Held live earlier this month at the Lectra Innovation Center in New York and streamed online late last week, the “Worldwide Talks 2024” was presented by Marcelo and Jordana Guimaraes, founders of Fashinnovation, and featured leading fashion brands and tech companies.
The themes included fashion marketing and branding, sustainability, authenticity, building community, and leveraging AI and e-commerce. This year was notable as it marked the 10th edition of the talks.
When asked about milestones, Marcelo and Jordana Guimaraes cited collaborations with governments in different parts of the world “to merge global with local including the ministry of culture in Saudi Arabia and the mayor’s office of Miami Dade County, as well as uplifting causes through our platform including the favelas in Brazil, homelessness and adaptive wear for people with disabilities. A huge moment for us was being invited in 2023 to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq.”
Fashinnovation’s mission is to generate real transformation in the industry via connections and thought leadership. Speakers have hailed from Google, Marc Jacobs, Meta, Lectra, Mastercard, YouTube and others, as well as notable designers such as Steve Madden, Kenneth Cole, Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan, among others.
The 10th edition opened with Irina Grechko, fashion director at Refinery 29, interviewing Raissa Gerona, chief brand officer at Revolve Group. The title of the session was “Fashion Is Building Community.” Gerona shared her career path, which included launching her apparel brand, Lovers + Friends, and noted she didn’t have any business training or fashion background and acknowledged the challenges of growing a small business. But building a brand requires building a community.
Left to right, Marcelo Guimaraes, Mara Hoffman the designer, and Jordana Guimaraes.
“I think when you’re a small business with limited funding, you have to be extremely creative to figure out how to connect with the consumer and how to market to them in a way that doesn’t require a ton of capital,” Gerona said, adding that is what attracted her to Revolve, which is a retailer with thousands of brands that also serves as a platform for emerging designers.
It is also a platform for building community — but it starts with a great product.
“Serving as a platform to provide small, emerging brands is something that we take so much pride in and they really help bring the community together because they’re making clothes and accessories that people want to wear — and that’s hard to find,” Gerona said.
While having a great product is key, successful sell-throughs today require leveraging AI and data for customer acquisition, marketing, operations and other processes. During a panel discussion on the topic, Shivani Bala, commercial partner and manager at Gorgias, was asked how the solution provider uses AI to streamline the customer service experience.
Bala first explained how Gorgias works with Shopify and online stores by providing a customer support help desk solution that unifies multiple customer channels (email, SMS, social media, etc.) into one place. Bala said the company uses AI to streamline the customer service experience in several ways.
“First, we are able to reply faster and then manage your [service questions] tickets faster,” Bala said. “The AI can detect the contact reason such as a return request upon and then send out a personalized response.” The platform can also send out article recommendations, which users of the solution have found to be effective since 70 percent “of the consumers that receive an article recommendation don’t have any follow-up questions.”
The AI can also detect the contact reason and the tone of the message, which can then be prioritized.
Aside from offering great product, leveraging AI for processes and boosting sales, and building community, participants at the event also discussed the importance of authenticity and practicing sustainability. But at the core of fashion apparel is branding and creative inspiration. And, for some, success means turning away from what everyone else is doing.
During a panel discussion, Nicole Miller was asked if timeless fashion means always being on trend. Miller was blunt with her response and said she didn’t agree with the sentiment. “Maybe it’s a little bit of a classic, and sometimes it becomes a trend — and it comes and goes, but it doesn’t have any kind of consistency as a trend,” Miller said. “It’s like on a wave pattern. It’s also about how much emphasis you put on trends.”
“When I’m designing, I’ve always stayed away from trends,” Miller added. “I always try to look the other way.”
Miller said she avoids design services that scope out fashion’s “next big thing.” Miller said she’s always felt “like if it’s out there, you should do something different. So, I’ve always tried to do the opposite or do something radically different. And I’ve had better luck doing something that doesn’t follow any trend or doing something that’s just out of the blue or from a random idea.”
As Fashinnovation passes this 10th edition milestone, the future is bright — and more global. “In the next 10 years, we at Fashinnovation want to keep connecting founders globally, which means we will continue to form alliances with governments around the world to bring our global ecosystem to their region and merge the local talent,” Marcelo and Jordana Guimaraes told WWD. “We believe in order for us as an industry to have the changes we want to see in the industry created, everyone globally must be on the same page to walk toward the future together.”
Left to right, Marcelo Guimaraes, Larry Namer and Jordana Guimaraes. Namer, founder of E! Television, is a Fashinnovation advisor.
