Style Miroslava Duma Style Thread
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is her buro blog that successful? i always liked her style but not anymore!i ve noticed that too. She used to be BFF with Natasha from childhood as I understood but they split and she became part of a Russian mafia gang and now she has a new friend Gabriela Hearst.
I have this nagging thought when it comes to her that she is a bad friend, I mean she is your friend just as long as you re useful to her. She controls her social circle. When she was with NG she was so interesting and all smiling and she became famous for that, then she started to wear all these expensive clothes due to her Russian crew membership and her at that time growing Buro blog. Now she makes friends in the West with more important or accomplished people than the previous ones and pursuing her I-am-busy-and-smart-*****-so-take-me-seriously
I guess social climbers don't have real friends
Miroslava Duma’s new industrial revolution
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Miroslava Duma, a 32-year-old Russian entrepreneur with a low, earnest voice and an even lower elevation (she just pips 5ft in her Nikes), is describing some of the technological innovations that she says will bring about the “fourth industrial revolution”. New fabrics made from orange peel, including a silk of “Hermes quality” fabricated from the waste pulps of the world’s biggest juice manufacturers; lab-mined diamonds, grown under carbon heat to be technically identical to the real thing but which can grow up to “16 carats in two weeks”. Then there’s the fabric made with milk protein, “which feels like the best cashmere, is 100 per cent breathable, and keeps moisturising your body while you’re wearing it”.
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The idea of such technologies combining to produce some of the world’s most intelligent and luxurious materials may sound like the product of some far distant utopia. In fact, many of them are already here. Last month, the Italian luxury house Salvatore Ferragamo launched a capsule range of pretty print scarves and dresses made in collaboration with Orange Fiber (the peel-recycling company), using a silk-mix manufactured in large part from the recycled fruit. The lab-mined Diamond Foundry has already raised $100m in investment, and piqued the interest of environmental celebrity crusader Leonardo DiCaprio and a sparkle of fine jewellery houses.
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Both companies fall within the portfolio of Duma’s latest enterprise, Fashion Tech Lab (FTL Ventures), launched this week at the Financial Times’ Business of Luxury Summit in Lisbon. A private company working with 1,000 technologies to transform the industry’s attitudes towards manufacturing, it has already secured $50m in investment and an advisory board that includes designer Diane von Furstenberg and e-commerce investor Carmen Busquets. Duma, who is both founder and chief executive, describes FTL as “a hybrid between venture capital funds and groundbreaking discovery”. Wearable technology is nothing new. We are now familiar with the idea of sportswear embedded with the microchips that read our heart rates, or biometric shoes that tell us to stop watching television. But the trouble with wearable tech is that it is too often unwearably ugly. Even the Apple Watch, with its peerless design pedigree, failed to really launch among the fashion cognoscenti who, while increasingly irrelevant, still have some sway in a luxury item’s success. With FTL Ventures, Duma hopes to bridge the gap between the tech innovators who have the means, and the brand creatives who have the design nous, to create really desirable new products.
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FTL’s purpose has “three pillars”, she says. The first is as an investment arm, where it sources engineers and scientists working in bio-, nano- and smart technology across the world and helps them raise funds. The second is as an agency “hooking up these technologies and bringing them extremely close to the $2.4 trillion industry of fashion” in which Duma is immersed. And the third is creative. FTL is developing its own products and collaborating with other brands in an “experimental laboratory” that is being steered by a newly appointed chief innovation officer, the fashion technologist and wearable tech designer Amanda Parkes. Duma plans to unveil a first showing of “beautifully minimalistic and modern designs” later this autumn. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this global sci-fi fashion forum, however, is not the band of scientific innovators being cultivated under its umbrella, but the figure of Duma herself. Until last year, “Mira” was best known as a chic fashion plate, a favourite of street-style photographers and the founder of Buro247.com, a luxury fashion and lifestyle website launched in 2011 to help brands penetrate fast-developing new markets in, among other places, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mexico and the Middle East. The company, which combines editorial features, native advertising, and events, now has 11 international outposts with a further 11 in the pipeline, and Duma enjoys an enviably close relationship with all the main luxury brands.
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As an industry figurehead, she has come to be regarded as a powerful force of persuasive charm, business-like intensity and ruthless efficiency: I once took a meeting with her in New York that lasted only the distance it took to travel two blocks in the back of her chauffeur-driven car. But her new guise as a tech revolutionary has still come as a surprise to many in the fashion world, and been a fascinating metamorphosis. Now, her 1.6m Instagram followers are as likely to see her hanging out at the Tesla headquarters, or watching real fur being cultivated via stem-cell technology in a laboratory in Asia, as they are to see her marching between the fashion shows. Her wardrobe has seen a similar transformation: today, she wears her Balenciaga suits with a Google T-shirt, sneakers and an Ivy League hoodie. For Duma, who is six months pregnant with her third child, and in the middle of an itinerary that has seen her travel to Lisbon, Stockholm, London and Silicon Valley in just a few days, the interest in sustainable industry is far from recent. “I was born in Siberia,” she explains over tea at the Connaught Hotel in London. “It’s not just the coldest area of Russia, but also the wealthiest area for oil, gas and natural resources. I grew up with the idea that there was nothing worse for planet earth than the oil industry.”
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Miroslava Duma, a 32-year-old Russian entrepreneur with a low, earnest voice and an even lower elevation (she just pips 5ft in her Nikes), is describing some of the technological innovations that she says will bring about the “fourth industrial revolution”. New fabrics made from orange peel, including a silk of “Hermes quality” fabricated from the waste pulps of the world’s biggest juice manufacturers; lab-mined diamonds, grown under carbon heat to be technically identical to the real thing but which can grow up to “16 carats in two weeks”. Then there’s the fabric made with milk protein, “which feels like the best cashmere, is 100 per cent breathable, and keeps moisturising your body while you’re wearing it”.
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https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
The idea of such technologies combining to produce some of the world’s most intelligent and luxurious materials may sound like the product of some far distant utopia. In fact, many of them are already here. Last month, the Italian luxury house Salvatore Ferragamo launched a capsule range of pretty print scarves and dresses made in collaboration with Orange Fiber (the peel-recycling company), using a silk-mix manufactured in large part from the recycled fruit. The lab-mined Diamond Foundry has already raised $100m in investment, and piqued the interest of environmental celebrity crusader Leonardo DiCaprio and a sparkle of fine jewellery houses.
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Both companies fall within the portfolio of Duma’s latest enterprise, Fashion Tech Lab (FTL Ventures), launched this week at the Financial Times’ Business of Luxury Summit in Lisbon. A private company working with 1,000 technologies to transform the industry’s attitudes towards manufacturing, it has already secured $50m in investment and an advisory board that includes designer Diane von Furstenberg and e-commerce investor Carmen Busquets. Duma, who is both founder and chief executive, describes FTL as “a hybrid between venture capital funds and groundbreaking discovery”. Wearable technology is nothing new. We are now familiar with the idea of sportswear embedded with the microchips that read our heart rates, or biometric shoes that tell us to stop watching television. But the trouble with wearable tech is that it is too often unwearably ugly. Even the Apple Watch, with its peerless design pedigree, failed to really launch among the fashion cognoscenti who, while increasingly irrelevant, still have some sway in a luxury item’s success. With FTL Ventures, Duma hopes to bridge the gap between the tech innovators who have the means, and the brand creatives who have the design nous, to create really desirable new products.
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FTL’s purpose has “three pillars”, she says. The first is as an investment arm, where it sources engineers and scientists working in bio-, nano- and smart technology across the world and helps them raise funds. The second is as an agency “hooking up these technologies and bringing them extremely close to the $2.4 trillion industry of fashion” in which Duma is immersed. And the third is creative. FTL is developing its own products and collaborating with other brands in an “experimental laboratory” that is being steered by a newly appointed chief innovation officer, the fashion technologist and wearable tech designer Amanda Parkes. Duma plans to unveil a first showing of “beautifully minimalistic and modern designs” later this autumn. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this global sci-fi fashion forum, however, is not the band of scientific innovators being cultivated under its umbrella, but the figure of Duma herself. Until last year, “Mira” was best known as a chic fashion plate, a favourite of street-style photographers and the founder of Buro247.com, a luxury fashion and lifestyle website launched in 2011 to help brands penetrate fast-developing new markets in, among other places, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mexico and the Middle East. The company, which combines editorial features, native advertising, and events, now has 11 international outposts with a further 11 in the pipeline, and Duma enjoys an enviably close relationship with all the main luxury brands.
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As an industry figurehead, she has come to be regarded as a powerful force of persuasive charm, business-like intensity and ruthless efficiency: I once took a meeting with her in New York that lasted only the distance it took to travel two blocks in the back of her chauffeur-driven car. But her new guise as a tech revolutionary has still come as a surprise to many in the fashion world, and been a fascinating metamorphosis. Now, her 1.6m Instagram followers are as likely to see her hanging out at the Tesla headquarters, or watching real fur being cultivated via stem-cell technology in a laboratory in Asia, as they are to see her marching between the fashion shows. Her wardrobe has seen a similar transformation: today, she wears her Balenciaga suits with a Google T-shirt, sneakers and an Ivy League hoodie. For Duma, who is six months pregnant with her third child, and in the middle of an itinerary that has seen her travel to Lisbon, Stockholm, London and Silicon Valley in just a few days, the interest in sustainable industry is far from recent. “I was born in Siberia,” she explains over tea at the Connaught Hotel in London. “It’s not just the coldest area of Russia, but also the wealthiest area for oil, gas and natural resources. I grew up with the idea that there was nothing worse for planet earth than the oil industry.”
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It was a chastening discovery for her, then, to realise that the fashion world in which she found herself working had almost as gruesome a footprint. According to a 2016 report by Greenpeace International, the global fashion industry produces more than 80bn pieces of clothing each year. Three of every four garments end up in landfill — only a quarter of clothes are recycled. And that’s before you consider the 60bn sq metres of waste fabric that gets left on the cutting room floor. Or the 7,000 litres of water it requires to produce the average pair of jeans, of which there are 2bn pairs made each year. Or the tons of chemicals used to dye them. “The discovery that the fashion and apparel industry — one I felt so blessed to be in because it was such a beautiful, creative and positive industry in terms of aesthetics and the pleasures it gave — was the second-largest polluter after the oil industry, was really a shock,” Duma explains. “I remember it was one of the shows, maybe two years ago. I’d just had my second daughter and I was looking at another collection, and looking at the people there whose facial expressions suggest they think they are saving people’s lives. And I thought, ‘What am I doing here? Am I really creating anything that can help anyone?’ It just didn’t really make sense for me any more. I thought, at the end of the day, I’d rather stay at home with my kids and learn Chinese. I wasn’t doing anything great with my life.” She is briefly interrupted by a personal call, but then she’s back to business. For someone with such a familiar public profile, she keeps the details of her private life close. She got married in 2005 to fellow entrepreneur Aleksey Mikheev, whom she met while studying economics and international relations in Moscow. But he remains as curiously anonymous as she is well-known, and Duma refuses to confirm any details about him.Duma’s growing dispassion about the fashion world was soon supplanted by her new love of tech. And she fell hard. Her introduction to its notoriously closed society happened through old-fashioned networking. Armed with a sense of purpose that seems uniquely Russian in its determination, she decided to put her contacts book to good use. “I was already very much into that world through a lot of my really great friends [such as Rachna Bhasin, chief business officer at Magic Leap and Ian Rogers, formerly of Apple and now chief digital officer at LVMH],” she explains. “And they took me to all these different laboratories where they were really creating things that can help environments, planets, people. I had this chance to get in and to meet these scientists and although I thought I would be speaking an entirely different language I realised it was the same.”Her mission has now become clear. She wants to bring the worlds of luxury and technology together. But how far do they want to be entwined? Very much so, she insists. Consumer priorities are changing and the industry needs to prepare. “Kids are not ready to spend money on luxury,” she says. “They would rather go to a restaurant and spend really good money on really good food. It’s an experiential thing. But that’s what I’m talking about with this clothing: it’s about storytelling, it’s an emotional thing. When you wear a T-shirt made of recycled orange peel, you know the story behind it.” Her intention, of course, is to bring yet more product to the market — and very expensive product at that (the prices will reach into the thousands), but she shrugs off the cost. “There will be things that will be super-expensive,” she says, “but if you think a designer hoodie sells for 800 bucks, and it is basically made from the same fabrics as the hoodie I’m wearing currently, which is worth 20 bucks and does nothing, it makes sense.” The new product will stand out, she argues, because it is innovative, because it is beautiful, and because it will provide a solution. “It has to be innovative. And it can’t be gimmicky. It’s not about a backpack that has an embedded light in, which looks fun, but is unexciting. It has to solve the problems of customers and be technologically advanced.”
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Like what? “Like a T-shirt embedded with a silver yarn that has such strong antimicrobial properties you can wear them up to 20 times,” she says, “And it will have zero bad smell. Which is great for students who don’t like to launder, and even greater for the environment.” Or, she adds, another company which is developing a similarly antimicrobial fabric infused with peppermint oil, because it’s even more sustainable than silver. “What we’re talking about is wearable tech: algorithms and microscopics embedded in fibres and fabrics that can solve a lot of the problems the iPhone does. In the future you will wear the technology, and it will do the same things for you.” The market is there for the taking. A World Economic Forum report published in 2015 claimed that 10 per cent of the world’s population will be wearing clothes connected to the internet by 2022. “Imagine?,” says Duma. “Ten per cent of 7.5bn people.” Even so, convincing a business still captivated by the narrative of the artisan and traditional craftsman-based manufacture isn’t easy. The luxury goods market is built on the pursuit of the unique: can it be persuaded that a lab-mined diamond is as good as the real thing? And will sustainable, wearable tech ever be sexy?“It can, it is, and it will become even more so,” says Duma, who targeted luxury not only because it was where her contacts are, but also because she believes that with their support and investment the high street will follow. “There are always going to be people who are for progress and evolution and people who are against it because they are part of that old world,” says Duma. She seizes on the cautionary tale of Kodak. At its 20th century peak, the company was said to have produced up to 90 per cent of the world’s photo paper but five years ago it went bankrupt “when the business model disappeared... because everyone made pictures on their iPhones”.
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https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
If brands want to survive the coming revolution, she says, they need to start adapting. “The world does not need as many brands and designers. And I feel sorry because there are such incredibly talented people around, but every year around 24,000 students graduate in design, and every single one of them wants to become a catwalk-designer-slash-diva. And it doesn’t really work like that any more.” She points to the example of Google, where an in-house start-up called Niantic focused on how location services could work in gaming eventually spawned Pokémon Go. “They were able to scan the planet with Google Earth, but the only thing they could not do was get inside people’s houses. Then the kids playing Pokémon Go just let them in and they could map everything in the house.” Duma’s point, it turns out, is that if brands don’t invest in tech, they will lose out on the data that will ultimately become their greatest asset. The luxury market, as with all markets, stands to gain as much from the information it gathers as its clients will gain from its “problem-solving” products. In this new world order, where everyone can be a content provider, he who has the biggest database is king, especially when that king is swathed in cashmere-soft milk protein materials. “In the tech world if you are working on data-mining, the evaluation of your company is multiplied by 100.” The fashion world still lags behind. Wearable tech won’t just be sexy, says Duma, it will bring the power back to the brand. “It’s win, win win”, she grins.
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https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
Jo Ellison is the FT’s fashion editor
Copyright
The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
It was a chastening discovery for her, then, to realise that the fashion world in which she found herself working had almost as gruesome a footprint. According to a 2016 report by Greenpeace International, the global fashion industry produces more than 80bn pieces of clothing each year. Three of every four garments end up in landfill — only a quarter of clothes are recycled. And that’s before you consider the 60bn sq metres of waste fabric that gets left on the cutting room floor. Or the 7,000 litres of water it requires to produce the average pair of jeans, of which there are 2bn pairs made each year. Or the tons of chemicals used to dye them. “The discovery that the fashion and apparel industry — one I felt so blessed to be in because it was such a beautiful, creative and positive industry in terms of aesthetics and the pleasures it gave — was the second-largest polluter after the oil industry, was really a shock,” Duma explains. “I remember it was one of the shows, maybe two years ago. I’d just had my second daughter and I was looking at another collection, and looking at the people there whose facial expressions suggest they think they are saving people’s lives. And I thought, ‘What am I doing here? Am I really creating anything that can help anyone?’ It just didn’t really make sense for me any more. I thought, at the end of the day, I’d rather stay at home with my kids and learn Chinese. I wasn’t doing anything great with my life.” She is briefly interrupted by a personal call, but then she’s back to business. For someone with such a familiar public profile, she keeps the details of her private life close. She got married in 2005 to fellow entrepreneur Aleksey Mikheev, whom she met while studying economics and international relations in Moscow. But he remains as curiously anonymous as she is well-known, and Duma refuses to confirm any details about him.Duma’s growing dispassion about the fashion world was soon supplanted by her new love of tech. And she fell hard. Her introduction to its notoriously closed society happened through old-fashioned networking. Armed with a sense of purpose that seems uniquely Russian in its determination, she decided to put her contacts book to good use. “I was already very much into that world through a lot of my really great friends [such as Rachna Bhasin, chief business officer at Magic Leap and Ian Rogers, formerly of Apple and now chief digital officer at LVMH],” she explains. “And they took me to all these different laboratories where they were really creating things that can help environments, planets, people. I had this chance to get in and to meet these scientists and although I thought I would be speaking an entirely different language I realised it was the same.”Her mission has now become clear. She wants to bring the worlds of luxury and technology together. But how far do they want to be entwined? Very much so, she insists. Consumer priorities are changing and the industry needs to prepare. “Kids are not ready to spend money on luxury,” she says. “They would rather go to a restaurant and spend really good money on really good food. It’s an experiential thing. But that’s what I’m talking about with this clothing: it’s about storytelling, it’s an emotional thing. When you wear a T-shirt made of recycled orange peel, you know the story behind it.” Her intention, of course, is to bring yet more product to the market — and very expensive product at that (the prices will reach into the thousands), but she shrugs off the cost. “There will be things that will be super-expensive,” she says, “but if you think a designer hoodie sells for 800 bucks, and it is basically made from the same fabrics as the hoodie I’m wearing currently, which is worth 20 bucks and does nothing, it makes sense.” The new product will stand out, she argues, because it is innovative, because it is beautiful, and because it will provide a solution. “It has to be innovative. And it can’t be gimmicky. It’s not about a backpack that has an embedded light in, which looks fun, but is unexciting. It has to solve the problems of customers and be technologically advanced.”
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https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
Like what? “Like a T-shirt embedded with a silver yarn that has such strong antimicrobial properties you can wear them up to 20 times,” she says, “And it will have zero bad smell. Which is great for students who don’t like to launder, and even greater for the environment.” Or, she adds, another company which is developing a similarly antimicrobial fabric infused with peppermint oil, because it’s even more sustainable than silver. “What we’re talking about is wearable tech: algorithms and microscopics embedded in fibres and fabrics that can solve a lot of the problems the iPhone does. In the future you will wear the technology, and it will do the same things for you.” The market is there for the taking. A World Economic Forum report published in 2015 claimed that 10 per cent of the world’s population will be wearing clothes connected to the internet by 2022. “Imagine?,” says Duma. “Ten per cent of 7.5bn people.” Even so, convincing a business still captivated by the narrative of the artisan and traditional craftsman-based manufacture isn’t easy. The luxury goods market is built on the pursuit of the unique: can it be persuaded that a lab-mined diamond is as good as the real thing? And will sustainable, wearable tech ever be sexy?“It can, it is, and it will become even more so,” says Duma, who targeted luxury not only because it was where her contacts are, but also because she believes that with their support and investment the high street will follow. “There are always going to be people who are for progress and evolution and people who are against it because they are part of that old world,” says Duma. She seizes on the cautionary tale of Kodak. At its 20th century peak, the company was said to have produced up to 90 per cent of the world’s photo paper but five years ago it went bankrupt “when the business model disappeared... because everyone made pictures on their iPhones”.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights.
https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
If brands want to survive the coming revolution, she says, they need to start adapting. “The world does not need as many brands and designers. And I feel sorry because there are such incredibly talented people around, but every year around 24,000 students graduate in design, and every single one of them wants to become a catwalk-designer-slash-diva. And it doesn’t really work like that any more.” She points to the example of Google, where an in-house start-up called Niantic focused on how location services could work in gaming eventually spawned Pokémon Go. “They were able to scan the planet with Google Earth, but the only thing they could not do was get inside people’s houses. Then the kids playing Pokémon Go just let them in and they could map everything in the house.” Duma’s point, it turns out, is that if brands don’t invest in tech, they will lose out on the data that will ultimately become their greatest asset. The luxury market, as with all markets, stands to gain as much from the information it gathers as its clients will gain from its “problem-solving” products. In this new world order, where everyone can be a content provider, he who has the biggest database is king, especially when that king is swathed in cashmere-soft milk protein materials. “In the tech world if you are working on data-mining, the evaluation of your company is multiplied by 100.” The fashion world still lags behind. Wearable tech won’t just be sexy, says Duma, it will bring the power back to the brand. “It’s win, win win”, she grins.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights.
https://www.ft.com/content/d20b61ea-3954-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
Jo Ellison is the FT’s fashion editor
Copyright
The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Miroslava Duma Launches Fashion Tech Lab with $50 Million to Invest
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By Robb Young and Limei Hoang May 12, 2017 05:28
The founder of Buro 24/7 is setting up a hybrid venture that is part investment fund, accelerator and experimental laboratory to commercialise new technologies and sustainable innovation for the fashion industry.
LONDON, United Kingdom — BoF can exclusively reveal that Miroslava Duma has launched a new venture that funds, connects and develops cutting-edge technologies and sustainable innovation with the aim of transforming the fashion industry. Investment targets will focus on the fields of materials science, biotech, nanotechnology, wearable electronics and high–performance fibres and fabrics.
The new company, Fashion Tech Lab (FTL), forms part of Duma’s rapidly expanding empire which includes Russia-based fashion and lifestyle digital platform Buro 24/7, currently published in 11 international editions, and The Tot, a US-based online shop for mothers and their children, adding yet another layer to her many business interests that span across fashion, media and technology.
The decision to set up FTL follows Duma’s previous investments in tech- and sustainability-focused fashion companies such as ethical fashion brand Reformation, Finery, an online wardrobe-operating system, and RewardStyle, a monetisation service for fashion influencers.
“Millennials and Gen Z, those are the ones who demand sustainability in every single area of their lives,” Duma told BoF, who added that part of her decision to set up FTL was driven by a personal quest to find environmental and sustainable solutions for the fashion industry, something she feels passionately about.
“The fashion and apparel industry is the second-largest polluter in the world… I was shocked [when I found out] and started to think what we could actually do about it,” she continued. “It really had a huge impact on me. And having two kids at home, I was also looking at what I was doing, and I thought: Am I really helping anyone? Am I really making a change?”
The result was FTL, which is split into three arms. “What we are doing, first of all, is socially responsible investing. Then we are connecting technologies with the fashion industry, and third we have an experimental lab, which develops the technology [and applies it to] products or garments that will be innovative and solve customers’ problems – but at the same time will have modern design.”
FTL is what Duma calls a hybrid of a venture capital fund, accelerator and an experimental laboratory, where companies can receive funding, meet with those in the industry and experiment with the latest technologies to accelerate the fashion industries’ efforts to be more innovative and sustainable.
The company’s investment arm has secured at least $50 million to invest in sustainable companies like Diamond Foundry and Orange Fiber, both of which are looking at ways to create sustainable materials that the fashion industry can use like man-made diamonds and fabrics made from orange peelings. FTL has also invested in a start-up based in San Francisco exploring the production of lab-growth leathers.
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Last month, Orange Fiber announced a capsule collaboration with Italian fashion house Ferragamo made with fabric from repurposed orange. “It’s anything from dresses to scarves,” said Duma, who launched into great detail about the benefits of the recycled fabric. “It’s a zero-waste situation, no chemicals on your body, no pesticides … With Orange Fiber, the funny thing is they work with the biggest juice producing companies in Italy, so they get that garbage for free. It’s a win-win situation.
“The future of our industry is the garments that will solve customers’ problems,” she continued. “If you think of basically what’s happening in the world and all those amazing companies like Uber, AirBnB, Amazon and many others … it’s because those platforms’ algorithms are solving people’s problems everyday.
"Some of the scientists and engineers we work with at FTL have been hidden away in these venerable institutes and specialist laboratories for decades so their innovations were available exclusively for the defence and space industries -- until now."
FTL is a privately-owned company that generates funding from private and institutional investors and has people like fashion-tech entrepreneur Carmen Busquets, fashion designer and CFDA chairwoman Diane Von Furstenberg and Livia Firth, eco-fashion activist and founder of EcoAge on its advisory board. It has access to a pipeline of more than 1,000 technologies that include wearable electronics, materials science innovations and high-performance fibres and fabrics, around 50 of which it currently plans to invest in.
So far, Duma has built up a team of 15 people, split between five countries including Russia, China, Britain, Italy and the United States. FTL has named Amanda Parkes, a fashion technologist with more than 12 years experience in wearable technology, interaction design, smart materials and fashion innovation, as its chief innovation officer.
“FTL Ventures will fill a void in the current landscape of fashion technology funding and product development,” Parkes told BoF. “Our focus will be on enabling technologies for the future of fashion… There are so many amazing scientific advances being developed in labs and small companies across the globe that can have a transformative effect across all parts of the fashion chain.
“We are convinced that technology does not have to be at odds with sustainability. In fact, quite the opposite — science should be seen as a tool and resource to help transform fashion into a truly 21st century industry,” she added.
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Late last year, Duma travelled across the United States, where she met with executives at tech companies including Google, Facebook and Snapchat, to soak up the lessons from its tech sector to apply them to her own portfolio of businesses.
One of Duma’s 2016 projects was the Buro Tech Forward Initiative (BTFI) which is a partnership between the Russian edition of Buro 24/7, Global Venture Alliance, Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund and the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, often dubbed the Silicon Valley of Russia. The initiative supports young tech and innovation specialists to secure investment and realise their digital initiatives in Russia.
Unlike BTFI, the newly launched FTL has a global remit and is a completely independent venture of Duma’s. The agency division of FTL is aimed at helping companies in the global fashion industry like LVMH and Kering to connect with engineers and scientists developing cutting-edge technologies and to integrate these new innovations into the product offer.
“The most important thing for us is to actually get in, get started, and make the industry embrace and collaborate with people in that world. Our main goal is to try and bring those innovations out of laboratories and into to market,” said Duma, who just spoke at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit on investing in sustainable growth.
FTL’s launch was welcomed by Carole Collet, professor at Central St Martins (CSM) and newly appointed director to lead the CSM LVMH Sustainable Innovation programme announced earlier this month.
“There are a number of great recent and new initiatives in this field, and I am glad to see that we are finally gaining a global momentum to transition towards a more sustainable and smart economy,” Collet told BoF.
“Creating and financing opportunities to interface emerging technologies with entrepreneurship and fashion design can be a catalyst for sustainable innovation, but only if sustainability is at the core of the business ambition; it cannot be added as a plug in, or an afterthought,” she added.
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By Robb Young and Limei Hoang May 12, 2017 05:28
The founder of Buro 24/7 is setting up a hybrid venture that is part investment fund, accelerator and experimental laboratory to commercialise new technologies and sustainable innovation for the fashion industry.
LONDON, United Kingdom — BoF can exclusively reveal that Miroslava Duma has launched a new venture that funds, connects and develops cutting-edge technologies and sustainable innovation with the aim of transforming the fashion industry. Investment targets will focus on the fields of materials science, biotech, nanotechnology, wearable electronics and high–performance fibres and fabrics.
The new company, Fashion Tech Lab (FTL), forms part of Duma’s rapidly expanding empire which includes Russia-based fashion and lifestyle digital platform Buro 24/7, currently published in 11 international editions, and The Tot, a US-based online shop for mothers and their children, adding yet another layer to her many business interests that span across fashion, media and technology.
The decision to set up FTL follows Duma’s previous investments in tech- and sustainability-focused fashion companies such as ethical fashion brand Reformation, Finery, an online wardrobe-operating system, and RewardStyle, a monetisation service for fashion influencers.
“Millennials and Gen Z, those are the ones who demand sustainability in every single area of their lives,” Duma told BoF, who added that part of her decision to set up FTL was driven by a personal quest to find environmental and sustainable solutions for the fashion industry, something she feels passionately about.
“The fashion and apparel industry is the second-largest polluter in the world… I was shocked [when I found out] and started to think what we could actually do about it,” she continued. “It really had a huge impact on me. And having two kids at home, I was also looking at what I was doing, and I thought: Am I really helping anyone? Am I really making a change?”
The result was FTL, which is split into three arms. “What we are doing, first of all, is socially responsible investing. Then we are connecting technologies with the fashion industry, and third we have an experimental lab, which develops the technology [and applies it to] products or garments that will be innovative and solve customers’ problems – but at the same time will have modern design.”
FTL is what Duma calls a hybrid of a venture capital fund, accelerator and an experimental laboratory, where companies can receive funding, meet with those in the industry and experiment with the latest technologies to accelerate the fashion industries’ efforts to be more innovative and sustainable.
The company’s investment arm has secured at least $50 million to invest in sustainable companies like Diamond Foundry and Orange Fiber, both of which are looking at ways to create sustainable materials that the fashion industry can use like man-made diamonds and fabrics made from orange peelings. FTL has also invested in a start-up based in San Francisco exploring the production of lab-growth leathers.
advertising
Last month, Orange Fiber announced a capsule collaboration with Italian fashion house Ferragamo made with fabric from repurposed orange. “It’s anything from dresses to scarves,” said Duma, who launched into great detail about the benefits of the recycled fabric. “It’s a zero-waste situation, no chemicals on your body, no pesticides … With Orange Fiber, the funny thing is they work with the biggest juice producing companies in Italy, so they get that garbage for free. It’s a win-win situation.
“The future of our industry is the garments that will solve customers’ problems,” she continued. “If you think of basically what’s happening in the world and all those amazing companies like Uber, AirBnB, Amazon and many others … it’s because those platforms’ algorithms are solving people’s problems everyday.
"Some of the scientists and engineers we work with at FTL have been hidden away in these venerable institutes and specialist laboratories for decades so their innovations were available exclusively for the defence and space industries -- until now."
FTL is a privately-owned company that generates funding from private and institutional investors and has people like fashion-tech entrepreneur Carmen Busquets, fashion designer and CFDA chairwoman Diane Von Furstenberg and Livia Firth, eco-fashion activist and founder of EcoAge on its advisory board. It has access to a pipeline of more than 1,000 technologies that include wearable electronics, materials science innovations and high-performance fibres and fabrics, around 50 of which it currently plans to invest in.
So far, Duma has built up a team of 15 people, split between five countries including Russia, China, Britain, Italy and the United States. FTL has named Amanda Parkes, a fashion technologist with more than 12 years experience in wearable technology, interaction design, smart materials and fashion innovation, as its chief innovation officer.
“FTL Ventures will fill a void in the current landscape of fashion technology funding and product development,” Parkes told BoF. “Our focus will be on enabling technologies for the future of fashion… There are so many amazing scientific advances being developed in labs and small companies across the globe that can have a transformative effect across all parts of the fashion chain.
“We are convinced that technology does not have to be at odds with sustainability. In fact, quite the opposite — science should be seen as a tool and resource to help transform fashion into a truly 21st century industry,” she added.
advertising
Late last year, Duma travelled across the United States, where she met with executives at tech companies including Google, Facebook and Snapchat, to soak up the lessons from its tech sector to apply them to her own portfolio of businesses.
One of Duma’s 2016 projects was the Buro Tech Forward Initiative (BTFI) which is a partnership between the Russian edition of Buro 24/7, Global Venture Alliance, Russia’s Internet Initiatives Development Fund and the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, often dubbed the Silicon Valley of Russia. The initiative supports young tech and innovation specialists to secure investment and realise their digital initiatives in Russia.
Unlike BTFI, the newly launched FTL has a global remit and is a completely independent venture of Duma’s. The agency division of FTL is aimed at helping companies in the global fashion industry like LVMH and Kering to connect with engineers and scientists developing cutting-edge technologies and to integrate these new innovations into the product offer.
“The most important thing for us is to actually get in, get started, and make the industry embrace and collaborate with people in that world. Our main goal is to try and bring those innovations out of laboratories and into to market,” said Duma, who just spoke at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit on investing in sustainable growth.
FTL’s launch was welcomed by Carole Collet, professor at Central St Martins (CSM) and newly appointed director to lead the CSM LVMH Sustainable Innovation programme announced earlier this month.
“There are a number of great recent and new initiatives in this field, and I am glad to see that we are finally gaining a global momentum to transition towards a more sustainable and smart economy,” Collet told BoF.
“Creating and financing opportunities to interface emerging technologies with entrepreneurship and fashion design can be a catalyst for sustainable innovation, but only if sustainability is at the core of the business ambition; it cannot be added as a plug in, or an afterthought,” she added.
Agree LOL
For such a stylish gal, she seems to just gravitate towards that bag. the croc is pretty awesome must say..
