Garmz, the fashion startup from Vienna, seeks to attract young and undiscovered fashion designers with their complete outsourcing service. The company wants to offload all operative tasks from the designer. Designers can create their masterpieces and Garmz will take over the production and sales for them – at least for the ones which rank well within the community. The pitch: “You design fashion, we do the rest”.
Designers upload their designs to Garmz and other Garmz users can then give feedback, discuss and vote on their favorite designs. The designs which are supported by the community and have the possibility of mass production are then prototyped with the designer.
The prototype is then promoted by Garmz on the “Upcoming” area of the webshop, where users can make binding orders for the product. According to the amount of confirmed orders, Garmz manufactures the items and markets them under the designer’s own label via the Garmz webshop.
Designers will have maximum control over their creations and will also be able to control their profit margins using a pricing tool from the website.
The fashion world lives from borrowing ideas and mutual copying. But how many designers will be able to survive when their ideas can be copied even before production, because they are all publicly viewable? Garmz is depending on the speed-to-market advantage of their production, which is not 100% convincing.
If Garmz is successful and makes a name for itself in the fashion world, this could become a real problem. A possible solution would be different levels of viewing rights within the Garmz community.
That is still a case for the future. Garmz is in beta and doesn’t have all basic features online yet. At the moment, designers can upload design drafts. At the end of July, the first community features are planned to go online. The end of summer should see the first products being sold from the Garmz webshop.
Garmz has closed a seed financing round and according to own statements is now finally covered for the rest of this year. According to TechCrunch EU, the seed round was in the lower six figure range. The founders want to take up further talks with VCs later this fall.
Joao Belo has released a detailed review of this startup and comes to the following conclusion:
“As it stands, garmz’s value proposition isn’t clear, isn’t game-changing or disruptive and so it’s difficult to believe they will become the fast-growing profitable business that can deliver on VC’s IRR expectations.
garmz’s team, however, will certainly execute on their strategy and have a couple of surprises up their sleeves that might make me think otherwise – let’s see!”
Warren Knight thanks Jochen Krisch