#ftiglobal

Six types of intervention are necessary to bridge the gender gap: financial incentives and support; technology and infrastructure; the creation of economic opportunity; capability building; advocacy and shaping attitudes; and laws, policies, and regulations. We identify some 75 potential interventions that could be evaluated and tailored to suit the social and economic context of each impact zone and country. Tackling gender inequality will require change within businesses as well as new coalitions. The private sector will need to play a more active role in concert with governments and nongovernmental organizations, and companies could benefit both directly and indirectly by taking action.

Why fashtech matters:

Venture funded opportunities - dominated specialized area for women professionals

VC’s - market opportunities for disruption in fashion with scale and magnitude

New Path to the C-Suite - Technology combined with marketing or editorial is still a rare skill set.

Cultivate talent - Opportunity to orient digital directors for C-suite or entrepreneurial path, hire more women engineers, scientists, creatives around the world

More successful women entrepreneurs means opportunities for representation within VC firms

Fashtech is about thinking about it as an industry, as a whole, how ones business interconnects globally and as part of all of the possibilities (hopefully all the positive) of the fourth industrial revolution as eloquently written by Klaus Scwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.  Looking to the possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, access to knowledge x emerging technological breakthroughs in fields such as AI, robotics, the internet of things, 3D printing, nano technology, bio technology, materials science, energy storage, quantum computing and the vasts amounts of data it unleashes.

And the products and services that focus on efficiency and pleasure in our personal lives - ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film or playing a game.  It’s also a great opportunity for knowledge, learning more about the various cultures and impacts we have on our world, creating entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupting existing industry value chains and systems with new patterns of consumer behaviour.

On the whole, there are four main effects that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has on business—on customer expectations, on product enhancement, on collaborative innovation, and on organizational forms. Whether consumers or businesses, customers are increasingly at the epicenter of the economy, which is all about improving how customers are served. Physical products and services, moreover, can now be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value. New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained. A world of customer experiences, data-based services, and asset performance through analytics, meanwhile, requires new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. And the emergence of global platforms and other new business models, finally, means that talent, culture, and organizational forms will have to be rethought.

For instance, ideas such as:

Bringing together a number of small to medium sized fashion companies to syndicate the purchasing of organic cotton, an enterprise that is usually hamstrung by the fact that, because of the instability inherent in smaller businesses, long-term contracts with producers are often impossible. The group spreads the risk, acting as guarantors to the contract.

More on the Pioneer Mode Conference and the Environmental Challenges Facing the Fashion Industry

Here’s a view of the economic impact of the fashion industry.

Fashion is a $1.2 trillion global industry, with more than $250 billion spent annually on fashion in the United States, according to industry analysts. 1 Fashion and apparel industries employ 1.9 million people in the United States and have a positive impact on regional economies across the country.2 New York City and Los Angeles are the two largest fashion hubs in the United States, with over two-thirds of all fashion designers employed in these cities.3 But they are not the whole story, and cities such as San Francisco, Nashville, and Columbus are beginning to reap economic benefits, including high-paying jobs in fashion design.

Fashion is a structurally diverse industry, ranging from major international retailers to wholesalers to large design houses to one-person design shops. It employs people across occupations—including fashion designers, computer programmers, lawyers, accountants, copywriters, social media directors, and project managers. According to a report by the California Fashion Association, manufacturing is only a fraction of the modern apparel industry as “it is a highly sophisticated industry involving fashion and market research, brand licensing/intellectual property rights, design, materials engineering, product manufacturing, marketing and finally, distribution.

Yet, within these sectors, there is still a significant challenge in finding the right people with the right skill mix to enable successful growth through a phase of major transition and expansion. Executive leaders should apply just as much business knowledge and acumen as creativity, to solve complex organisational and talent management issues

Example leading practices to access and retain talent

 It remains true that the cornerstone of capturing this offline retail demand is still ‘location, location, location’ – but a key enabler for success will be to ensure a consistent cross-channel consumer experience from communication to conversion. The variety of demographic and  in-region nuances (e.g. cities, such as London – or even specific streets within cities – acting as stand-alone demand centres; together with transit and tourism drivers) will be very important if luxury brands are to truly capture growth.

Balancing the physical growth strategy is one of the most important components of success