I show the same collection in February and December. I think itâ€s crazy and I think the clothes are being shipped to the stores far too early for the consumer. So I think we should go back to where we were 25 years ago. Thatâ€s my honest feeling. – Donna Karan

FashionStake's new voting booth feature

It’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle, but an increasing number of websites are betting on the wisdom of crowds to close the consumer gap between when shoppers are first introduced to a garment, and when they can buy it. While the exact model continues to shift and there are variations, the crowds and important investors are betting on the ability of those companies to do it.

We were first introduced to FashionStake through a series on the Business of Fashion where co-founder Vivian Weng chronicled the path from funding to launch. Originally conceived as a fashion focused Kickstarter-like site where fans could invest in designer collections by purchasing shares, they quickly shifted to a pre-order model upon finding that the majority of customers were more interested in the ability to pre-order pieces, rather than make a general investment. The site recently pivoted again by adding a voting section that changes daily alongside a more traditional online shop.

Catwalk Genius, a UK site with a similar model, still offers the ability to fund collections but has also shifted to include a more traditional e-commerce shop focused on emerging designers.

This doesn’t mean that crowd funding for fashion doesn’t work – it just doesn’t work in the same way as other industries.

Moda Operandi, the recently launched site from Aslaug Magnusdottir and Lauren Santo Domingo, skipped the investment aspect altogether and is building on a model of limited time runway and trunk show pre-orders. It’s similar to Burberry’s practice of allowing customers to place orders within hours of seeing pictures, and increasingly visible video broadcasts, of the runway show. The difference is that Moda Operandi will continue to operate year round by making the less visible, but often more wearable pre-fall and resort collections available for pre-orders as well.

Skeptics will say that pre-ordering isn’t the same as crowd funding, but we disagree for a few reasons.

Pre-Orders Attract Investors

Moda Operandi's Pre-Order Sales

With pre-orders that totaled $60,000 in their first month, FashionStake provided enough of an indication that the general concept was solid to attract more traditional investors to support the model. Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexis Maybank became the most recent investor in FashionStake, and while it’s obviously a bigger win for FashionStake than any individual designer, it’s also a good indication that the smaller group of people who are interested in more traditional fashion investing are looking to crowdsourced websites as a viable indicator of emerging talent.

Garmz, the company we first covered at Le Web, started with a model that makes garments available for pre-order after gaining enough community votes. When asked what previously held assumption about crowd sourced fashion had been most challenged, co-founder Andreas Klinger says that so far that the most surprising thing about the model is how well it has performed.

“Until now, the biggest assumption that we held that’s turned out to be different than anticipated is an underestimation [of the interest] in a positive way on our side,” he says. “We were truly unsure about the real interest of customers to be involved with the process. We are very happy that the interest has surpassed our hopes, and the engagement we see between designers and users is absolutely great.”

Garmz is crowd sourcing part of the selection for a €25,000 award that will result in the production of an emerging designer's collection

(Going on some of the finished products, we think the process is working pretty well too.) It’s working well enough, in fact, for Garmz to power a fashion award with Range Rover that includes a €25,000 prize that includes production, distribution and a runway show for an entire collection. {Evoque Fashion Award} Traditionally the domain of reality television shows or retailing behemoths, it’s one of the first programs we’ve seen that includes a significant amount of crowd participation (user voting makes up one-third of the jury) for such a comprehensive award.

Even on the high end, Fashionista editor Lauren Sherman pointed out that in addition to providing a way to capitalize on the push from all of the Fashion Week coverage while it’s fresh in shoppers’ minds, simply breaking up payments for expensive clothes makes them somewhat more accessible without taking away from the ability of brands to sell at full price. In essence, creating a pre-order incentive in addition to giving designers a solid indication of where demand is strongest.

Pre-orders have the potential to create efficiencies in production for designers, and inventory for retailers. At the moment, designers produce collections based on orders from store buyers, buyers place orders based partially on a history of what’s sold in the past and what they think customers will want in the future. What happens when bets on either end are off? Look at the success of Gilt, Hautelook or RueLaLa. That’s what happens when companies create efficiencies at the end of the buying cycle, pre-orders look like part of the way that companies will be able to create efficiencies at the beginning. Unlike the flash sales sites, pre-orders create efficiencies by not only using demand to influence supply, but by providing the funding to kick things off in the first place.

The takeaway: Even the biggest crowd funding success to date came about largely as a result of pre-orders. Those that provide pre-order platforms and find new ways to make that model work at scale will become increasingly attractive to traditional investors. Crowd funding isn’t the same as crowd investing, but the first can be the social proof necessary for the second.

Lower Barriers Attract More Pre-Orders

While Moda Operandi is following the flash sales model by operating behind an invitation only closed door, FashionStake recently dropped theirs.

“We took down the wall to give our users a chance to explore our site and find out about who FashionStake is BEFORE we ask them to commit to giving us their email address,” says co-founder Vivian Weng. “What weâ€ve found is that our users really need a chance to at least see what weâ€re offering (in terms of experience and product) before they are willing to create a profile on our site. As weâ€ve checked out traffic since weâ€ve taken the wall down, weâ€ve noticed that users really do poke around and explore our designers – read their bios, browse their products – before they actually give us their email address for future contact.”

“We had previously believed that users were interested in crowd-sourced apparel only if they were interested in becoming buyers of that apparel,” she continues. “What weâ€ve since learned is that there are many shoppers who love just having a say in the curation process; and there are other shoppers who like to shop clothing that have been curated by their peers. In effect, the curators and the shoppers arenâ€t necessarily the same person. What weâ€ve done with our new business model is to separate out the ability to interact/engage with us (i.e., ‘Voting Boothâ€) from the ability to discover and shop new emerging designers (i.e., ‘The Shopâ€). Weâ€ve lowered the barrier for users to engage in our community because anyone can now have a voice in the curation process.”

Attract the Right Crowd by Going to the Crowds

Perhaps more than other industries, fashion thrives on a certain amount of exclusivity. While it may seem obvious to anyone interested in a crowd supported business, restrictions aren’t the same as exclusivity. Though it might not seem entirely logical at first, those building businesses with crowd sourced components are finding that the best way to get the right crowd is to be as social as possible.

“In order to build the FashionStake community, we are really leveraging the networks of our designers. Whatâ€s remarkable is that these emerging designers do have great networks of consumers, but many donâ€t manage their social media or online presence optimally. We see ourselves as aggregating these designers†networks and helping them actively market to their target consumers and manage a dynamic online presence,” says Weng.

Garmz co-founder Andreas Klinger lists Facebook as the main driver of traffic and credits much of their success to the support of their fans.

“To be really honest Garmz is doing very well. It is so amazing how much great support we get,” he says.

Chocolate, and even designer sunglasses are hopping on the bespoke bandwagon, but custom clothing has the greatest potential to disrupt the normal fashion cycle. Custom clothing certainly isn’t anything new – it dominated for centuries before ready to wear clothing became the standard. What is new is the speed and price at which custom clothing can be produced, seemingly by tossing out the rules of mass apparel production.

A custom shirt won’t arrive as quickly as one in stock on your favorite department store’s website, but the 2 to 3 week delivery time offered by custom shirt makers like ProperCloth and Alfa is faster than the 8 to 10 weeks an off the rack shirt requires to go from design to delivery. eShakti, a website offering customized dresses and women’s clothing based on existing style templates, has reduced the timeframe to a week and a half. For women’s fashion, design to delivery in stores normally takes a year.

Bringing Down the Cost of Custom

Two fabric options from Alfa custom shirts. Prices range from $29 to $75

While a week and a half or 2 weeks may still not be quick enough for last minute shoppers, the competitive prices make custom clothing an attractive option for those who plan ahead. Patrick Kodjoe, CEO of Alfa, explains that technology and operating outside the traditional ready-to-wear fashion cycle is what allows his company to offer mass market prices on individually produced products.

“We have had to develop unique production processes and sophisticated software, driving down the cost while bringing efficiency and consistency to a traditionally manual industry,” Kodjoe says. “Basically, the biggest challenge is the garment pattern. The reason why ready made production is so much cheaper and easier is that you work with one pattern. With us, in addition to all the different options, every shirt has a different pattern created specifically according to the body measurements of each individual customer. Traditionally, primarily because of individual patterns and expertise needed, custom-tailoring is all manual, which explains the time investment in each piece and thus, the cost/price. Our software enables us to generate each shirt pattern separately with manual supervision, and coupled with our steamlined hand-production processes, this enables us to offer our revolutionary prices.” Perhaps equally important, “we generally stay away from traditional retail distribution and expensive marketing campaigns,” he explains.

Seph Skerritt, founder of ProperCloth, also attributes the relatively affordable prices of custom clothing to direct production and distribution. “The primary advantage is that, by making products to order, we avoid any costs associated with producing products that don’t end up being sold,” he says.

Two shirts from ProperCloth. Prices range from $99 to $200 with free shipping.

eShakti operates on a slightly different model. Shoppers can choose varied skirt shapes and lengths, different sleeve and neckline options in addition to specifying measurements, but do so based on an existing garment rather than designing something completely new. Still, the company has found a similar benefit in using the internet to bypass the traditional retail system. “The costs of production are indeed higher when you make individual garments separately – as much as two to three times higher than mass, assembly-line production. And when we courier separately to individuals, the costs are extremely high. We still keep our price reasonable since we do not have any buyers/retailers as middle-men and sell directly to the consumer,” says Jennifer Mayer, eShakti’s head of marketing.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Bringing prices and production in line with mass market clothing is a significant step in putting custom clothing in line to compete with off the rack clothing, but each person we spoke with emphasized that the biggest opportunity is in providing clothes that fit well.