EditD founders talk fashion intelligen​ce

With the fashion landscape in a new phase where a plethora of sites are now attempting to reach a pinnacle of creativity through merging technology, new niche services are also being created. Case in point: new fashion intelligence and real time

data start up, EditD. Founders Julia Fowler (previously a fashion designer) and Geoff Watts (data developer) saw a gap in the digital market for an updated trend forecasting service that moved away from plain market research or ‘informed guessing.’
 
With fashion insiders from retailers, merchandisers and designers' interest already piqued by the opportunity for gathered data, FashionUnited caught up with the two founders to hear more about the day to day service and their ambitious plans to keep drawing in key fashion industry figures.
 
FashionUnited: How did the idea for EDITD come to you?
Julia Fowler: The idea for EDITD came from my own personal need.  As a designer, I tangibly felt that there wasn't enough information out there to do my job properly, and when I asked around, my colleagues felt like that too. As a designer, your job is to produce product that people will love and want to buy, you need to understand everything about your customer. I wanted that knowledge.
 
FU: Can you give me an overview of the service you offer?
Geoff Watts: If you think about that knowledge Julia wanted, that's really what we've built.
What a consumer does is made up of influential opinions (like blogs, personalities, celebrities, magazines, or their friends), the retail market (what they can buy), and intimate knowledge of culture and the arts. We have dashboards that show how hot a particular trend is, what price point it's at, what colourway is selling well, when it was first dropped and the date you shouldn't consider dropping a new product after.  We also monitor things like online visual merchandising, runway shows, key blogs and everything else that matters to fashion.
 
FU: How do you see yourself as different from traditional trend forecasting? And something niche in a saturated market?
JF: Seasonal fashion is slipping into the history books, so forecasting needs to adapt.
When you think about what's been happening in the world over the last 5 years, people have gained this new ability to express themselves so much more rapidly.  We now know when an influential person has a view about a collection, because they broadcast it on Twitter from the front row of the show. It's obvious when you think about it, we should integrate those expressions into products.  Considering the industry can produce so much more quickly now also, it does seem a little crazy to gaze into crystal balls instead of measure what's going on out there.
 
FU: Don’t you think fashion has become too fast, trend led and ‘over cycled’ already?
JF: No.  I love seeing different things whenever I go shopping, and I'm not sure how that could ever be a negative!
Creative genius always needs to exist, to spark revolutions.  But since time immemorial in every form of art and design there have been "movements" - it's not a coincidence that Art Nouveau looked a certain way.  That wouldn't happen if creative genius worked in a vacuum.
 
FU: How do you see real time data as continuing to revolutionise the fashion landscape?
JF: Feedback on products from the shop floor has always been super valuable.  That's a kind of data - fundamentally, data just means information. Design is built on information.  Now we can measure this globally and instantly, and pull it together to inform design.
GW: We see it as a fait accompli - as it has been in other industries.  Real time data really runs the most successful fashion brands now - virtually everyone has fantastic sales reporting tools to understand what's selling day-by-day.  It's this new ability to understand the full market instantly that's going to be transformative.
For consumers, it's an amazing future too - because the industry can now pick up on grassroots much more rapidly, and address niches - so the chances are if you're thinking you might want something, it'll be in the shops.  That's a huge benefit!
 
FU: How are you looking to keep developing EDITD?
GW: Capitalising on some great investment we've got, we are adding new features and data all the time, that's the exciting part.  As time goes by, we've built and built on the platform - and the new ways to express and visualise all the information we hold are very powerful.
JF: Wherever the customers take us is where we'll go - everything we've built so far has come from a genuine need, so the direction we take it will be to help underpin the massive changes going on in the industry.
 
FU: How do you see the fashion landscape forever changing in these new digital days?
JF: It's clearly already changed.  Now that people can communicate with each other worldwide in the blink of an eye, there's really much more similarities between markets.
 
FU:How do you see the future of fashion?
JF: More personalised, more rapid, and less wasteful.