey towards circularity: customer experience reassessment, choosing the right resell partner and a reliable traceability solution

In conversation with Michela Puddu,  CEO and Co-Founder at Haelixa Ltd – Felix Winckler, Co-Founder at Reflaunt Pte Ltd and Marta Waydel, Fashion Futurist

#SustainableAfter, Episode 2

As the industry is about to hit its post-WWII historic low, brands brace themselves for a hard year in a survival mode. Those that will come out thriving out of this crisis will use this time to redefine what they want to stand for in the new world, to address the new needs of their customers and – most hopefully – to reorganise their business in order to finally be able to fully walk that talk.

Muchaneta Kapfunde, Founder & Editor at FashNerd.com
Renana Krebs, Co-Founder & CEO at Algalife (alga-life.com)
Kresse Wesling MBE, Co-Founder at Elvis & Kresse (elvisandkresse.com)

#SustainableAfter, Episode 1

Right now, the economic outlook for the fashion industry is not a happy one. Yet, today more than ever, we mustn’t lose focus on the sustainability commitment the sector declared less than a year ago. Although dramatic, the Covid19 crisis could actually be an opportunity to reassess major issues and start making fundamental changes to fashion.

Loomish celebrates the best of AI FashionTech as the Fashion Innovation Award 2019 winners are announced

Lugano, April 2 2019

Loomish SA, a Swiss investment advisory firm specialised in Lifestyle Tech, announces the winners of the Fashion Innovation Award 2019, focused on mature FashionTech start-ups who apply Artificial Intelligence to enhance different parts of the Fashion value chain.

The winners are iCoolhunt/Nextatlas (Italy), Spott.ai (Belgium) and Yosh.AI (Poland).

3D-printed Fashion Innovation Award Trophies 

Having pitched in the competition of 12 international finalists, the winners were chosen by a jury panel of decision makers from the leading fashion brands, investment funds and AI experts.

The pitches took place in Lugano during the Fashion Innovation Week, one of the biggest FashionTech events in Europe.

Fashion Innovation Award 2019 focused on mature FashionTech start-ups who apply Artificial Intelligence to enhance different parts of the Fashion value chain. Out of over 100 applicants from across the world, 34 start-ups made it to the long list and 12 finalists, coming from Switzerland, different EU countries and the Silicon Valley, were invited to pitch in front of the jury.

The winners are:

iCoolhunt/Nextatlas – Turin (IT), London (UK)

iCoolhunt is a pioneering proponent of innovative services that provide brand owners and their advisors with rich, timely and objective information about the drivers of change in consumer lifestyles and behaviour.

As a first mover in the use of artificial intelligence for predictive monitoring of emerging consumer trends, the company developed Nextatlas, a unique data platform leveraging proprietary algorithms and AI methodologies to detect new trends likely to become mainstream. Nextatlas AI can quickly be redirected to solve specific business challenges: Nextstyle AI is the deep learning model for the Fashion industry, trained to identify fashion trends, fabrics, and details in photos, available as API service for product, merchandising, marketing applications.

SPOTT.ai – Aalst, Belgium

SPOTT.ai is a successful MarTech company transforming any visual content into an interactive, inspirational and shoppable experience no matter the screen & platform.

They use AI and machine learning tools to do the latter in a scalable manner and impact ROI (product placement deals 2.0, new revenues from affiliates & rich data). Their interactive layer with metadata ensures higher user engagement and allows consumers to switch more quickly from inspiration to action.

With one clear dashboard you get action-oriented insights into the content strategy. Their technology is device and platform agnostic, and offered in a PaaS or SaaS model. Spott.ai is on the Microsoft Azure market place & on a partnership with Publicis Media.

Yosh.ai – Warsaw, Poland

Yosh.AI revolutionises how retail commerce work using Artificial Intelligence through a personal shopping advisor. At Yosh.AI, with the use of Artificial Intelligence, the machine is taught not only about the users but also about the ways of giving personal advice and providing inspiration for the user.

Today Yosh builds virtual Advisors, in chat, but most importantly in voice versions, which are the future form of communicating between retailers and users.

The Yosh team is strongly supported by Google. It is based in Google Campus, and gets continues support not only from Google mentors worldwide, but also was awarded 100 K $ grant by Google Cloud for startups. Yosh.AI is the first company in CEE, which is officially recommended by Google for its high-quality actions on Google Assistant. Also, start-up was chosen to participate in Blackbox Acceleration program powered by Google for Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley as one of the 15 start-ups for global expansion. The company was also finalist of the Start-up Jerusalem 2017 Competition.

Next to the award, Yosh.ai received an additional prize: 1 year of office space and Swiss market-entry consultancy from Lugano-based Fondazione AGIRE.

Fashion Innovation Award jury panel at work 

The event is sponsored by Google, Bally, Accenture Interactive, NextBit, CRIF and AGIRE. It also has the endorsement of the Lugano City government.

Jelena Tasic Pizzolato, Head of Strategic Marketing, Loomish SA, said:

“We at Loomish are extremely pleased by the level of start-ups we were able to showcase at this year’s Fashion Innovation Award. They are all mature companies, with numerous international clients and important revenues, and we are pleased that they generated a lot of interest among the fashion managers that attended the event. On the other hand, we are very proud to have had several c-level executives from the Fashion industry, which for us in an important indicator about the readiness of the industry to embrace innovation.”

Other Fashion Innovation Award finalists were:

  • Wide Eyes Technologies, Barcelona, Spain
  • Catchoom, Barcelona, Spain
  • Tooso, San Francisco, USA
  • Masha.ai, Zug, CH
  • Predit, Milan, IT
  • Save Your Wardrobe, London, UK
  • Sizolution, Berlin, Germany
  • Productlead.me, Bucharest, Romania
  • HUUB, Porto, Portugal

Fashion Innovation Award was a part of Fashion Innovation Week, organised by Loomish’s partner NetComm Suisse.

Nextatlas pitching