Fashion GPS, an online software company that specializes in events, samples and other PR management solutions for the fashion industry, announced Wednesday that it has raised $4 million in Series A financing from Ironfire Capital, among other investors. It plans to use the funds to open offices in Hong Kong and Milan, ramp up hiring and accelerate the development of consumer-facing products.
Headquartered in New York, Fashion GPS also has offices in London, Paris, and Sydney. The company's current suite of products includes GPS Events, which allows users to manage event invitations, checkins and seating assignments; GPS Samples, used for inventory tracking and management; GPS Styles, a lookbook creator for press; and GPS Reporting, designed to help PR professionals asses the performance of a sample or campaign.
This is the second round of funding Fashion GPS has raised. The company raised more than $1 million in seed funding in 2011 from investors including actor Ashton Kutcher, Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby and High Line Ventures partner Shana Fisher. It has been profitable for about a year, founder and CEO Eddie Mullon tells Mashable.
The company has a rather fabulous genesis story. It began more than seven years ago, the day that Mullon was called into the office of KCD Worldwide, a fashion public relations firm that represents clients like Marc Jacobs and Chanel. Mullon wasn't there to start a new division at the company: He was there to fix someone's virus-infected computer, which he did in about 10 minutes.
Soon, word of Mullon spread, and he made regular appearances at KCD when IT issues arose. "Eventually, they asked me to build a simple software tracking system for them," he recalled in a phone interview with Mashable on Monday. "I didn't know what fashion was, but I learned quickly. As I started to see all the things that were inefficient, I started building products [to improve them]," he says. Those products became the foundation of Fashion GPS, now one of the leading b2b technology providers in the fashion industry.
Though Fashion GPS's roots are in inventory management — helping designers and publicists track product samples as they move between buyers, stylists and editors — its greatest accomplishment has been the reorganization of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. A half decade ago, Fashion Week attendees worked their way into shows with pasteboard invitations stating their seat assignments. Long queues often formed to get into shows, and there was no way for fashion companies to track whom on their RSVP lists had actually shown up.
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Today, attendees' receive invitations, seat assignments and checkin barcodes via e-mail. When they arrive at Lincoln Center, they need only open up Fashion GPS's Radar iPhone app or approach a barcode-scanning kiosk to check in. They're seated faster, and the show organizers are able to tell who came and who said they would but skipped. The whole experience — invitations, RSVPs, seating assignments, checkins — is powered by Fashion GPS.
The company currently has about 40 employees and plans to hire 12 more people in the next year, Mullon says. In additional to targeting companies in the Asia-Pacific region and Milan, Mullon says he wants to develop products that help fashion industry professionals communicate not only with one another, but also with consumers — helping them distribute looks and gauge responses to runway looks before buyers make their purchasing decisions every fashion week, for example.
Image: Thos Robinson/Stringer/Getty Images
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