Good morning, beginning to be noon, actually, and welcome to my little speak about

the future of fashion and how digital disruption will influence the fashion world as well. I will tell you a bit about myself, but first I would like to know a little bit about the audience.

Should I do this in German or should I do this in English? Is there anybody who is English speaking here? Here? That's cool. I can do it in English. Then the next thing is just to get an overview who I'm talking to.

Who here is actually, like, in fashion business? Does somebody have a label here? No? Fashion publishing? Okay, so more like general interest. All right, so a little bit about myself. My name is Gabriel.

I've worked at Vice magazine as the head of digital for a number of years here in Berlin. Afterwards, I went to a business consultancy here in Berlin consulting large companies, large industry companies. I've been in China and consulted Volkswagen, for example.

I then became a father together with Phoebe, who is my partner in the branches here as well. It wasn't clear that you could make it, so it's just me on stage. But if you have any really fashion-related questions, you can ask her afterwards if you want to.

So I've been working for all these big brands and I had these epiphanies sitting on top on this O2 skyscraper, talking to all these really, really intelligent people and thinking to myself, what's happening here? I mean, that's really smart people here and all they do is paint mobile waves blue or red when you work for Vodafone.

So it really doesn't matter for humanity or anything, so I got a bit frustrated in the process. Meanwhile, I saw what's happening with all these industries, starting with publishing, for example.

I mean, working for Vice was really just a print magazine and turning it into like the digital outlet it is today. Also, what's happening in the music industry, it became pretty clear that things are changing.

And that is five years ago. If you look at this slide, I don't know, a number of people might have seen this already. That's two years ago. I mean, okay, Facebook is in the game a longer time, but things are really changing radically in a number of industries and fashion is one of them.

Let this sink in for a moment. So what does this mean for fashion? I came to this whole fashion topic, of course, because of my girlfriend. She is a designer. She worked for Limi Fu who is Yamamoto's daughter in Tokyo.

She worked for House of Holland in London and is now a designer for Adidas by Stella McCartney. So somehow we got our two fields of expertise together because we just, we don't have a TV.

We sit at home in the evening, have a glass of wine and just think about projects. And someone, I saw this here. I don't know if any of you know this. It's Healthcough. And this is really interesting. This is the first real fashion trend who was solely created on the web. It's only on Facebook. Like, you know, Facebook, I mean, doesn't have the reach it used to have for pages.

It only has 20,000 fans, actually, but it has a huge, huge, huge reach out there to all big medias. Since Phoebe has this background with Japan and she likes black, that was really the time where we said,

okay, we have to do something now because that's just our style. And that's how we thought about the process of creating a brand. And if you look at fashion in the old times, you really had three different components which are being fabric, colour and the cut.

Well, now there's technology coming to it. What we did is that we took the whole colour part out. It's boring anyway. And we added the tech part because that is really something new and something which is exciting and something where I know a bit about as well. So, we created this brand called Phoebe Hess. We work with tech, but tech is not only tech.

I mean, everybody is talking about wearables at the moment, but what many people probably don't see as well right now is that there's a lot of things happening in the fields of fabrics as well.

So, the tech is the wearables but also the fabrics component. And if you look at it, we have here on the left side, we have neoprene on the right side, carbon. This pullover here in the middle is quite interesting. It has three-dimensional mesh on the one side and cashmere on the backside.

So, you can turn it over depending on if you're cold or if you're warm. So, that's the fabric part of it. And then that was our first step. We did our first collection with it, and we showed it at Berlin Alternative Fashion Week,

which is also like a new concept, which is not like the old, really boring Fashion Week in Berlin, but catering to the new creators. And that is where this whole trend is going to. It's similar to the music industry or publishing industry where you could become like a blogger or you could produce your own music, which wouldn't be possible before,

and now you can really start doing your own fashion. So, that's a video of our second fashion show at Berlin Alternative Fashion Week.

I hope you can see our USB sphere, which we used.

Okay, so you get the picture. We did this fashion show, then we realized,

with each of the pieces we do, we really have a big, big story to tell. A fashion show is not really going to cut it for us, because you have like 12 to 20 styles and you walk up and down and people, okay, they see how it looks, but it doesn't really tell all the different levels of story of the functional clothing that are behind it.

First of all, all of the stuff you see here is really performance clothing, because VB is, of course, a sportswear designer, so you can run in it and jump in it and whatever. And then like this, for example, is black reflective. If you make a photo of it with a flash, it's really white. And this is carbon, if I'm not mistaken, these pants.

And we got kefler, which is knife-proof, and a whole bunch of really interesting stuff, which is just not possible to convey the stories in a classical sense with a fashion show. So, that was our first steps.

Then we found the next thing on the internet, okay? No, and so that was the fashion part, and now we, at the same time, looked into the tech part, fabrics I was already talking about, but now into wearables.

This is, I don't know if you know it, it's the Gartner Hype Cycle. It comes out every year. It's a very interesting chart of looking what innovations are in what stage in said cycle, which they kind of dug up through a lot of data. And you see wearables in 3D printing is coming slowly from this hype down to becoming mainstream.

And we just started, and as most of you probably did, just went to a fab lab, met some geeks, and started hacking on some stuff. We did a cap which flashes back when it's being photographed, sort of privacy functionality.

We did a self-defence jacket, so if you're five o'clock in the morning, a girl comes out of a club, goes into a dark alley, she can switch it on, and it's carrying electricity, so if she's being jumped, the guy's getting electrocuted.

It turns out, and me being like from a total digital background where you can just go to the website and change if you don't like anything or something, it turns out there are things like patents. We didn't think about that. So, yes, somebody patented this in the States, I don't know, ten years ago,

and sold the whole tech to the police, to riot police. So now there's cops standing there, electrified, and well, that's not really what we had in mind. We wanted to save people. Anyway, we're still in talks with them, maybe where it's going to become a project,

but maybe not just for you the next time. There are patents first, seconds. If you do anything with electricity, there's a lot of certificates you have to think about before you bring that into the market. That's a lot of initial invest and a lot of time you have to get into there. Then we found another thing on the internet that's the next.

I don't know how many people of you have seen this on the web? One, two, all right. So, being a creative, which is more Phoebe than me, but being a creative, you have all these different techniques at hand. You can combine stuff, you can deconstruct stuff,

or you can take something over the top, and that is where the idea came from. Hey, we can actually make a fabric out of this, which is blacker than black, because, as I also told our tech partner in Switzerland, this meme has been shared, and that doesn't include Facebook,

which I can't really count in, I don't know, 40 million times. So it's a lot of people who saw this, who liked it, who shared it. I went to this big, big company who just works with the biggest players, really, and I told them, look at this, this has been shared 40 million times. This is practically an, okay, I'm going to buy this if this exists.

Do you want to do this with us? And they said, yeah, cool, let's do it. So, we looked into it further. There's this fabric called Vantablack, you've probably seen it, and that's really, really black. But it's made of carbon nanotubes, and they're said to be causing cancer,

so that wasn't an option for a fabric itself, but the guys had another idea. That's in German now.

I was told that Wednesday Addams family, and they said, I will stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.

And we were told that we were going to have a technology partner in the Swiss. And we thought, we'd also like to make this a vehicle. And we thought, okay, I'll make it. The Gaboon Viper is an inspiration. It's a ring that you can find in the corner. And this is an extreme Swiss. In the 20th century, there was a fortune in it.

It's really hard to find. And it's not like we were in the 70's. We have a prototype. We have the stuff we're looking for. There's already 50% worth, as far as the test is concerned, so it's already been made. And we also have crowdfunding, which is currently being made in the 70's. So, if you want to find out more about it,

then go to phoebihlist.com. So, phoebihlist.com.

And I hope you'll enjoy it. Really get a grip on. They can't really do forecasts on it.

I mean, you practically have to invent your brand every single season, you know. And if you don't do it the next season, you're just not gonna have any money. So, it's really hard to get funding for startup fashion brands. So, crowdfunding was the perfect thing. We had a good idea. And we did this video

without any marketing budget really. It's a friend of us. This is a house which was painted black, all of it, somewhere in Pforzheim. We drove there. It really looked awesome. Couldn't, of course, take the picture of the Wednesday Addams,

but that meme went around as well. And that is what happened.

So, we got the word out to a lot of medias. We were in Vogue, Wired, Edel. Well, we are friends with HealthGolf now, so they brought us as well. Days, Idea, like really all of the big ones, including Reddit. And I'm telling you, Reddit, that was really the most intense two hours of my life.

Maybe the second most intense two hours after having the first kiss with Phoebe. But it was super intense. If you ever plan to get on the first page of Reddit, then get food, get a bucket if you have to go to the toilet because you're just doing memes,

researching stuff, answering stuff, translating stuff. It's absolutely mayhem. So, we were on the front page. We had 4.5 million views about. It's really hard to count that. We got three times funded on Kickstarter. And we're right now in the process of doing it. Actually, we were supposed to ship this whole thing a few weeks ago.

We did not make the deadline. And being a German company, we're like, ugh, not being on time. But it turns out that 84% of all Kickstarters are shipping late because it's something new. You can't absolutely put your hand on when it's going to be ready.

Of course you want to ship a good product. The cool thing is these Kickstarter people, they know about it. They're super easy with it. And it turns out people who like black of all different sorts. I mean, there was ravers and goths and, well, pretty large people who just wanted to look 40% thinner.

And they're all really a really, really nice bunch. I was at this forum on Reddit with startup people and tech people. God, they sucked, but these gov people were awesome. So that's cool. We're still working on it. And here, just like a few, I mean, all of you have heard of crowdfunding.

But for us, it was really good because it can, of course, test the market. You get reach for future and actual customers. But really interesting was that we got a lot of attention from the business-to-business side. So now the investors are coming and want to be a part of the brand.

Now there's companies coming saying, like, oh, we have this wearable innovation, but can you do it cool for us? Can we have your reach? Can we have your design and aesthetic approach? And, of course, it brings in money, which you will not have because, as I said before, you won't find investor in the first place.

Then let's talk about production a little bit. The next thing, when you look at all these, I'm going to make a big step back again to these large corporations. What's happening top-down with manufacturing at the moment is that you see here, what all of you know is that China is going up everything.

It's the workbench of the world. All of the Western countries, most of it are going down. But if you look at it closely, the grey line here, that's Germany, and Germany is starting to go up again. Why is that? That's because we produce the machines who are going to do the manufacturing in the future.

So all these manufacturing jobs, which are now in the East because they're cheap, are going to come back because robots are even cheaper. And that's why China is very afraid of what's happening at the moment, and they invest a lot in robotics and 3D printing and all of that stuff.

You see, Donald Trump says he's going to bring back the jobs to the USA. No, Donald, that's not the case. It's the robots who will bring back the jobs, because it doesn't make sense to produce something in China on a robot when you can do the same thing in America, and it's much nearer to your customer.

Here's the first example that's a Nike shoe. I mean, many sportswear companies have played around with this whole concept with 3D printing, and everything you have seen until now is just a concept. This here, however, has been sold. This is 3D printed in the USA and sold to the customer.

So this is market ready. That's the first piece. Why shoes? Because it's much easier to print than fabrics. That's just because it's solid and doesn't have to be stretchable, and 3D printers are not really capable of that. On the other hand, from like the bottom-up level, you have, of course, 3D printers,

and they're becoming mass market, and people are having them at home. And this, for example, this thing with the torso on that is one of the first 3D printers who was actually doing fabrics. But the solid 3D printers are much, much more advanced still.

So what you will have in the future is, on the one hand, you will have the big companies who are coming nearer and nearer to your home, and just as it happened with the Internet, the Internet didn't go from one to your home. In the meantime, there were things like Internet cafes,

where you went in between to do your Internet stuff. That's exactly what's going to happen with 3D printing as well. You're not going to have the printer at home first, but there's going to be places where you can go with your designs or designs you get from the cloud, which are probably pirated then, and you're going to print them in some sort of 3D printing cafe.

In the middle is a picture of something that Converse did with Chucks, because Chucks are really, really low tech. Everybody knows that. So you get all the different parts, and you can assemble it in the shop itself. So you can get your laces and the colours, you can sew it together,

you can take different stuff. So that's going to be the future from the bottom up. You're going to go into these cafes or whatever, the Alita store or Puma or Nike for that matter, and produce really the shoe you want to do, much more sophistically than what you can do right now with personalisation.

So let's talk about communication. Communication is changing as well. You probably all heard about this, that all the companies, all the big fashion brands are changing into fast fashion now. Fast fashion means that you see something and you can buy it directly instead of waiting for half a year.

So that's one of the big trends in communication. That means for you that right now, you have all these peaks. That's like September fashion week, then it's February fashion week, and it's all these peaks, and that is when all the content is coming out. But in fact, the interest in fashion isn't lower in between.

It doesn't really make any sense. So we're planning to be on holiday in September and February, and just do our stuff in between and get our content out in between because you get much more reach, and so that's our idea with anti-cyclic content spreading.

So then being one of these small companies which are going to disrupt the whole business, as I showed you in the slide before, that's a big, big, big, big, big, very big challenge for big companies

because they are not as quick, they are not as agile, they have all these old structures. I always refer to like dinosaurs, you know. Some when they went just too big, it costed too much energy to keep all the structure afloat whilst you had all these little critters getting all the food

and, well, the dinosaurs just died. So we partner as a small entity. We don't even want to get big. We don't even want to get the new Nike. It's not interesting to us. We just want to do cool shit. So we're just a small entity, but we work with people who have wearables

or who work with fabrics or have awesome ideas or with guys who do videos in Berlin with people in the Caribbean Islands who do glitch art with VR people from Japan. So it's really internationalised and that is a very, very big opportunity you have here

considering that the big companies don't have it. They do start right now to buy small firms, but then what's happening, you still have the dinosaur, but you have little critter feet under it. It just doesn't work. I mean, you get all the innovation, but how is it going to be, how does it become products

in the big scheme of large corporations? It's not permeable enough. So that's about it. Do any of you have any questions?

Can you hear me? How black does the black remain when you wash it or do you have to use special detergent? Well, first of all, to give you an idea

about how this whole fabric is working, it's biomimetically copying the scales of that snake. The scales of that snake work that well because they just have exactly the diameter of the wavelength of light. So the photons come in and they don't come back again.

So the task is to recreate that in a fabric. It's not going to be flat. It's going to be a little bit hairy. So the trap is in there, or the light is being trapped in there. However, when you work with one of these large fabric companies, they are very, very quality-driven,

especially when they're from Switzerland, as we learned. And there are special standards, which are sportswear standards, and that's one which was important for us. I don't know what more standards there are, but that means you have to be able to wash that thing, I don't know, 200 or 300 times without the color getting any bleaker.

Thank you. Unfortunately, the time is over. That was on point. Thank you. We have a little break again, 15 minutes, and afterwards we are going to hear Anna Ruhjan with a branded new world. Welcome to virtual commerce. Thank you.