Today’s independent and emerging designers are challenged with launching and growing their businesses; expensive operation costs and small profit margins constrain designers’ limited time and resources. Many good designs never make it to production because of these challenges. Enter Inspirare.
Inspirare is a fashion incubator and curated global marketplace that connects talented, emerging designers with savvy fashion customers. Sean Peng, Inspirare’s Founder and CEO, recognized this lack of opportunity for good designs to successfully make it to the marketplace and the exorbitant profit markup of most good designs being swallowed up by traditional stores and decided here was an opportunity to shake things up and inspire designers.
At Inspirare, designers submit their sketches and samples to customer opinion. Customers vote on their favorite garments and judges at Inspirare take high scoring designs and move them forward for production. Inspirare picks up 100% of the production costs, providing an innovative risk-free platform to sell designs and build designers’ brands.
“The Inspirare concept is something I wish I had when I was starting out as a designer,” says Kate Blank, Inspirare’s Fashion Director. “It’s very exciting to be a part of [Inspirare] from the beginning: A platform to launch designers that takes the hard work and risk out and promotes them directly to the consumer.”
Designers have nothing to lose. Following the sale of a garment, Inspirare pays designers a generous ten to twenty percent of the royalties, depending on its popularity.
Recent 2012 Inspirare Design Competition winner Alejandra de Coss adds, “as an emerging designer this is the best thing we can get! All the support, economically, technically, all the exposure and merchandising. I only have to worry about the design!”
Ms. de Coss’s Miss Marble dress captured fans and judges’ whimsy with its creative layered approach to several trends. An evening cocktail number made of a playful digital black and white marble print – it is stunning with its feminine silhouette pronounced by a flirty peplum skirt, against sharp architectural cutouts at the neckline, balanced by a sheer organza soft lace back.
Even designs that do not sell take zero risk and at the very least, designers further develop the business side of their portfolio. 2012 Design Competition judge and Academy of Art Styling Coordinator and freelance Fashion Designer, Flore Morton comments that while there are numerous platforms out there, Inspirare is a “good model that focuses on the success of the designers.”
Designers’ success depends not just on craft, but their ability to collaborate. Through Inspirare, they build relationships, collaborate with fashion merchandising, work with marketing, and public relations.
And ideally designers will continue to work with Inspirare. Alejandra De Coss says, “I can tell you the whole idea of the project seems great to me, and I hope this is not the last collaboration I´ll have with the Inspirare team.”
By the same token, Inspirare consumers can also participate in this value of connection. The sale is not a singular transaction like the traditional store experience, where there are many layers between a designer and consumer. Inspirare’s experience connects consumers with a certain designer or garment, direct communication through forums, and grants them voting power to shape the dialogue, creation, and success of an original piece of art.
In a recent article about the 2012 competition, Inspirare judge Lorraine Sanders of Digital Style Digest highlights this approach as “the latest example of crowd-sourced, crowd-approved fashion coming to the fore.”
This bold new platform provides a unique space for people from all points of the fashion community to intersect and develop relationships as well as shape the art of fashion.
And where better to launch this exciting platform for fashion, technology, social media, and ecommerce than San Francisco. Fashion was once a major industry in SF, and now it’s the hub of tech; Inspirare is the new community for designers and consumers alike to connect and shake up the fashion world.