My name is Anne-Christine or AC, and I lead two fashion tech startups called HATCH and STICH. The startups are both born at a fashion company, we were born at PVH. We're currently owned by PVH, but we service brands outside of the PVH family. HATCH is a digital showroom but we're a bit more than that. HATCH was created to digitize the wholesale selling experience and this was all the way back in 2014, and we started with our first brand which was Tommy Hilfiger. We realized when we're digitizing wholesale selling that it's not just you're digitizing one part, you're actually digitizing an appointment experience where a buyer and a seller comes together to buy into a new collection, and that's what HATCH is today. It's a digital way, whether you're physically still in a showroom or if you're in a room meeting, it's a digital way for buyers and sellers to connect, and for brands to be able to see the stories that the brand has to sell that season, to see the collections, and to also go through the proposals that sales has created for the different buyers. I think every company of course thinks that they're unique, but what I think makes HATCH really stand out is that our product was built with and for salespeople. When we were at Tommy, we used the sales team's feedback to build the first very first prototype. All the way back in 2014, back in 2015, people didn't want us, they didn't want anything to do with that. But we kept on getting that feedback and we started building the product to say, "Hey, what if this were to happen, or if we changed the flow like this, would you?" Then slowly but surely, people started suggesting, "Hey, maybe I'll take my buyer through one day" and we're like "Yes please do". We iterated and iterated, and in every country that we rolled out to, all the new feedback that came in, everything was put into HATCH, and we realized that, for sales teams to sell digitally, it was such a change in their way of working, we had to give something back. You can't just say, "I'm going to digitize what you do, I'm going to take away all your samples and you still need to be successful". That's a no go, because then everyone will resist it. We built HATCH really with that focus on sales teams, how do we make them successful in a digital appointment, and what do sales teams need to find the confidence to sell with reduced samples? It turns out that it's a lot about, obviously a software product that is intuitive and it's easy to use and it's visual, but it's also about having the right content. It's about making it easy to sell, it's about being able to share presentations and assortments with others and to collaborate. All of that we realized by working with all the different teams at Tommy and of Calvin afterwards, and that was all fed into the products, so that's what I think makes HATCH really truly unique because it's really built for and with salespeople. It's built to tell stories and to connect, and to have a buyer and seller be there whether physically or digitally, but to connect and really build relationships and that's really what we're after. It's quite unique to see a fashion tech startup being spun out of an existing fashion business like this. When we started with the digital showroom we never imagined that we would be here in this space, but we're really lucky that we had some great momentum. The success that the digital showroom had, it went across Tommy, it went across Calvin, and at some point there were a lot of other brands coming in and asking to have a demo of the showrooms and saying, "Wow, you guys, you came so far. Can we not leverage your technology? Could we potentially buy it?" Tommy, the brand itself at its core, has an entrepreneurial mindset as one of the values. We really honed in on that and we saw there might be in real opportunity in the market to make a difference, because if everyone could transition to wholesale selling in a digital way, then that would mean huge amount of samples that get reduced, that don't need to be even produced anymore. That would be mean efficiency also in traveling if you're doing your sales remotely, so there's so many benefits of being able to sell digitally that as if we as an industry move, everyone gets a better deal out of it, it's like one plus one is three. We were able to convince, a nice thing, it's almost magic, but we were able to convince PVH to let us try and build a startup, like let us try to really package our products and our services in a way that we can engage with other brands, and we got the go. In 2020, just before COVID we went onto the market and we're like full of confidence, ready to go, but then obviously COVID hit and every single showroom in the world closed. Our product was still built to digitize that physical space so also we had to go through this enormous pivot to think, "oh, what is the future for us all going to be now in this new world?" Being independent, it allowed us to see the problem space from so much wider perspective, that has made our products a lot stronger. That's really what's also justified this, not just from a commercial point of view with the new customers that we have coming in, but also our product is becoming better and stronger every single day because we get to talk to more brands, and more seals users and that all feeds back into our product. I think now that we've gone through COVID the way that we have, there's hope and there's reality. My hope, is that this has been a real awakening for the fashion industry and that the brands are seeing that they can do things differently and they have to do things differently and their value chain and supply chain needs to be organized in a way that is more flexible, more resilient and more digital so less physical need. I think because of that, what I believe in, what we believe in in our teams at HATCH and STICH is that the future value chain for fashion is digital and for that value chain to have almost like a synergetic effect every step of the way, it needs to have 3D at the core. Because if you're already designing in 3D, you're iterating your products, you're testing, you're doing fits, you're doing everything already in 3D, you reduce the amount of physical protos that you need, but you do 3D also in such a way and you do it really well and beautifully rendered, that those assets, you can use it every step of the way. You could sell immediately in wholesale in B2B from digital samples. You don't even have to produce these samples. You could even go straight onto e-commerce and replace your pack shots for example with these 3D samples, and that's just the beginning. A lot of brands are already making huge strides but what you see, it's still very ad hoc. Not everyone has tackled this fully digital value chain yet but I think it's the best opportunity. I think what would help brands to speed up is, there's a tendency which I think is very human tendency to want to boil the ocean. If we digitize something, it has to be end to end immediately, and we're not going to be happy until it's fully done. Then also we're going to design it for a really long time, and only if it's perfect then we would launch it. I think we have to almost go against our nature, and start making it really small and look at where can we achieve value and where do we have problems and how can we tackle and capsulate one problem, and solve it in a digital way? If that's a success, how do we build on that success, and how do we keep that momentum going? It seems really easy, but it's really hard because it goes against a lot of even top-down bottom-up, it's really hard to start doing it in that way, but it is the way to do it. It's test, learn, try and try again, until you really start seeing what that value is and being focused on the problem and not necessarily on the technology. That's also something that probably a lot of industries but the fashion industry also does it really well, is we love beautiful things, we love a good story, we love when it looks amazing, but doesn't really solve a problem.
