The cost of inventory that doesn’t sell is fashion’s biggest inefficiency. But there is a better approach that some believe can be achieved at any scale.

Disruptions caused by Covid-19 have redoubled concerns about vulnerabilities in fashion’s manufacturing base, accelerating efforts to build more resilient and efficient operations.

A crop of platform-like brand incubators, from New Guards Group and Tomorrow to Dover Street Market Paris, are spinning up new fashion labels for a hype cycle that’s moving faster and faster.

The market is changing, but the fashion system isn’t changing with it.

Bits and Bytes is a weekly roundup of the most important news in the fast evolving fashion-tech space.

London and New York are both home to vibrant start-up ecosystems. But which is the world’s true fashion-tech capital?

Lawrence Lenihan, managing director of FirstMark Capital, argues that the Internet provides a new model for building fashion businesses based on passionate and intimate relationships with consumers, but the maximum market size for these companies is inherently capped, something that overcapitalised entrepreneurs, and the investors who fund them, too often fail to recognise.

As money pours into fashion-tech start-ups, at sky high valuations, BoF talks to leading investors to assess the existence of a bubble and understand what separates winning investments from those that are failing.