Looklab Screenshot | Source: Looklab.com

NEW YORK, United States — Finding fashion products online that fit personal parameters like taste, style, size, body shape, eye colour, hair colour and skin tone; are right for a particular mood or upcoming event; and can be nicely mixed-and-matched with the existing contents of a user’s closet, all while quickening the pulse and providing a feeling of discovery, is a problem that offers tremendous opportunity for would-be innovators.

In a detailed blog post last month, leading movie subscription service Netflix, known for having one of the world’s most effective personal recommendation engines, revealed a remarkable statistic. “We have adapted our personalisation algorithms… in such a way that now 75 percent of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation,” wrote Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico, who work in the company’s personalisation science and engineering department. But in the complex market for fashion, with its subjective tastes, trend cycles and gatekeepers, many debate whether Netflix-style recommendation algorithms are the answer.

The failure, last September, of Google’s Boutiques.com — a fashion site that promised perfectly personalised product selections powered by “machine learning” — seemed to sound something of a death knell for purely algorithmic recommendations in fashion. And yet, despite the spectacular rise of social curation sites like Pinterest, which features thousands of fashion products hand-picked by humans, simply presenting users with items shared by the people they follow is also an imperfect solution to the personal relevance problem.

Now, a number of ambitious start-ups are aiming to offer consumers more sophisticated personalised product selections and styling advice by building expert curation into their online business models.

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LN-CC | Source: daman.co.id

LONDON, United Kingdom — Today, BoF can exclusively reveal that concept store LN-CC, which operates a 5,000 square foot, Gary Card-designed retail and events space in East London alongside a highly curated e-commerce store that ships to over 70 countries, is set to announce a new £2 million round of funding from an undisclosed private investor, at a pre-money valuation of £20 million. While these numbers are small relative to the capital injections and valuations touted in Silicon Valley, they do speak to the potential of niche fashion retailers with a strong point of view. Luxury fashion juggernaut Net-a-Porter.com was valued at £350m in 2010, after ten years in business.

Founded in 2010, with an initial investment of £1.6 million, by a team that includes highly-respected creative director John Skelton, formerly of Oki-ni and Harrods, and buyer Dan Mitchell, who worked alongside Skelton at Oki-ni, LN-CC is known for its progressive buys, stocking underground Japanese streetwear brands like Sasquatchfabrix and Sunsea, as well as rising talents like J.W. Anderson and Tze Goh, alongside globally recognised luxury brands like Lanvin, Jil Sander, Balenciaga, Dries van Noten and Rick Owens.

“We simply buy things that we want to wear,” Skelton told BoF, when asked about the store’s buying strategy. “We [pick] things that we love on a personal level, in a space that we find interesting; there’s no more to it than that,” he continued. “I guess that’s why what we do comes across as being very different, because there aren’t many stores that work like this. Most stores buy product that they think they will be able to sell, which is a completely different approach.”

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SXSW Registrants | Photo: Leyla Kuhn

AUSTIN, United States — Sometimes described as ‘spring break for geeks,’ the annual SXSW Interactive conference is a 5-day whirlwind of panels, presentations, parties, product launches, ‘hackathons’ and happy hours. This year’s conference was said to have attracted more than 25,000 attendees, ranging from tech entrepreneurs to agency executives, to this progressive Texan city with a budding start-up culture of its own, for what, at the best of times, manages to feel like a collective conversation on the future.

The conference certainly has its heady moments. Former American vice-president Al Gore and Napster co-founder Sean Parker discussed the power of digital democracy, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone examined content as a force for social change, executive editor Jill Abramson answered questions on the future of The New York Times and visionary Ray Kurzweil spoke about the coming integration of humans and computers.

But as always, much of the action happened off-piste at countless parties and happy hours that came to life after the rain that dampened the first few days of the event gave way to a burst of warm Texas sun, and people came out from under their umbrellas and bumped into each other in a uniquely SXSW way. Here, we’ve compiled some key takeaways from our five days in Austin.

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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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