Featured Guest Post: Ben Tompkins of Eden Ventures London
London Fashion Week Event Recap
This is a Guest Post from Ben Tompkins, Partner at London Based Eden Ventures. In conjunction with London Fashion Week, Eden Ventures co-sponsored a panel discussion at Forward Internet Group’s office in Camden Town.
Photo Credit: Natasha Jane Hussein & Vikram Shah
It was great to go along to the Are You Following Me? – How Technology Is Influencing Fashion Trends (#ayfm) event last night – and to have the opportunity to sponsor it alongside Forward Internet and Zuneta. Held in Forward’s offices in Camden Town, the event was hailed as ‘London’s best tech startups meet [at] London Fashion Week’. With over 120 people attending from fashion, technology, social media and publishing, it proved to be an eclectic group of panelists and audience participants with some very specific and forthright views. For me, it was doubly great having been to a social-media-meets-fashion event (Fashion 140) in New York last summer. There is no doubt in my mind that social media is going to make a big impact on the fashion industry, just as digital distribution is fundamentally changing music, TV and games. What irked me about last year’s event was that it was taking place in New York and not in London. We may not have come up with Facebook or Twitter (or Google, Amazon, and eBay for that matter). But, surely London can do fashion? After all, we have Net-a-Porter and ASOS. Vivienne Westwood, Alice Temperley and Stella McCartney. And, yes, TopShop and Burberry. Surely, we are not going to leave all the exciting new tech developments in fashion to the Americans?
So it was reassuring to see a group of international entrepreneurs present and debate some truly interesting opinions and insights on this subject during London Fashion Week (#lfw). The first panel (Christine de Leon from VeryNiceThreads, James Joseph from Stylenoir, Ryan Barkataki from Closetswap and Katie Smith from EDITD) focused on curation, discovery and user generated content. Previously, the heartland of the Elle’s and Vogue’s of the world, this was all about real time feedback (no need to wait until the next issue), having an opinion, crowdsourcing, the ‘power of pull’ and data empowering better decision making.
Photo Credit: Natasha Jane Hussein & Vikram Shah
Christine had some interesting comments on the power of street fashion in trend setting. There was a bit of a tussle in the audience when James commented that too many software engineers didn’t make for a great user experience. But no one was hurt. I always thought that rule #1 of development effectiveness was [to] cut the tech team in half!
Another interesting comment was on the use of data to make better decisions (led by EDITD). This prompted a discussion around the concept that ‘fashion is art’ and that data didn’t have a place. It struck me that, for the truly creative 0.1% of people in the industry, this is probably true. However, for the rest of us trying to make money from their creative genius, data is pretty essential.
The second panel was a little grittier and was called Platforms, which, being a bit thick, took me a little while to realise meant ecommerce. Here, Dean Fankhouser from Nuji, Felix Leuschner from Stylistpick, Andreas Klinger from Lookk (Disclosure: one of Eden’s portfolio companies) and Nicola McClafferty from Covetique explained how their businesses aim to monetise social media activity around likes, sharing, following and recommending. The topics were around traffic acquisition, conversion and KPIs [key performance indicators]– how to make money from all the likes, followers, nudges, etc.
Photo Credit: Natasha Jane Hussein & Vikram Shah
This discussion struck me as being a little more informed than what I had heard in New York last year. Maybe the eight months has made a difference (we now have Fab and Pinterest to point to, for example). Or maybe it’s that, given the relative scarcity of investment in European tech, the startups here have to worry about revenue just that little bit sooner. For good or bad?
That said, a good number of the participants (both panelists and in the audience) had already raised some funding and a number of VCs were in the audience, notably Balderton [Capital] and Venrex [Investment Management]. It was good to see many Seedcamp companies present – EDITD, Lookk and Nuji (Disclosure: Eden is an investor in Seedcamp).
Perhaps the most interesting element was the audience participation, and the lack of it. The whole ‘fishbowl panel’ concept was a bit difficult for most of us to grasp. Nobody wanted to ‘get in the fishbowl’ but this did not hold back the questions. Notable input came from Metail, Brandid (‘we are clothes, not fashion’, an important distinction) and WishWantWear. My own personal favourite was having my VC investor ignorance corrected – yes, apparently even Vivienne Westwood uses excess channels to dispose of her remnant stock!
The ’lack of audience participation’ prize goes to some well-known brands – including publishers and online retailers – who kept quiet for the most part, clearly not wanting to take the startups’ thunder (or too busy writing notes?).
Hats off to organiser Janita Han (@oomoo). Looking forward to the next one.
Watch out New York! The Europeans are coming.
Ben Tompkins (@b_tompkins) is a partner at Eden Ventures (@edenventures), one of Europe’s leading early stage technology investors.
