Forget San Francisco. When Geoff Watts and Julia Fowler were ready to launch their ambitious fashion intelligence startup they knew straight where to head. And while London often sings the praises of its traditional strengths in the creative industries, there's an even more exciting generation of sites exploring the crossover between creativity and technology.
Five years after the pair moved to London from Australia to found Editd, the startup has just negotiated an impressively cheap deal for a large Old Street office space – and business is starting to boom.
Taking advantage of the largely tech-backward fashion market, Watts and Fowler recognised that forecasting for the industry has mostly been attempted through services that offer expensive, tailored but unscientific trend books or dry, panel-based market research from the likes of Nielsen and MPD.
"It means the industry is making decisions off the back of what are really just guesses," says Watts. "Julia suggested that as I could already do financial modelling and data cubes, and we could crawl the web for information, then why couldn't we do that for the entire fashion world?"
It's an ambitious business, but striking in its boldness and simplicity. Combining Fowler's background as a fashion designer and Watts's experience as a developer, Editd serves up customised industry trend data to clients that include retailers, designers, buyers and merchandisers. Watts describes the service as 85-90% data and 10-15% creative inspiration, but it's the scale of data gathering that lends Editd such authority.
As well as crawling retail sites across the web to gather details on stock, prices and sizes, Editd monitors mentions on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, aggregates data from key catwalk and trade shows and adds a sprinkle of secret sauce that captures public "mind share".
The result is a bespoke dashboard digitising the age-old mood board, also accessible through the Editd iPad app, that serves up detailed reports on anything from knitwear to colour swatches from individual designers' shows, but with the force of thousands of data sources behind it. There's also more than a little editorial potential too in Editd's data, which can power trend lists in everything from pattern of the week (polka dots are still hot in Shoreditch) to retail quirks (high-end fruit prints just aren't selling, while Dorothy Perkins has sold out of cherry).
Retailers have so far been tolerant of Editd crawling their sites for data on styles, prices and stock levels, not least because the data is useful and often differs from their own. One high-street brand asked for a report on their top 20 garments, predicting 1970s prints and maxi skirts – but the results showed tight, bodycon dresses were the biggest sellers.
"It was because it was the first few weeks of summer, and 18 to 30-year-old women were buying dresses on discount for nights out," Watts notes. "The retailer should have adapted their visual merchandising, discounted the 70s stuff instead of the bodycon dresses and made some more money. It's about making a structured decision."
But Editd faces stiff competition. As well as traditional industry market research, extremely profitable online subscription services including WGSN and Stylesight are making big inroads into the lucrative style forecasting sector – a market that could be worth as much as $36bn (£23bn) a year, according to analysts Outsell.
There's also an ultra-cool audience of far higher profile trendspotting blogs and communities, such as Polyvore, Stylehunter and The Sartorialist – all addictive reads for fashion creatives who will claim the instincts and inspirations behind trends are far too delicate for an algorithm to define. At the business end of the industry, however, where buyers are concerned with stock management and competitive online pricing, data is a powerful tool and the more sources there are, the more accurate it becomes.
How does Watts feel about the competition? "Well, if someone builds an online retail storefront tool that aggregates everything and in a really nice way, we might be worried. But at the moment there's no one else doing all three – data, social monitoring and creative. The art is bringing machine-learning together with human editing and taxonomies." If that's not confident enough, Editd's ambitions don't stop at fashion.
"There's room in all sorts of companies for this sort of information and that's the aim for us."
Editd's customer base already includes 10 high street retailers. Price is determined by the size of the client and how much data they need, but prices start at £2,000 per month for a cross-company licence. Watts won't talk about revenues, but it's early days for a company of 10 staff with a fresh seed round of $1.6m (£1m) safely in the bank. Editd was one of 10 winners at the startup beauty parade Seedcamp last year, and its investors include Atlas Ventures, individual investor Alex Zubillaga and Joanne Wilson, wife of high-profile New York investor Fred Wilson and a buyer at Macy's. That investment will be put into "doubling down on data", says Watts, including getting more developers on board.
"We keep doing better than our forecasts and in 12 months we'll have more products and will be showing even more data to the public." Despite the commercial focus of the site, the pair recognise the consumer and editorial interest in fashion trends. Editd's blog picks out some highlights for non-subscribers, but there is significant potential for a wider, public audience. "We're definitely interested in opening our kimono," says Watts with a chuckle.
Jemima Kiss will be visiting other digital media startups in the coming weeks
