Bernhard Willhelm ‘Karasaba’ Mini-Skirt | Source: Farfetch.com

LONDON, United Kingdom — Today, BoF can exclusively reveal that curated fashion marketplace Farfetch.com has raised a new $18 million round of funding from Index Ventures, eVenture Capital Partners and existing investors Advent Venture Partners, bringing the total amount of capital the company has raised to date to almost $25 million. The valuation of the company in this latest round was not disclosed.

Founded in 2008, the London-based Farfetch is an online marketplace for fashion that connects consumers with carefully selected product from a large global network of more than 100 independent boutiques.

“The online channel is growing tremendously, but it’s often difficult for small or even medium size businesses to create the teams and the platform to successfully reach a global online audience,” Farfetch founder José Neves told BoF. “I realised that the selection of these cutting-edge boutiques was really relevant to global fashionistas. You had boutiques such as RA in Antwerp stocking Meadham Kirchhoff, John Rocha or Rodarte which may have been sought by someone in Singapore or Sydney, but they were really constrained by geography.”

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Oren Michels | Photo: Scott Beale

NEW YORK, United States — Today, rapid innovation in consumer technologies and accelerating adoption rates are driving explosive growth of new devices and platforms — from iPads and gaming consoles to web-connected cars and internet-enabled TVs — putting pressure on brands to design and support a diverse and fast proliferating array of digital touchpoints. Keeping pace with consumers means thinking beyond the web browser. The days of simply building and supporting a brand website are over. But creating new experiences and applications for every new channel dramatically increases the cost and complexity of engaging consumers, a significant challenge for even the most savvy and well-financed brands.

While there is no escaping this new reality, forward-thinking brands are learning to efficiently leverage external partners and developers to create new experiences and applications for them — driving innovation and increasing revenue while reducing cost and complexity — by creating and publishing open APIs.

An API, or application programming interface, enables interaction between pieces of software, much the same way that a user interface facilitates interaction between people and computers. Specifically, an API makes it easy for one piece of software to open part of its functionality or content for other programs to leverage. Technology leaders like Google, Facebook and Amazon have long published open APIs, making specific content and functionality available to external partners and developers who can then use these building blocks to create new experiences and applications. For example, Amazon’s Product Advertising API provides programmatic access to the retailer’s vast product range so that external developers can easily advertise Amazon products on third-party websites.

Now, embracing APIs and the ecosystem growth strategies they enable is rapidly becoming vital for all brands and retailers, not just technology companies. Indeed, Gartner predicts that by 2014 over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will have APIs.

BoF spoke with Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of leading API management, infrastructure and strategy firm Mashery, to find out more about the fast approaching future of brand APIs.

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Emerging Designer CC Kuo, The Black Stripe | Source: Lookk.com

NEW YORK, United States — Blogging and other forms of social media are surfacing emerging designers faster than ever before, bringing greater transparency to a previously underexposed part of the market and empowering consumers to discover new names. But the emerging fashion businesses which stand to benefit most have long faced significant distribution barriers and unfavourable economic terms that make bringing their product to market problematic.

Because young labels can rarely afford the huge investments associated with opening their own bricks-and-mortar stores, their primary path to market has been selling pieces at wholesale prices to multi-brand boutiques and department stores, who traditionally mark up items 2.5 to 3 times before selling them to end consumers, taking 60 to 70 percent of the retail value. But for emerging brands, even this is far from guaranteed, as risk-averse retailers typically wait a few seasons before buying a new designer in order to first confirm that the brand has proven its ability to generate consumer demand, creating a kind of “Catch-22.”

In recent years, the growth of internet retailing has enabled smaller brands to route around retailers and earn more favourable margins by establishing direct-to-consumer sales channels online, at a fraction of what it costs to build a physical store. But for the majority of emerging fashion businesses just entering the market, the costs associated with implementing their own e-commerce presence have traditionally been too high to make a directly-owned and operated online sales channel a viable immediate option.

Now, a number start-ups are aiming to disrupt the traditional retail model by changing the way emerging fashion designers break into the market. Launched in October 2010, London-based Boticca is a curated online marketplace for fashion accessories that enables emerging designers, hand-picked by the Boticca team, to sell pieces directly to end consumers, earning 75 to 80 percent of retail value, nearly twice as much as they would make via traditional wholesale channels.

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Digital IQ Index 2011, Greatest Year-Over-Year Gain or Loss, 2010 vs. 2011 Digital IQ Percentile Rank | Source: L2

NEW YORK, United States — On Monday, Professor Scott Galloway’s NYU-based thinktank LuxuryLab, or L2, released advance copies of their third annual “Digital IQ” report, assessing the digital competence of 49 global fashion and leather goods firms, to a small number of media outlets, including BoF.

According to the study, which will be published later today, fashion brands are embracing digital innovation with enthusiasm and have been amongst the first to pilot forward-thinking marketing initiatives on platforms like Foursquare, Tumblr and the fashion flock’s current obsession, photo-sharing app Instagram. “Some programs could best be described as bleeding edge,” says the study, referring to Ralph Lauren’s experimentation with ‘4D’ projection mapping technology.

But a closer reading reveals that a majority of fashion companies — in a sector which trades on being perfectly contemporary and thinks in terms of trend cycles — still regard the rise of digital media as a trend to be exploited, first and foremost, for its PR and image value.

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InAisce S/S 2012 | Source: InAisce

NEW YORK, United States — This month, the BoF Spotlight turns to InAisce, the New York-based anti-trend menswear label launched by Colorado native Jona (first name only) whose poetic and meticulously crafted work — simultaneously forward-looking and artisanal — first caught our eye at New York boutique If. “InAisce doesn’t fit into a category,” Jona told BoF, speaking at his design studio on the fourth floor of a former factory building in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood. “I’m neither Gareth Pugh, nor an Italian artisan.”

Rather, InAisce (pronounced “in-ask-ee”) manages to unite these very different approaches, creating dark, modern, architectural looks that also feel natural, organic and full of passion for history and place. “The man-made, architectural aspect comes from my actual surroundings,” said Jona, gesturing to the industrial environment around him. “The natural part comes from what I’m experiencing in my head — my imagination and my memories of times in Colorado, Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan,” he continued.

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