How did you first come up with the idea of the Fashion Tech Forum?

Mira Duma, Karen Harvey, Nasiba AdilovaFounding fashion tech forum was from two kinds of very important pivots, if you will, that I saw both in luxury fashion, retail, and what we call innovation with our core company, Karen Harvey consulting group. Secondly, almost as a result of where my company sits in terms of bringing in talent and helping companies acquire world class talent on both the CEO and director level, I saw a dramatic shift. About three years ago, the calls coming into my company for services were looking very very different. I think in the world where people know that talent, Karen Harvey is not only a powerful and executive creative search practice, but also we have something called brand incubation which is kind of this open floor where you look at ideas as an affiliate member of the CFDA; we’ve always had an open door to designers. Whether they’re emerging designers or established designers, they could come in and ask our advice about all kind of things. Should I launch footwear? Should I hire a president? should I do a collaboration with Target or Kohls? You know all of these things. And then what started to happen is we started getting phone calls from Silicon Valley. Whether it was founders like Michael Preysman from Everlane or whether it was a large BC that was looking for us to find a board of directors for some of their startups doing fashion tech, but they were people who didn’t know the industry. So they wanted to find board members that could help them understand supply chain or retail, any of those things. And then honestly it was one of those “aha!” moments where I started to realize that the tech sector was going to start aggressively pursuing talent from fashion and retail at a very fast pace, I could see it. [Mira Duma, Karen Harvey, Nasiba Adilova via @fashtechforum]
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