Modern Brands’ Story

For a few years I balanced being a factory and building our technology in stealth. But I decided, pre-pandemic, to focus solely on my technology. I gave the factory portion of the business to the employees that worked with me, and they started their own small business. Here I am a year later with our MVP launched last month.

I hate to say it, but every design department I worked for was a total S*** show. Ask anyone else who works in fashion and they will say the same thing. The cost, time and complexity are the biggest pain points in apparel pre-production- which encompasses everything from sourcing to sketching to fittings. When I started my design agency, we offered product design and development consulting. I worked with these amazing brands who had so much potential… and most of them were “losing their shirt” in the product design (PD) process. I had one guy contact us who had spent 30K on contractors for his PD and still did not have a sample. I had another who got over 150K investment in for their plus size brand, and used all of the money in product development-then could not afford to produce.

The thing is – there is a lot of repetition in fashion… Not only do we recycle trends (like the 90’s are now back in style) but most fashion brands follow the same trend research- so essentially, everyone is making the same things. I had five brands in three months ask me to make a motorcycle jacket. Now as an agency- it is a BIG no no to share a brand’s pattern with another brand. So, I charged each brand for their own pattern, and paid my pattern maker for each pattern…. but I know our pattern maker was doing a lot of copy /paste in the backend. What if we could digitize every type of garment in the world, and validate the fit to a set of standards, select materials in multiple countries, and ensure that the design documents needed are prepared? What if we could make the “recipe” for garments accessible the way open-source code is?

To date, there has been no real effort to open-source all the physical “work.” For example: If two different brands design denim jackets- they both are starting from scratch. If you look up denim jackets on google- you will see they look almost the same. Sure, the sizing might be different, the fabrics are slightly different… some might have a detail added here or there. Obviously, the branding is a major differentiator, and drives the price (for instance a Forever21 jacket might cost $45 vs a Balenciaga jacket that would price out at $1500). The point is, they all could have started from the same place and saved time, money and a lot of effort.

Modern Brands is a solution for brands, factories, and apparel design professionals, anyone who wants to make production possible apparel. We want to be to the fashion industry what WordPress was to the internet. WordPress has empowered 42% of the websites on the global internet today-from small bloggers to big businesses…Imagine if 42% of the world’s fashion products started with Modern Brands- how much of an impact could this make on a global scale?