NFTs aren’t just for the cryptocrowd anymore. With two fashion weeks under its belt, the metaverse is set up to be the next big stop on the fashion calendar.
1. Jonathan Simkhai’s digital twins
As one of the industry’s leading lights, it’s no surprise that the trendsetters are getting in on the action already. ApparelMagic client Jonathan Simkhai reproduced looks from his fall 2022 collection for a metaverse event on Second Life put on by Everyrealm and Blueberry Entertainment.
Proving that fashion can pack just as much of a punch even as pixels, ROKSANDA put their trademark statement-making clothes online. The high fashion brand teamed up with the Institute of Digital Fashion to create an NFT of a dress to debut during Crypto Fashion Week 2022.
3. Tommy Hilfiger jumps into Web3
In March, some of the biggest brands in fashion like Tommy Hilfiger and Elie Saab teamed up for Metaverse Fashion Week, a digital-only fashion week inside the Decentraland platform. With attendance by a who’s who of the decentralized finance and digital art worlds, its front row is becoming an important spot to see and be seen for fashion insiders and tech innovators alike.
4. Rebecca Minkoff turns the information superhighway into her runway
How does a traditional fashion brand approach new technology? Apparently, with some great panache. Creating looks exclusively for the digital market, Rebecca Minkoff turned the brand DNA into purchasable assets available at THE DEMATERIALIZED marketplace.
5. Diesel goes digital
When cutting-edge fashion and novel forms of art merge, great things can happen. It’s with that knowledge that creative director Glenn Marten transformed his fall 2022 collection for Diesel into NFTs available at Rarible and their own NFT store, D:VERSE.
6. Overpriced.™’s $26,000 hoodie
Fashion loves a tongue-in-cheek joke, and even in its infancy, digital fashion already knows how to make fun of itself. Overpriced.™ notably proved the market for NFTs with their release of a hoodie paired with a NFT, selling on BlockParty for more than any other hooded sweatshirt in history.
Artwork series are a natural fit for the current trends in NFTs, and today’s artists are able to turn their creativity into profit. Working outside his typical T-shirt canvas, Warren Lotas took his cult-favorite illustrations to the internet with 4,000 fugitive skeletons for his NFT Discord community “The Wild Bunch.” Best yet? They sold out in 9 minutes.
Say you’re the biggest name in fashion. You’ve dressed all the biggest names in music and celebrity. Beyonce’s a big fan. The Kardashians collectively owe you their greatest looks. The Jenners, too, look best in your wares. What’s next?
LaQuan Smith has had to answer all of these questions, and each time, the brand ups the ante. Last season, it was a show on the top of the Empire State Building. This season, it was opening their New York Fashion Week show with the It Girl of the moment (and Kanye West collaborator) Julia Fox.
Jennifer Epstein, Director of Sales at LaQuan Smith, has been a part of the meteoric rise, and she’s been part of the effort behind the glamor to turn a force of fashion into something to reckon with at retail.
Growing isn’t easy even at a normal pace, but when you’re the talk of the town, that exponential growth can be hard to handle from the backend.
“We were manually entering in every single invoice, and that was taking forever,” Epstein says.
When it got to be too much, she turned to ApparelMagic for a cost-effective solution that would keep records accurate, even as their business grew in leaps and bounds.
“Once I opened the department stores, I knew we had to put something in place. There was no way I could physically do this, or rely on someone else to do it,” Epstein says.
ApparelMagic gave her team a way to keep track of sales and inventory from one place, syncing across the system and ensuring numbers were accurate everywhere.
“The collection has grown tremendously in terms of categories and SKUs,” Epstein says. “This avoids a lot of mistakes entering orders at larger volumes as our business starts to get bigger.”
Finally, the brand has a reliable solution that can scale with the business. Growing pains are diminishing, and the team at LaQuan Smith has fewer headaches as they write their next chapter.
“It has added structure to the back end of our business that we hadn’t had before,” Epstein says. “ApparelMagic greatly helps in the organization of all of the new customers that we have acquired.”
Launching in March 2021 wouldn’t be an auspicious start for most businesses, but Juliette Porter’s JMP The Label is a striking exception. The influencer, MTV’s Siesta Key star, and now fashion mogul built a swimwear brand when most businesses were treading water.
Porter has been the one to watch, being named the Emerging Fashion Influencer of the Year at the American Influencer Awards in 2021. Pairing Porter’s taste and natural affinity with the beach with the skills of fashion industry veterans, JMP The Label is no merch line: it’s a well thought out lifestyle brand.
We spoke to JMP The Label co-founder David Kelleher about the business’s success using ApparelMagic.
“ApparelMagic has allowed us to expand rapidly, while maintaining control of inventory, BOMs, vendor information, and details necessary to stay organized with our 1600 skus—and growing!” Kelleher says.
It wasn’t always this easy though. Like many fashion brands, they hit a bump in the road early on when their commercial success was outpacing growth on the backend of the business.
“Prior to switching over, our information was maintained with various Excel documents, and human error plays such a factor with Excel,” Kelleher says.
By identifying their pain points right away, the team was able to start looking for a solution before any errors started to affect the business.
“Because of the fact that we saw success with sales early on, and that we knew that we wanted to continue to design more styles with more fabrics,” Kelleher says, “we were going to need something that was more robust than Excel. We needed an ERP system, and the sooner we could get to it, the better.”
With the goalposts identified, the next challenge was to find the best system for their needs. Though with a reputation that preceded it, a winner soon became clear.
“We knew we needed to move to an ERP system. We met with a bunch of them, and ApparelMagic seemed to be the industry leader,” Kelleher says.
They moved their business operations to the ApparelMagic platform for its ability to manage everything in one accurate, central hub.
“Trying to figure out how to build a brand on the backend as we scaled: that’s where we saw the worth of the software.”
As a brand that communicates directly with its customers, being able to connect to an eCommerce service was paramount. JMP The Label built a Shopify store using a standard integration between it and ApparelMagic, effortlessly syncing product and order data back and forth.
“The integration into Shopify was so simple, and now that we are able to generate reports on sales, styles, and leftover inventory,” Kelleher says, “2022 is poised to be a great year.”
Now that JMP The Label has the software power behind the scenes, they can concentrate on taking advantage of their growing popularity. As they grow, they know ApparelMagic will continue to support them with new features.
“ApparelMagic is the leader in the industry, and we can’t wait to see where the next few years can take us!”
After considerable deliberation around scores of amazing brands, it’s our pleasure to announce the winners of the ApparelMagic Awards 2021. These clients are going above and beyond to push fashion forward as a business and as a field of unfettered creativity.
Juliette Porter, one of fashion’s biggest influencers, makes a splash with her new swimwear line.
Stay tuned as we talk to each of our winners about how they’ve successfully met and exceeded their goals over the course of 2021, and what they see next for their brands in 2022!
Less than two weeks in, 2022 is already shaping up to be a huge year of growth and movement in fashion. There’s a palpable sense of change in the air, and as technology and fashion are finally converging, we’re about to see a revolution. What will this year mean for the fashion industry? Here are my predictions:
Blockchain in Fashion
Between crypto, NFTs, and the new advancements in Web3 technology, fashion is set to surf a wave of innovation based on the blockchain. Perennially plagued by counterfeiting, luxury fashion and collectible accessories are already turning towards decentralized networks to certify ownership and authenticity. It’s no longer the easily-lost certificate in a nice handbag.
Fashion brands will start utilizing the same minting platforms used by NFT artists to authenticate their goods, creating digital twins in the process that can be integrated into the metaverse. Customers will now have the opportunity to sport the newest fashions not just in real life but in virtual spaces like Decentraland, Sandbox, and Facebook’s new Meta venture. The most cutting-edge fashion will be created and exhibited 100% digitally, where the laws of gravity and thermodynamics don’t apply.
The magic of the blockchain is that it gives power back to the artists and creators, and that doesn’t stop at just the brand. Designers can start earning commissions from their work. For independent creators and intellectual property owners alike, a digital register can simplify keeping track of royalties, helping everyone involved reap the benefits of sales.
Ethical fashion is finally going mainstream. Consumers have read the stories about poor working conditions in factories, the climate-altering scale of modern fashion production, and the innovations brands are bringing to market. It’s finally all sinking in.
Sustainable principles are no longer fringe activism, and we’re all going to benefit. Concepts like the circular economy are taking hold in the design studio. A dress can’t just go from fiber to closet to landfill: it can now be designed to be broken back down and rebuilt endlessly. As customers begin to recognize the value in this kind of fashion, it becomes an added value in every SKU.
Our clients like SoftShirts and Anaak are already going down this path. Reaching for organic materials and human-first production, they are the trailblazers who are making fashion better. And they’re not the only ones.
Digital Design
Design doesn’t just happen in the studio. After almost two years of WFH, designers know they can harness their creativity from wherever they are. Brands will continue to empower their creative staff with flexible roles, empowered by new technology in design development.
With 3D modeling and advanced textile physics, pattern making software has grown leaps and bounds. Through further investment in 2022, designers can create new products from their laptops and iterate completely digitally—no sewing machine required.
With development instantaneous in the cloud, brands will save on sampling, spending less time and money on prototype development. Sophisticated digital design means less lead time and fewer resources used before going to market.
Pandemic Recovery
COVID-19 represented a shift in nearly every element of life, and getting dressed is no different. As we collectively put away our sweatpants, we’re taking a second look at who we want to be and what we want to wear.
From style we’ll keep from the pandemic (comfortable dressing, masks as an evergreen staple, and the recent vogue for logomania) to what we’ve been missing out on (event dressing, travel wardrobes, and likely, new sweats that don’t remind us of quarantine) fashion is ready for a big shift forward.
For brands, this means staying agile and responding to customer demands as soon as they’re spotted. Powerful forecasting will be de rigueur, and advanced replenishment systems can finally get us off the out-of-stock treadmill we’ve been running on for the past two years.
Working with retailers, though, will require a whole new approach. Work From Home culture isn’t going anywhere, and even when we’re back in the office, we’ll all be reevaluating our work trips. A successful brand in 2022 has to accommodate buyers from anywhere in the world, so setting up a B2B eCommerce platform is going to be an absolute essential. With these online stores, buyers can browse and add styles to their carts at their leisure, replicating the showroom experience from the comfort of their home or office.
Economic Reset
We’re seeing signs of an economic reset already. As the status quo is evolving, more people are breaking molds and becoming entrepreneurs, fueling a small business boom that’s particularly noticeable within the fashion industry. These rule-breakers are shifting what it means to run a modern business, focusing first on their changing customer profile.
A new generation of shoppers is asking for different modes of browsing and buying. These Gen-Z customers are discovering products on social media like Tik-Tok and Instagram, and they’re forming relationships with brands long before they make their first purchase.
And no longer are they confined to brick-and-mortar stores and eCommerce outlets—they’re using a whole ecosystem of apps to make their purchases, highlighting the need for a comprehensive, multichannel customer experience. Brands will be well rewarded when they’re the first mover on new platforms and in emerging markets.
And when young customers do buy, optionality is still at the forefront. Businesses will quickly adopt cryptocurrency as a payment method, expanding its utility and its mass adoption. As a side benefit, these early adopters will earn increased social relevance from aligning themselves with both groundbreaking technology.
Going Forward
2022 is going to be full of surprises, but we’re looking forward to a year full of growth, improvement, and openness to change. As the fashion industry embraces the latest technology, we’ll be leading the way forward every step of the way.
On the west coast, it’s no secret that the best ideas come from Burning Man. For best friends Emma Williams and Tanner Bloom, it was the spark that ignited a booming business.
After a trip to the playa six years ago, Bloom returned with an out-of-the-blue proposal: “What do you think about a pasties company?”
“I said I didn’t even know what that was, but to leave it with me, and I’d do some research,’” Williams recalls.
Rave fashion like body glitter, nipple pasties, and stick-on crystals was getting big in the festival circuit. Embedded in the rave community, Bloom was looking for things she could dance in for days, and Williams was all about sparkles and glitter. They would make the perfect team.
Williams says she got to work immediately mocking up a website and designing packaging. Bloom quickly started to become an expert in logistics. The best friends started the business without an office, a warehouse, or even manufacturers.
“We’d be laminating on the floor in my apartment,” Williams says. “It literally got to the point where I would open my cupboards in my bathroom and pasties would fall out. It was nuts.”
While operating on a shoestring at home, the duo had a knack for getting the word out and getting orders to roll in.
“Once I got a hold of certain buyers’ email addresses, I just didn’t stop,” Williams says. “Once a week, I’d drop them an email. And one day, they’d just respond.”
It didn’t take long until Neva Nude got the attention of some of the biggest names in the space.
“Our first order from Nasty Galwas amazing,” Williams says. “It wasn’t a big order, but it just told me, ‘You know what? We can build a brand here. Big names in the apparel industry are taking note of what we do.’”
The response from buyers and customers started to become overwhelming, and something had to change to keep up with demand.
“We got this massive order from American Apparel, and we had to handpack every single one item by ourselves in my apartment,” Williams says. “But, it was a great problem to have.”
This rapid success caused its fair share of growing pains, and a lot of those came from having inaccurate inventory. The team had one employee, Emily Farfan, tasked with keeping track of all inventory through a spreadsheet. She had to manually check in shipments and deduct orders from Amazon, Etsy, and wholesalers one by one.
“It’s a lot for one person to do,” Williams says. Between internet connectivity issues at the warehouse and a constant stream of items coming in and out, “Errors are bound to happen when you’re doing 500 SKUs manually.”
“We were using Google Sheets, and it just got to the point where it said we had 100 units, but we’re actually out of stock, and we have an open order.” Williams says. “And I thought, ‘this will take three to four months to order from China!’”
“To be honest, I didn’t know anything about WMS and ERP. I had to Google this stuff,” Williams admits.
However, Williams and Bloom weren’t intimidated by industry jargon. With their can-do attitude and hustler mentality, they set about finding software that would optimize their inventory, warehousing, and logistics.
“QuickBooks was our go-to, but honestly I can’t stand QuickBooks,” Williams says. “It’s more problematic than anything, and it doesn’t track inventory at all.”
At that point, the cobbled together softwares were not cutting it. Neva Nude turned to ApparelMagic when they saw they could get more accurate inventory while at the same time improving the workdays of their team.
“We needed a system that will help us streamline, manage our inventory, and take away all of these manual pieces that we do at the warehouse,” Williams says. “I was hoping it would free up so much of Emily’s time, just being able to log on to the system and see all of the numbers.”
“It was now or never,” Williams says. “I’m very happy we did it now and not when we have 2,500 SKUs.”
Business Optimized
And it doesn’t take an autodidact to learn how to use ApparelMagic. With training materials, weekly live webinars, and a support team to guide them, new users can feel fully supported by the solution.
“Zane from the support team is very knowledgeable and very good at explaining things,” Williams says. “When he’d be doing screen shares with me, he briefly went over the B2B, and three days later, I messaged him, ‘It’s up! It looks amazing!’”
With ApparelMagic’s fully-integrated inventory management, the team has the confidence of knowing exactly what they have on hand, what they need to order, and what’s selling the best.
“In a few clicks, I can check the inventory,” Williams says. And that’s not all. “I can’t believe how much the software actually does. Seeing all the features, I keep thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they thought of this.’”
At the 2021 CFDA Awards, presented by the Council of Fashion Designers in America in New York, Emily Bode Aujla won the award for American Menswear Designer of the Year.
Her brand, Bode, uses ApparelMagic’s fashion ERP software to manage its growing business and all of the opportunities, challenges, and rewards of operating a fashion brand today.
Bode has grown from a new voice within the fashion industry to join its upper echelons at a rapid pace. Its rise has tracked a new cultural shift in gender presentation and sustainable practices. Bode’s signature mix of reused textiles and ornate embellishments has not just kept up with the times—it’s changed them.
Bode Aujla is no stranger to accolades. In 2018, her brand was named a runner-up for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Just a year later, the designer took home the award for Best Emerging Designer at the CFDA Awards in 2019.
After a year of cancelled fashion weeks, reduced trade show attendance, and an embrace of work-from-home culture, it’s no wonder that brands are turning to the internet for wholesaling.
With ApparelMagic’s recent introduction of B2B eCommerce, sales can happen instantaneously around the world and across timezones. Integrated directly to their product and inventory data inside ApparelMagic, brands can launch online wholesale environments in just minutes.
Let’s see how one of ApparelMagic’s clients uses it:
The Problem: Standalone B2B Stores
Kizzi Dancewear, a specialty brand that works directly with dance schools and studios, started setting up a standalone wholesale eCommerce store in April of 2020. And a year later, it was still in the works. Until then, they’d been selling exclusively through trade shows and word-of-mouth. While shifting to online wholesale was a great move at the start of the pandemic, that kind of growth has challenges all its own. Kizzi Dancewear CEO Kim Coates said working with another service was full of headaches and constant manual attention.
“It was a boatload of constant importing and exporting,” Coates says. “We just met stumbling block after stumbling block.”
Bogged down in tedious formatting and spreadsheets, her team was busy keeping their B2B store up to date, all the while missing out on time they could use contributing to actual sales.
“For the other sales platform, they wanted this very complicated image naming,” Coates says. “I just said ‘That will not work.’ I can’t go back and edit thousands of images.”
As an established business, Kizzi Dancewear has plenty of product data on file. It’s this current and past season information that allows them to accurately plan and forecast for future seasons. Managing over a hundred thousand SKUs and nearly 1,000 styles inside ApparelMagic is all in a day’s work for Coates and her team, but when it came to getting that product data to their customers, other solutions were falling short.
Introducing ApparelMagic B2B
All that changed this summer when ApparelMagic introduced a built-in B2B eCommerce feature. Now, users can use a simple drag-and-drop interface to build stores and invite their wholesale customers to shop, allowing them to browse products and add them to their cart just like they would when online shopping.
“Everything in the way you set it up has made it so easy for us to use,” Coates says. “Really, in two days, I created everything you see in our store.”
Getting started with ApparelMagic B2B
For Coates, moving over to ApparelMagic’s integrated B2B was a cinch. After hearing about the new feature at one of Kizzi’s leadership meetings, she gave it a spin. How long did it take her to get the hang of it?
“Really, in 48 hours, with just looking at your support portal and someone emailing me a short video link,” Coates says. “And we launched it to over 600 customers within two weeks.”
“That afternoon, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be life-changing!’”
Kim Coates, CEO of Kizzi Dancewear
To add products to the store, Coates simply chose from her brand’s existing products in ApparelMagic inventory data. Advanced controls can further filter products by availability, season, and more. This customized approach allows brands to choose exactly which styles they’d like to sell online.
“It’s shocking how good it is,” Coates says. “I was literally screaming from my office.”
And that’s just the beginning. From there, brands can add their own content through smart widgets, telling that season’s full narrative through embedded videos, links, and custom HTML.
“I put everything there that I could think of from a shopper’s standpoint,” Coates says. “People can search by category, sizing, etc.”
And all of this represented a sea change compared to using a standalone B2B eCommerce solution. With all of the data effortlessly syncing between modules, ApparelMagic is able to deliver accurate stock information through an incredibly intuitive interface.
This accuracy is because ApparelMagic B2B is not a standard integration, translating data across platforms: it’s fully a part of the ApparelMagic ERP system. When customers login to make orders, they’re accessing the latest data from their customized portal into ApparelMagic’s inventory.
Making Sales
Reaching out to new and existing customers is easy. With their data stored safely and privately within ApparelMagic, salespeople can simply invite them to view and shop from the store. Invite them one at a time, or by the hundreds, and ApparelMagic manages their traffic, following customer interaction with Google Analytics.
“We did a mass invitation with a little descriptive information,” Coates says. “Not a lot, because it just doesn’t require very much instruction.”
“We launched it to over 600 customers within two weeks.”
Kim Coates, CEO of Kizzi Dancewear
And customers? They’re falling in love.
“We had one of our biggest customers in our shop,” Coates says. “While they were here, we showed them the store, and they loved it. They thought it’d be so easy for anyone to use.”
The transition to online wholesale has been a win for everyone so far. After sending out a link to the store on a Friday, orders were already flowing in by the time the sales team returned from the weekend.
“The way they come in, it’s really easy for our sales people to know which ones we still need to connect with and send out our invoice and payment method separately. It’s all working really smoothly.”
Next up, Kizzi will be bringing in ApparelMagic Pay to process credit card payments coming through their store. Just like that, a start-to-finish sales process has been transformed.
The Results are in: Selling with ApparelMagic
If Kizzi Dancewear’s experience is anything to go by, ApparelMagic’s built-in B2B eCommerce is the easiest, fastest, and most accurate solution out there. And for ApparelMagic users, it’s included free in all subscriptions from the Professional level and up.
Setting up stores takes just moments, and from there on accepting orders and now taking payments is all handled seamlessly by the web app. Try it and see for yourself.
“I think at this point, it’s just so unbelievably beyond where we were at after a year and a half with another company,” Coates says. “It’s so hard to comprehend how fast we got to where we are.”
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