Finesse Says ‘FashionTech’ Will Disrupt Apparel Industry The Way FinTech Roiled Banks

A three-month-old Los Angeles-based startup is using data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D imaging to take on the traditional fashion industry, by only making clothes that people actually vote to wear — for a fraction of the cost and none of the waste. Finesse.us is the creation of CEO Ramin Ahmari, who characterizes his company as “Fashion 3.0”  or “ Zara meets Netflix,” since it eliminates the traditional catwalk and glamour magazine shoots and replaces them with actual customer feedback and data in a much more environmentally sustainable way.

“The fashion industry touches everyone’s lives in one way or another,” Ahmari said in a recent chat with PYMNTS, “but it’s one that has been largely untouched by any technology, let alone deep technology.” Most people would place fashion and tech at opposite ends of the spectrum — including the legacy industry itself — which is why fashion is an incredibly inefficient and unsustainable industry, he believes.

“There are two trends that we see in this industry: one of them is the emergence of new data, and the other is this consistent inefficiency,” Ahmari explained. “So that’s really what Finesse is all about: using Big Data and AI to figure out how we can get rid of all the inefficiencies that are so inherent in fashion today.”

Even Faster Fashion

“When you look at most fast-fashion houses — or general fashion houses — right now, they produce as much as they can and hope that something will stick and end up selling,” Ahmari said. “That’s an incredibly inefficient business model, because most things actually do not end up selling.” And when they don’t sell, designer goods and branded merchandise can sometimes end up in landfills or incinerators.

Because Finesse creates all of its garments in 3D, it never has to incur the expense, time or waste involved in designing and making physical samples. Ahmaria said his company can do in 25 days what the typical fashion house would take at least five months to complete.

“Both [those things] boost our timeline as well as our sustainable footprint,” he said, which is an equally important selling point to the typical young Finesse customer. “Our audience is very much drawn to us by the sustainability aspect, because they love to ‘look fire,’ but they don’t want to set the world on fire to do that. So that’s one of the main things that draws them to us: They love fashion, but they’re really bothered by how unsustainable fast-fashion is, but they also don’t have the money to go to a Burberry or a Louis Vuitton.”

The Appeal of Being Affordable and Sustainable

Ahmari says he already has “tens of thousands” of users signed up and voting on the new looks that get dropped each week on the site and then go into production. Those consumers are typically digitally native Gen-Zers, 16 to 24 years old. Because of the changing tastes and demands of this demographic, Finesse also strives to make clothes that focus on people other than “white millennial girls,” especially embracing unisex outfits.

“We don’t think clothing should have a gender, and we think that’s also a change that Gen Z is currently undergoing,” said Ahmari. “It’s something we want to support as well, and something I think fashion needs to keep up with.”

Because of the inherent cost savings in the business model, Finesse is able to produce garments that are lower in price yet higher in quality. “People are usually very surprised when they buy from us,” noted Ahmari, referencing the customer feedback he has received.

The Business Model

The potential of Finesse and FashionTech to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar global fashion industry has already caught the eye of the investment community, which has given Ahmari and his team an initial $4.5 million of seed funding to scale the idea, including creating a pre-order function and an interactive app.

“Obviously this is something that is very interesting to investors, because it can fit their thesis of  hopefully becoming a billion-dollar business,” noted Ahmari. “And you can only do that by disrupting a large industry with a very significant significant change.”

As he sees it, Finesse’s process of only making clothes after people have voted and said “I want this” is uniquely positioned to take on the legacy industry, which is producing pretty much the same way it did in the 1960s. “We’re completely upending what fashion looks like today and giving it a complete makeover, and hopefully pushing it into what it should look in the 21st century,” said Ahmari.