Australian tech start-up Flaunter heads to Paris Fashion Week
An Australian technology start-up will be featured at Paris Fashion Week as the silk and sequinned world of haute couture embraces the efficiencies of software.
Flaunter is an web-based app that enables fashion brands and agencies to send print-quality, high-resolution images to journalists and bloggers covering events. It was launched three years ago as the Photo Diner, but has since evolved to include documents and video as well as simply pictures.
It was selected by the Australian Chamber of Fashion to be the official distribution platform for the seven Australian designers heading to Paris Fashion Week, such as Romance Was Born, Camilla and Marc and Ginger & Smart.
It is a breakthrough for its founders Gaby Howard and Nadine von Cohen who have spent the early years of the company convincing fashion houses of the concept before being able to sell the subscription product.
New market
"When we first launched there was nothing like it here. So one of the biggest challenges was the education piece about what exactly we did and why it might be useful. We were trying to sell a concept before we could sell our product," Ms Howard told Fairfax Media.
The pair headed out with printouts of the site and their laptops tucked under their arms to show fairly traditional executives how it would work.
The platform now has more than 200 customers and Ms Howard said they were hoping the appearance at Paris Fashion Week will accelerate growth.
Australia's fashion industry has by and large avoided the interest of the country's growing start-up sector, possibly because the latter is still dominated by rarely shaved, hoodie-wearing men.
There are several rapidly growing fashion apps, such as customisable e-commerce startup Shoes of Prey and shopping organisational ecommerce app Stashd, but these are consumer facing rather than business to business companies.
Business tech in fashion
"Tech platforms within the industry itself are still quite new in Australia but we are hoping we'll catch up," Ms Howard said.
"There are business-to-business companies in asset management and stock tracking, but they're incredibly expensive. We wanted to find a solution emerging houses could use, not just the big ones."
Ms Howard and her team of six are banking on the fact that in an industry powered by images, enabling better and wider sharing of them should be a welcome product.
The Flaunter team will be focused on driving more journalist and blogger sign-ups to the platform as well as opening negotiations with more fashion brands and agencies during the fashionable festivities in Paris over the coming week.
A key part of the newly revised is search functionality for those seeking images, who will now be able to search within the options for a particular type of clothing rather than having to navigate by brand.
Citing the rampant success of the picture-driven social media sites, Instagram and Snapchat and Pinterest, Ms Howard said their potential market was extended beyond Australia's industry to neighbouring nations and beyond.Read more at:www.marieprom.co.uk/yellow-prom-dresses
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