The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Syky, created by a fashion veteran who held top roles at Ralph Lauren and Burberry, closed a funding round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture fund of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian.
The company is the brainchild of Alice Delahunt, who was previously chief digital and content officer at Ralph Lauren and before that served as Burberry’s digital and social marketing director. In March, she left Ralph Lauren to focus on building her own digital-fashion venture.
”Some people talk about digital fashion and when it’s coming and when will it be a thing. My perspective is it’s already here,” Delahunt previously told BoF.
Syky (pronounced like “psyche”) is a blockchain-enabled platform that aims to function as a marketplace, community hub and incubator for emerging designers in digital fashion. The funding will be used to “fuel Delahunt’s vision and her mission to enable this digital-first generation to create, curate, share and trade their fashion collections,” the company said in a release.
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The investment is Seven Seven Six’s first in web3 fashion.
”We invested in Alice and Syky because we believe in Alice’s vision to build the leading fashion platform and community for the next generation of designers and consumers,” Ohanian said in a statement.
Although virtual fashion is a niche market compared to its physical counterpart, young consumers who spend time in virtual environments such as Roblox and Fortnite say they value their digital appearances and are willing to spend money on virtual clothing and avatars. A number of fashion brands and entrepreneurs are betting sales of digital fashion will grow significantly in the years ahead.
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The Executive Who Left Luxury for Digital Fashion
Alice Delahunt left her role as Ralph Lauren’s chief digital and content officer to strike out on her own and found a new web3 company in the belief that digital fashion is reaching a turning point.
The app, owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, has been promising to help emerging US labels get started selling in China at the same time that TikTok stares down a ban by the US for its ties to China.
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Four years ago, when the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok in the US, its Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. worked out a preliminary deal to sell the short video app’s business. Not this time.
Brands are using them for design tasks, in their marketing, on their e-commerce sites and in augmented-reality experiences such as virtual try-on, with more applications still emerging.