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Los Angeles’ fashion reputation isn’t the best, but thanks to events like the Refinery 29 and Madewell‘s “Jeans Journey” it has its moments. Thursday night, our favorite bi-coastal fashion blog, teamed up with the clothing brand to create a style haven safe from booty shorts, Uggs, and bedazzled t-shirts. Read the full story
With Rose McGowen.
Rose McGowan has been making the Fashion Week rounds…and when we ran into her backstage at Max Azria on Sunday, we asked her why she’s been spending so much time in the Big Apple of late. “My boyfriend lives here,” McGowan admitted…The mystery man works in “finance something something,” is an “amazing art collector,” and is “starting an art fund for underprivileged artists.” “He’s six-foot-six, the tallest one yet,” McGowan said.
Who Is Rose McGowan’s ‘Finance Something Something’ Boyfriend? [NYM]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
via guestofaguest.com: It's that time of year again, when L.A. is busy getting ready for the Grammys, the fashion industry holds NYC hostage. New York Fashion Week has officially kicked off its week-long occupation of the city and our team in the trenches has the first batch of party reca[...]
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via guestofaguest.com: Get a glimpse of the new Levi's Spring campaign, the 50 most fashionable New Yorkers, PETA's NYFW plans for Donna Karan, Urban Outfitters is launching a bridal line, and more! See what's happening in the world of fashion in today's Fashion Files. MORE>>[...]
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Atomico Ventures, the investment fund of Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, just made a seed investment of $500,000 in Fashiolista, an online fashion community. Having seen Zennström in person, I can vouch for the fact that he is no dandy, so his investment firm must see the potential for solid returns in the area of fashion.
Fashiolista launched in 2010 and provides a “Love” button, which functions in a similar way to Facebook’s “Like” button. Users install a toolbar which allows them to “love” an item from any shopping site and add it to their collection. You can also follow other members to get updates on their latest fashion finds. 1 million items are currently “loved” per month.
Fashiolista is most popular in Brazil and the Netherlands but has members in over 100 countries. The biggest user group is, unsurprisingly, female and aged between 15 and 25. The business model is based on advertising and affiliate fees. In the future, the founders plan to add group deals and marketing intelligence since the “loves” can be used to spot trends in real-time.
Fashiolista launched in 2010, is based in Amsterdam and has 10 employees. Prior to this investment the company was privately funded.
Companies: Atomico Ventures, Fashiolista
People: Niklas Zennstrom
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
When I last checked in with Andy Dunn, the CEO of online menswear retailer Bonobos, he was in the middle of raising $2 million from angel investors.
Make that $18.5 million instead, in a venture-capital round led by two of Silicon Valley’s top venture-capital firms, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners. That’s a huge vote of confidence for a business that Dunn told me was on track to do $10 million a year in sales, based on September figures. It’s growing fast, though: Dunn says sales have tripled in the past six months and jumped from $830,000 a month in September to $1.3 million in November.
Bonobos, which launched in 2007 and is based in New York City, starting out making pants that Dunn and cofounder Brian Spaly felt fit better. (A disclosure is in order here: I have two pairs of amazingly well-fitting Bonobos shorts in my dresser and an unopened Bonobos box under the tree in my living room.) It has since expanded into shirts and jackets and sells third-party menswear brands as well to round out its selection.
Lightspeed and Accel seem like similarly good fits for Bonobos: Lightspeed managing director Jeremy Liew, who is joining the board, recently wrote for VentureBeat about the reinvention of e-commerce as a top trend for 2011 — specifically, the need to make online shopping fun versus merely efficient.
While Bonobos isn’t as whimsical as, say, the ultra-quirky San Francisco clothier Betabrand, its online store, its company blog, and the solicitous emails from its customer-service reps, whom Dunn has dubbed “ninjas,” collectively ooze a cheeky wit.
Accel, whose partner Sameer Gandhi is also joining Bonobos’s board, has invested in Etsy, ModCloth, and Groupon — three startups also reinventing the online-retail experience. Gandhi’s also on the board of Quidsi, the parent of Diapers.com, which Amazon.com recently agreed to buy for $540 million.
Dunn told me not all Silicon Valley venture capitalists were as easy to win over as Liew, who wore a pair of Bonobos turquoise corduroys to their first meeting. Some remain highly averse to retail businesses like Bonobos, which take on inventory.
“Saying inventory is toxic to a business is kind of like saying all people are bad because some people are bad,” said Dunn. “It’s a question of cash and how fast you turn that inventory. Enormous value has been created by companies like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, and Blue Nile, because they turn inventory rapidly.”
Fashion, too, was a tough sell for some American investors. European investors like Index Ventures, he said, were way ahead of Sand Hill Road in backing fashion startups. Index’s Net-a-porter sold for $553 million earlier this year.
“That’s why I’m so excited about Bonobos,” said Dunn. “We’re going to create enormous value because guys like that don’t get it.”
[Photo: Bonobos Blog]
Tags: e commerce, fashion, menswear, online fashion, online retail
Companies: Accel Partners, Bonobos, Lightspeed Venture Partners
People: Andy Dunn, Jeremy Liew, Sameer Gandhi
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
Social shopping startup Fashism just announced that it has raised an angel round of funding led by A Grade Investments, the fund created by actor/Twitter super-user Ashton Kutcher.
The New York startup offers a way to get fashion feedback before making a purchase. For example, if you’re not sure whether a jacket is a good buy, you can try it on, take a photo, ask how it looks on how, then read comments from other Fashism users. Fashism says its site has more than 40,000 registered users on its site, while its iPhone application has been downloaded 50,000 times.
The company’s press release doesn’t disclose the size of the round, but The New York Times reports that it was around $1 million. Other inestors include actress Demi Moore (Kutcher’s wife), Nina Garcia of Marie Claire magazine, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), NV Investments, Vast Ventures, and Rick Webb. Foursquare chief executive Dennis Crowley and designer Steven Alan are also investors.
Back in July, Jalak Jobanputra of the New York City Investment Fund wrote a guest column for VentureBeat arguing that the fashion industry is finally seeing some tech innovation. In the post, he highlighted Fashism, along with competitor Go Try It On.
Tags: fashion, social shopping
Companies: Fashism, Grade A Investments, Highline Venture Partners, NV Investments, SV Angel, Vast Ventures
People: Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Dennis Crowley, Nina Garcia, Rick Webb, Ron Conway, Steven Alan
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
In our long and highly scientific study into the lives of Harbinger Capital couple Phil and Lisa Falcone, one thing we’ve determined is that Lisa, God’s gift to us, is not your typical hedge fund wife. For instance, most of these women would not commandeer a conference room at their husband’s office blasting music with the lyrics directing “bitches, throw your hands in the air,” citing 18 years of marriage and no pre-nup to mean “shared family office.” Most of them would not hire “little people” for their daughters’ birthday, or bring a piano-playing pig into the house or dance on a table in view of photographers. In sum, most of these women play by the rules, figuring that’s the price they’ve paid, whereas Lisa lives by the motto “I do what I want.”
One of the things Lisa has most notably wanted to do, which her fellow Hedge Fund Wives will not, is take an out of the box approach to fashion. Gladiator outfits? Yes, please. Mermaid Chic? Don’t mind if I do. Slutty Peacock? Bring. It. On. And while the fact that Phil clearly loves Lisa for who she is and has no interest in forcing her to act like one of them should be refreshing, some people have still questioned how he is comfortable with these get-ups, wondering if they attract too much attention and scare of potential and existing investors, whose hands must all times. What is the deal here? A profile on Phil in the latest issue of Bloomberg Markets that touches on his early life sheds some light.
Philip Falcone left his hometown of Chisholm in northern Minnesota’s rusting Iron Range in 1980 in the passenger seat of a 12-year-old Mercury Cougar that cost $150. Neil Sheehy, from nearby International Falls, had offered Falcone a ride to Harvard University, which had recruited both of them to play hockey for the Crimson. The car stalled in front of Falcone’s house, and Sheehy had to restart it on a hill while Falcone’s mother and one of his sisters sobbed their goodbyes. “It’ll be all right, Mrs. Falcone; it’ll be all right,” Sheehy recalls telling Caroline Falcone as the car chugged to life and headed east. Phil was the youngest of nine children and had grown up poor. His mother worked in a shirt factory, and his father never made more than $14,000 a year as a superintendent at a local utility.
Falcone rode to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his feet on the dashboard because Sheehy had packed a skate-sharpening machine on the floor of the front seat, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. Halfway there, the roof liner came loose and showered the young men with fiberglass insulation that stuck to them as they sweated in the late summer heat.
After recovering from the initial shock, Falcone made himself something of a campus don. Hockey teammates called him “Fashion Phil” because he cared so much about his clothes, Olson says. He had a blue, three-piece suit that he wore often, and he always wore stylish shoes.
Of course! He doesn’t object to the outfits because he himself is the mastermind behind them. He has always had a flair for fashion but being a big time investor, can’t color outside the lines with his own attire. So he looks to Lisa (aka his muse) to trot out his creations. When she came out of her closet/bar wearing the gladiator outfit he didn’t have a “kill me now” moment– it was more like “I’ve outdone myself.”
The same profile touches on some discontent among Harbinger investors, over the fact that Falcone has “changed the focus of the fund” with the wireless network he’s building, whereas “they thought they were putting money into a hedge fund that traded securities that were easy to buy and sell.” It will be interesting to see how they feel about the long-term plan to turn the firm into a purveyor of couture gowns.
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
Andrew Montalenti is a former Morgan Stanley programmer. He’s also a rapeboredom survivor who after years of fear and shame feels strong enough to speak out and tell the world what was done to him. In 2006, Montalenti took a job with the bank as a software engineer after graduating from NYU. A friend had vouched for MS, telling Montalenti it was a great shop and that he “really liked it there.” And at first, Drew did too. The project he worked on was “exciting,” he liked the people there, it was great. But then something happened. Something so dark and so harrowing to this day it’s even difficult to speak of. I’m actually getting a lump in my throat as a type this, as I’m sure Monts did when telling it. In fact, hold on. Let’s give him a second to collect himself. Okay. Here’s what happened. (Please, do not read unless you’ve got a strong stomach because it gets quite graphic.)
But soon the work grew redundant, Mr. Montalenti said, and the problems he was asked to solve as part of his day-to-day responsibilities started to seem technically uninteresting. Like many other creatively inclined, intellectually ambitious programmers who took high-paying jobs on Wall Street after college, Mr. Montalenti found himself disillusioned and restless.
It’s truly astounding that no one has ever taken Morgan Stanely to task for this. Disgusting even, that they could get away with treating an employee in such a manner. It’s one thing to, for instance, insert foreign objects into an employee’s ass, piss in his mouth and and force him to wear women’s panties but failing to stimulate his mind is quite another. The sad thing is it’s an epidemic not just exclusive to MS. Up and down Wall Street, there are tens if not dozens of programmers being degraded in this fashion on a daily basis.
“At my workplace, I did not know one single person who was happy with what they were doing—not even one,” said Puneet Mehta, who was a VP of technology with Citi Capital Markets before quitting and, along with two other Wall Street refugees, founding the mobile app start-up MyCityWay. “Each one of them was just getting through it because they had to pay the bills.”
The sickest thing here is that, in addition to the abuse, Wall Street banks lured these guys in with false promises.
In the process of recruiting, standout engineers—the kind of people who want to intellectually stimulating jobs—are often told that the programming positions on offer on Wall Street involve sophisticated engagement with cutting-edge technology, only to find that that’s not necessarily true. “That’s how they attract top talent,” said Mr. Mehta. “Going in, most people do not expect to be bored. I’ve worked outside of Wall Street and I’ve seen how attractive it is from the outside and how most people just dream of getting one of these jobs.” Often the malaise doesn’t set in until after a few years. The source of it is multifaceted, and varies depending on the function of the group an engineer is placed in after college. But the most common complaint, based on interviews with individuals who left finance for start-up life, is that the work they’re asked to do there is repetitive and boring.
Hopefully anyone reading this, who’s found him or herself in a similar position might now have the courage to stand up and say “I am a person, this isn’t right and enough is enough.”
Programming For Dummies [NYO via BI]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
Time was, the MBA candidates at Harvard were by and large white boys of debatable attractiveness looking for a cushy gig at Goldman upon graduation. Those guys are still there. But know who else is too? Chicks! Good looking ones! Who don’t a rat’s ass about working on Wall Street. What praytell are they doing at HBS? Looking to get a leg up in the fashion world. For example, former model Olga Vidisheva. This her story.
…the 25-year-old Russian model with piercing green eyes and a 24-inch waist, struts into class, her fellow students at Harvard Business School snap up from their laptops. The 5-foot-8 stunner, who loves labels like Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, stands out in a sea of crew-cut, khaki-wearing nerds. After graduating from Wellesley in 2007, the beauty from Moscow logged two grueling years working at Goldman Sachs. “I really gave it a shot,” she sighs. Upon realizing that finance wasn’t for her, she enrolled at HBS for an unlikely reason—to get a leg up in the fashion world. She spent this past summer in a coveted internship with Chanel’s marketing department in New York and hopes to score a plum job in fashion after graduating in 2011.
And Olga’s not just some sort of freak accident. Apparently there are lots of Olga’s running around campus.
They are a growing breed of well-groomed, well-heeled women who know as much about modern capital markets as they do about hemlines; who strive to work in chic lofts in Dumbo rather than a trading floor on Wall Street; and who claim that forgoing a “serious” career as an i-banker to hawk beauty products and designer dresses marks them as a new breed of feminist. With their perfectly blow-dried locks and lip-glossed smiles, these women lend a new glamour to the fusty business school, famed for churning out financial eggheads like Michael Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.
But why Harvard? “Stanford’s too small, Kellogg [at Northwestern] is too far from any fashion hub and Wharton has such a focus on finance that I don’t know if you’d find enough people interested in retail,” Alexandra Nelson, class of 2010, told Page Six Magazine. “Harvard Business School is becoming the place for fashion.”
Harvard Goes High Fashion [NYP]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
