Hi Everyone,
This is the 4th edition of Favorable Fashion Futures, the newsletter following the founding journey of The Favorable Company, the fashion retail tech solution to realign customers, brands, and our Planet’s resources: Fashion’s Hottest Engine.
Welcome to Fashion’s Cognitive, Eco-Conscious, NeuroNerd, Nature Loving, Peace Planting, Holographic Tech Party.
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Housekeeping; it’s a long one, strap in! Also, it’s not Sunday, but these accelerators and events have me working on Pacific Time from Paris and twirling plates on my nose so here we are. High Season.
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Founder - me, Isis
& Company - for a Favorable Fashion Future
Ever notice the echo between radars and radios?
Just a thought.
You Guys,
The Founder Institute comes to a close next week - my self & company are entering a second advisory phase and environment which began last week - doubling up! Bring it on!
The build is underway. Sounds hush hush? It is. Will share more soon-ish, you can also follow the tweets. Until then, there’s already plenty to cover.
The first being - these founder incubators are live applicable knowledge and R&D labs. In practice, it is So. Cool.
Born in 1984, I was in one of the first Millennial Accelerators and Think Tanks - the Accelerator Summer Business Institute at Vanderbilt’s Owen School of Biz - summer 2006. My first steps in Entrepreneurship - other than with my mum who created Snapchat’s predecessor StealthText - were with Michael Burcham, named a “Champion of Change” by Barack Obama. Inspiring to say the least. Fresh out of Neuroscience labs, I devised then my first dynamic and automated feed and content algorithm to solve a marketing challenge. For reference, Facebook’s newsfeed started on September 5, 2006 - the site was a directory at the time. Convergent evolution happens all. the. time. It’s a good sign. I understand now that I was transposing my passion for nature’s nature to self organise into beautiful ultimate efficiency and logic structures to best fulfil sets of functions. I called it the MagaBlog (magazine + blog) at the time. Lol. Form Follows Function, said Lupe Fiasco.
Enter the itch and frustration, while working in fashion, from witnessing inefficiency for no good reason. There are great ways to re-align everyone concerned. The need for it is painfully obvious & I am passionate about creating & implementing it. It‘s in my nature.
More importantly, the race to Net Zero carbon emissions is Urgent. That we had till yesterday to address it - would be an understatement. Every bit of help counts, and I can’t twiddle my thumbs and push product aimlessly. We can, however, funnel product efficiently, yay! In other words - match customers, brands, and resources positively, with the great digital safety net… and Favorable Business Logic… obvi.
As for the “Sustainability Gap” that all are endeavouring to recover - efforts are far from what the numbers require to have a chance of seeing a better tomorrow. Luckily, we have technology to meet the challenge, and these Founder growth spaces ought to help significantly in bridging that gap. Find me in the grinding, informed, optimistic believers club.
Culture Club
This is my first year with a real pass to VivaTech!!!
Thank you so much Vera @ For Colored Girls Who Tech!
SO. Today was Day 1. We got to hear Emmanuel Macron, Maurice Levy, and Tim Cook, interviewed by Guillaume Lacroix, CEO of Brut.
Takeaways - the only woman on stage in the discussion with Emmanuel Macron for the opening of VivaTech in Paris 2021 was - a - Neuroscientist! Ana Maiques. She demonstrated a super cool brain cap with live readings on a tablet. She highlighted that the biggest challenge ahead of us will be the mental health pandemic, I reference this in my 2019 white paper.
This tied nicely into a discussion on the role of Europe on the world stage, being 20 years late to the digital party, leveraging this Space in Time by staking its claim as the defender of responsibility & ethics in tech, starting with RGPD, and positioned for leadership in health tech - big stakes, for all of us, leading to the promise of science, discoveries & tech enabled positive progress. It was a really cool discussion! I appreciated the ultimate point made by the French President who underlined that participating in innovation means securing choice, which is a matter of sovereignty, and ties in to his political responsibilities. Choice and agency being a principle stake of neuroscience.
Should I share with you my personal career mantra since I was 18? “I want to be on the frontier where science informs technology to optimise the consumption of what I like - fashion, art, and music.” It’s quite personal but here you go. Consumption Science?
I was disappointed, after Guillaume’s great interview with Tim Cook, that Maurice Levy’s closing comment to Guillaume was “you failed”. What? No joke - video below. It was such a typical, fake humor, macro aggression. Why. Literally. The permanent local Duel pour l’Honneur against thin air. It’s exhausting.
The late David Servan-Schreiber, a Neuroscientist practicing internationally and a founding member of Nobel Peace Prize winning organization Doctors Without Borders highlights the following in his book, Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2003 (personally translated from the french edition, p. 184-5):
“France has one of the highest rates of depression on the planet (on par with Lebanon, which has faced 25 years of civil war). The French are also the greatest consumers of antidepressants in the world. These statistics are hard to believe for a country living in peace for over 40 years, where the majority of the population benefits from comfortable material conditions, the climate is ideal, the countryside and cities are beautiful, and the culture is profound. [...] Over the last 10 years, the consumption of antidepressants has doubled in France. If you were to ask me where to begin to reverse this trend, I would reply to address the violence in daily rapports, as much in couple life, with our kids and our neighbors, as in the workplace.
35 years ago, my father, journalist, wrote a book named “The American Challenge”. He called out the lagging adoption in Europe of certain key aspects to functional enterprise implemented in the US, namely IT automation and modern management techniques. After spending 20 years in the US and having chosen to return to France, I am taken by the new nature of this challenge. The real difference in workplace culture between the two societies isn’t in IT or management, but in the fact that the best American companies, be it universities, research centers, or grand distribution, have reinvented the nature of human relations at work. They’ve understood the importance of emotional intelligence, of teamwork, of respecting individual integrity, of encouragement (positive feedback). They’ve understood that nothing is worse for a company than useless violence between people, when in fact these relations, all of our relations, form the very fabric of wellness. Especially since a few simple and powerful ideas enable the complete transformation of these for the better.
Also living between France & the US since childhood, discovering and reading this passage was a true key of understanding as it expressed clearly something I felt but couldn’t quite grasp, define, or have permission to feel. I am taken aback and weighted down every.day by the volume of relational violence and sadness under the pretty city lights of Paris. Add to this cultural ambivalence. Americans love/hate the French and vice-versa, and here are a few of us expats with no choice but to be the bridge. Scientifically, technologically, professionally, culturally. Of course however, and agreed with Mr Macron, the lag reflects long standing traditions which rightfully, this beautiful land and culture is in no hurry or need to shift radically and has every good reason to protect. Balancing the Scales.
Short Bonus
#FAVORABLE FAVORITES
Back to, Oooooh Fashion!
Thank you so much for your feedback on this newsletter, and a heartfelt thank you for being here.
Shall we get into THE EDIT
Our very quick, and very manual, round up overview of a few of Fashion’s current favorites.
… No Best Sellers highlighted on the 24s site - the site positioning itself as the leading French online luxury department store reference.
Let’s go to mass.
Zalando - Womens - first favorite clothing item
Never Fully Dressed - Multi Use Jaspre Skirt - 64,95eur
Zalando - Mens - First favorite top - I love a good white tee! So does everyone!
Lacoste - Tshirt Basique - 39,95eur
Net-a-Porter - Womens - The first Best Seller below 500eur
Frame - Le High-Flare distressed high rise jeans - 315.47eur
East Dane - Mens
Ami - Small AMI Heart Logo Tshirt - 78,35eur
MANGO Womens
MANGO Mens
Slim fit linen Pant - 49,99eur
STYLECDOTE!
You see that number one item for Women at Zalando’s this June 2021? Find below a cute little video of this feline skirt living its best life in 2017 on a mediterranean ferry. As it were, my most stylish friend, wore it on a trip together in 2015 - she’d borrowed it from another über stylish friend and it was vintage. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had it custom created in 2017 in Bali, the land of custom creation, where I made a mini collection of items I could never find but also couldn’t live without - 4 pieces. Back in Europe stylists were snapping it every time I wore it out. Efficiency, focus. And, turns out in my archives I seem to have been hypnotized by it flowing in the wind and did a full slo-mo focus, montaged below. Yup.
Thank you everyone for being here!
This is a community driven space - please let me know what you think!
And a wonderful High Season to everyone!
You are also welcome to reach out at favorablefashionfuture@gmail.com.
Enjoyed the read, the hyper links, the interdisciplinary trail of ideas.
Glad you made it to Viva Tech!!!