Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts are busy reminiscing about how they met racing cars and how a conversation at that racing club in their native Perth, Australia, got them to where they are today: a light and spacious studio in the basement of a Hatton Garden office.
Fowler, a fashion designer, was frustrated with the industry: she felt there was a shortfall of factual data and, too often, decision-making was based on “the way the wind was blowing, rather than any real hard solid metrics”, resulting in key commercial opportunities slipping by. Watts was working for a big dairy company at the time: “I said to Julia, ‘This is not how we do things in the dairy industry. We’ve got a lot of metrics … we know how much milk each cow is producing.’”
Using Fowler’s understanding of the fashion world and Watts’s experience as a developer, the couple co-founded Editd, a retail technology company that offers brands not just insights into how the industry is moving, but data to monitor and compare how they and their competitors are performing. If a competitor introduces a product from a brand you care about, an email pings straight into your inbox, says Watts. Stock movements are captured so that retailers have the information they need to “have the right product at the right price at the right time”.
Editd is used mostly by retail buyers, traders and merchandisers – clients include Gap, Asos, Gilt Groupe, Harvey Nichols and Debenhams. Earlier this year Asos, one of Editd’s first customers, attributed a 37% revenue increase in the last quarter of 2013 to its data insights, which helped structure Asos’s pricing competitively.
“I wanted to build a product like this because in my [former] job we would have information about our own products … but we never knew if we were missing out on an opportunity that we’d never tried,” Fowler explains. They moved to the UK in 2007, to London. “We felt that London had more a cutting-edge retail environment,” adds Watts. “If you think about all the value that has been created in fashion, I think London is the Silicon Valley of the world.”
Leaning over the laptop, they demonstrate in a few simple clicks the types of insights their customers glean from using the dashboard, which slices up the data that has been gathered using a combination of web crawlers and information provided by retailers. Adjust a few measures and you have a comparison of how much biker jackets are selling for by retailer, and how yours fares against the average price.
“If you look at retailers now,” says Fowler, “online or in-store they’re having new products delivered every week, almost every day, so the need for having better information about what you’re going to order is huge.”
Production and manufacturing processes have been a big contributor to the change in speedy decisions and fast turnarounds. “Some of our customers can now move from concept to in-store in three weeks,” Fowler says. Watts chips in: “Less than that [sometimes].”
Fowler also points to advances in technology and the uptake in digital as fuelling the need for an abundance of information in order to stay ahead of the market. She references brands that have used “buy-it-now” buttons during live streams of fashion shows and the proliferation of online-only stores. And, she says, “Trends will emerge from someone wearing something cool on Instagram; people will want to copy it [and] people need to bring a product to market instantly to address that demand.”
Editd’s co-founders are flying to the US next week, to begin recruiting staff for their new New York office. Earlier this year, Editd raised $4.4m from Index Ventures and Frog Capital, and their team of 28 is about to recruit four more people. As Watts says, laughing: “It’s getting a bit real.”
