Former 2010 Seedcamp winner rebrands to bring young designers to market and announces impressive line-up of investors

Former 2010 Seedcamp winner rebrands to bring young designers to market and announces impressive line-up of investors

LOOKK, a new platform that connects young designers with consumers through an open social network, launched this month with a high-profile team of seed investors that includes Net-a-Porter founder Carmen Busquets, Eden Ventures and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure.

LOOKK aims to fundamentally change the way young designers and labels enter the fashion market by providing a platform for them to showcase their designs to a community of fashion-lovers, all of whom have the opportunity to feedback on what they love and directly influence the items that are produced for sale within the LOOKK webshop.

Direct engagement with consumers

By providing an open network for designers to engage directly with consumers, LOOKK gives every new fashion graduate or aspiring designer the chance to be discovered and become successful on their own merits, making visible a section of the industry that has tough entry barriers to overcome. In turn, consumers are able to purchase unique, authentic garments in the knowledge they are supporting young, fresh talent.

Andreas Klinger, co-founder and chief operating officer of LOOKK, said: “Until now fashion has been a slow adopter of technology. LOOKK aims to change this by connecting new designers with consumers online and harnessing the power of social networks to give both groups a voice.

“Social media has completely changed how new fashion gets discovered. New trends and names now surface more often and quicker than retail and production cycles can adapt to. This leaves an untapped potential of new designers with proven demand but no ‘first steps’ to market – LOOKK provides a solution for this.”

Designers can upload a single design or showcase an entire collection with each item having the potential to be discovered. By garnering support from the LOOKK community as well as their own social networks, they can increase their level of exposure and in turn, have the opportunity to be identified by an expert fashion panel who, using data to estimate market demand, will ultimately choose which items are put into production. Once selected, LOOKK said it will be responsible for the high-quality manufacturing, distribution and disbursement of the pieces, including all associated costs.

Evolving platform and model

LOOKK is the brainchild of Tamas Locher, Andreas Klinger and Gilbert Wedam, who formerly founded Garmz, last year’s winner of the European micro seed fund, Seedcamp. As the original concept evolved to encompass a broader proposition and superior product, the team chose to rebrand with a name and style that better reflected the platform.

As well as Carmen Busquets, Eden Ventures and Dave McClure, LOOKK has also received seed funding from Kima Ventures and angel investors Sherry Coutu, Richard Titus and Tom Hulme.

“LOOKK felt to me like the natural evolution for technology in fashion – something I wanted to explore following Net-a-Porter,” commented Carmen Busquets. “Its power is in its ability to help designers start and, crucially, sustain their fashion career – not only paying them a commission on their designs, but also covering production costs and helping them to market themselves.

“The detailed market data available through LOOKK means we can predict demand for pieces much more efficiently than with a traditional model. This, coupled with shorter production cycles, means we can produce smaller, demand-driven, batches – significantly reducing waste, and therefore costs.”