Farfetch Dream Assembly goes digital and announces companies selected for fourth cohort
- Dream Assembly fourth cohort consists of eight start-ups focused on shaping the future of fashion and retail
- The programme will be held fully digitally, for the first time
- Burberry returns as a partner for the fourth time
London 24th April 2020: Farfetch (NYSE:FTCH), the leading global technology platform for the luxury fashion industry, has announced today the fourth cohort of start-ups for its Dream Assembly program. The eight tech-focused companies who are part of the latest cohort are shaping the future of fashion and retail and were selected from 155 applications from around the word.
In light of the recent health and safety guidelines issued by many Governments, the program will run in its entirety with a fully digital schedule, while still offering start-ups mentorship, networking opportunities and support.
Farfetch is pleased to announce the eight new companies that will take part in the program this time around. These are: Cerebra, FavourUp, Ivapparel, M-XR, Newlife, StyleScript, Supply Compass and Whoqip.
Global luxury fashion brand Burberry, which has been a partner of Farfetch on the Dream Assembly program since its launch, will also return and will continue to share its expertise with founders.
David Grunwald, VP Innovation of Farfetch, said: "As always, we are thrilled to welcome the latest group of start-ups to the Dream Assembly program. The program will be executed digitally for the first time, but it's still set to to be an incredible seven weeks, where this cohort of companies can access mentorship and an array of masterclasses. These companies all have business models focused on the digitisation of commerce across various industries, which will be more relevant than ever now, and for a post-Covid world."
Cipriano Sousa, Chief Technology Officer of Farfetch, said: “In these extraordinary times, Farfetch wants to keep supporting the community with this amazing program, sharing know-how, tools, and expertise to help the start-ups reach their full potential and ultimately helping them increase efficiencies in their current business models. For Farfetch, it’s an honour, and each cohort represents a new challenge as we aim to be a valuable partner and work along with the start-ups to spearhead their development”.
Mark Morris, Senior Vice President of Digital Commerce at Burberry, said: “We are excited to partner with Farfetch on Dream Assembly for the fourth time, especially with this programme running with a fully digital schedule. Innovation is at the heart of our digital strategy at Burberry and we are proud to support this latest cohort of start-ups shaping the future of fashion and retail.”
The seven-week program will include a series of masterclasses, one-to-one sessions with senior leaders from Farfetch and partners, covering topics including luxury fashion, marketing, technology and operations, giving start-ups direct access to Farfetch’s expertise in the luxury fashion and technology industries. Companies will also have the chance to get exclusive introductions with a selected pool of leading-external investors for follow-on funding and luxury brands.
Launched two years ago, in April 2018, Dream Assembly keeps strengthening its connection to the community, with over 60 accelerated start-ups, three completed programs and a recently launched bootcamp format, to support start-ups around the world.
Meet the start-ups:
Cerebra (USA) www.cerebra.tech
Cerebra helps retailers, marketplaces and franchises make better data-driven decisions by forecasting critical trends and opportunities. Cerebra transforms sales, CRM, inventory and text data into real-time insights that enable action with one click for merchandising, customer satisfaction, sales, and inventory-planning decisions. With Cerebra, each decision maker in the retail organisation gets a curated feed of insights. The team works closely with each user to identify the right insight suites and customizations to fit with their workflow. The insights are ranked by their urgency and forecasted impact, and require no coding to start using. Cerebra’s insight suites cover everything from essentials like forecasting demand surges and out-of-stock events, to more advanced capabilities like identifying churning customers, suggesting optimal times for markdown introductions, and improving assortments based on shifts in customer buying patterns in real-time.
Favourup (UK) https://favourup.com
FavourUp is a Geo-targeting Advocacy platform that helps fashion, retail, and travel brands to create endless location-driven user generated content for each market, and provide real-time insights down to a postcode level. The solution activates brands’ untapped local communities. The collected data can be further used for consumer trend forecasting and to balance online and offline marketing efforts.
Immersive Virtual Apparel (IVA) (UK) www.ivapparel.co
IVA enables gaming companies to incorporate fashion skins into games & virtual worlds. We are a B2B Marketplace connecting the 3tr $ fashion industry with the biggest entertainment industry on the planet, gaming, to enable the sale of IRL products as gaming skins.
With people spending an ever increasing amount of time online on virtual platforms, our digital personas are becoming ever more important. We harness the appeal of fashion and the power of tech to create a new digital and sustainable revenue stream for brands.
M-XR (UK) m-xr.com
M—XR develops 3D capture technology, which allows brands, studios and creators to digitise their real-world product catalogues accurately and automatically. Our goal is to ensure that brands leverage truly realistic 3D models that are indistinguishable from reality, and avoid diminishing the quality of their real-world products in represented realities.
Newlife (Czech Republic) newlife.ai
Each year the fashion industry gets further away from cultural relevance, ending up producing $500B worth of garments that will remain unsold. Newlife.ai is a decentralised social network designed to aggregate cultural innovators and produce the largest dataset for design and aesthetics trends. Fostering the digitalisation of the creative layer of the fashion and arts industries, our database is structured for deep learning based on user’s emotional connections with concepts such as colours and shapes.
StyleScript (Netherlands) www.stylescript.com
StyleScript provides retailers with digital tools to get to know the consumer and help them to make the right choice/decision and giving them an experience that reflects who they really are. By creating personal profiles of customers StyleScript is able to match these with the right products which leads to an improved customer experience (both online and in-stores) and achieve a guaranteed uplift in conversion.
StyleScript helps brands to digitally map products’ DNA to create relevant and personal retail experiences for your individual customers and translate product information into the language that brands can understand and make business decisions. StyleScript offers B2B SAAS solutions and aspires to become a digital personal profiling platform using a personal digital style wallet with the aim of enriching the lifestyle of customers.
Supply Compass (UK) www.supplycompass.com
SupplyCompass is a product development and production management platform that enables fashion brands and manufacturers to produce better, together. The cloud-based software is transforming the fashion industry, by digitising global supply chains and making sustainable sourcing easy and cost-effective for brands and every player in the supply chain. The platform enables brands to manage the entire product development, sourcing and production process from design right through to delivery, all in one place.
Whoqip (Germany) www.whoqip.com
Whoqip is a Connected Store Solution - we help retailers to connect with customers across channels in real-time to reduce waiting times - from product search to check-out. In the last couple of months we have helped several local and global retailers to serve their customers while empowering sales associates with the right tools to move visitors a few steps further along their shopping journey towards a purchase. During and after COVID-19 we will continue to support more retailers to reach their customers online while helping to transition to a unique connected shopping experience online, instore and in-between.
For more information please visit www.dreamassembly.com.