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Fashion Gets Crowd Sourced With Fashion Stake

by Ruthie Friedlander | 3:06 pm, April 6th, 2010

Until recently, crowd sourcing in the fashion industry seemed sort of oxymoronic. After all, so much about fashion — like it or not — rests on its exclusivity. If a designer were to make a dress that — hear me out — fit all body types and was affordable, would it not lose its appeal in some ways? While it’s important for brands and designers to listen to what the public wants, the allure of fashion exists because it’s aspirational, not necessarily attainable.

Now, though, brands have started taking the ideas out of the fashion elite’s well-trained hands and into the arms of the public, asking what they want and how they want it. Companies are beginning to ponder how best to use crowd sourcing not only to gain a better understanding of their consumer, but to use the consumer’s ideas more directly in the creative process.

Websites like Threadless.com, a $38 million company that allows shoppers to choose which designs go on graphic T-shirts, and Made.com, a London furniture website that produces items based on what shoppers vote for, were two of the first to begin using crowd sourcing methods to boost sales.

Enter, Fashion Stake: a website, set to launch in September 2010, which will allow shoppers to have a unique and intimate relationship with designers. Consumers will be able to browse online collections and invest in a particular designer by buying a “stake” in their line, starting with $50 investments. In return, consumers will get clothing credit, among other perks.

Founded by Daniel Gulati and a Harvard Business School classmate of his, Vivian Weng, Fashion Stake will launch with five designers, including last season’s runner up on Project Runway Althea Harper. So if you loved Althea’s collection, for $50 you could become a “supporter” by buying a stake her line, earn credits toward future purchases, and get invites to showroom viewings, sales, and other special offers.

Shoppers will also be able to vote and share their thoughts on the various items showcased on the site. The site aims to bring the ideas of the designers directly to the shopper who, ultimately, determines a collection’s success if not aesthetically, then certainly financially.

Daniel Gulati explained to Reuters that the site’s goal is to move away from a system where elite are able to decide what the general public purchases.

“We think this can be a real game changer. What we’re basically doing is redirecting the margin to fans and cutting out the retailer altogether…Why should we leave it up to just a couple of people to decide what the public wants? Let’s actually just go straight to the crowd. It’s a two way conversation between brands and their fans. It’s not a one way type of logic anymore.”

Weng told Styleite that the process of selecting designers for inclusion on Fashion Stake was not that simple. They looked for designers who were familiar with the production process and who had been sold to at least one top retailer. And although a wide range of designers will be featured, whether they’re sold at a small albeit well-known boutique in your hometown or at Barney’s in New York, they all believe in “the mantra of democratizing fashion.”

The question of what crowd sourcing like this does to the fashion industry as a whole still looms. With a site that aims to “democratize fashion” and a motto that reads “support a designer, shape the creative process, share in clothing and cash,” what happens to the creative process?

“It’s a delicate balance,” Weng told Styleite. She explained that designers are starting to view fashion and, more generally, the design process, as a two-way communication — not between themselves and the merchant, but between themselves and the customer.

Those who rise to the top in the fashion world do so for a reason, and very little of it has to do with luck. It takes hard work and, most importantly, talent. It takes a watchful eye and an intense attention to detail. Designers are tastemakers and artists, so at the end of the day, it’s equally important for their clothes to be respected by the elite as it is for their brand to make money.

So, while the ultimate goal of every fledgling designer is to earn a living, they should still be careful not to cater only to the wants of the crowd and remember the talent and drive that made them want to design in the first place.

All said, we don’t doubt that Fashion Stake’s first round of designers have the eye and drive to find the delicate balance Weng alludes to — and we can’t wait to see what happens.


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  • DavidReinke

    It’s great to see another company entering the crowdsourcing space in fashion. The dichotomy between design freedom and gauging consumer feedback is a false one. Any healthy fashion business is great at both creative/design and carefully listening to consumer feedback. Crowdsourcing, done well, is a new tool to do the latter even better.

    The trick for Fashion Stake, as we have learned at StyleHop, is identifying among the “crowd” who has predictive capacity to identify hits and who doesn’t. While the theory around crowdsourcing holds that any truly diverse crowd should be able to provide directionally relevant predictions, we haven’t found that to be true in fashion. Our research suggests that only between 1-10% of consumers in the crowd have any sort of meaningful predictive capability at identifying what will be hot (and not). Unfortunately, simple segmenting using demographics or psychographics doesn’t meaningfully help in identifying the great forecasters. In our experience, the only way to identify which fashionistas have “got it” is through rigorous, on-going testing.

    Good luck to Fashion Stake.

    David Reinke
    http://www.StyleHop.com/enterprise

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