She started thinking about how technology could help make work more efficient and easier to scale. She landed on Sourced By, Waller’s new AI-powered technology platform that makes life easier for fashion purveyors by providing an all-in-one platform to manage product requests, inventory, and payments. It is intended to.
“I know all the problems,” Waller said. Every day was, and still is, a test for her. For the HeadStart team, the AI services business that built the software, this expertise is important. “When you have people with unique skill sets and you apply AI technology to what they want to do, that combination becomes very powerful,” said Chris Hedley, who runs Head Start with his sister Nicole. I say. Waller’s experience convinced her first investor, Emil Tal of Pentas Ventures, to join her.
Now, Waller has announced the first round of funding, which will begin this month. The goal is to secure $1 million, and the first action item will be based on feedback from saucers and shoppers (people who buy Saucer’s requested items; Waller calls them her). Hiring a founding engineer to lead the development of the platform. “Procurement Assistant”) is currently trialling this technology.
The timing is right, experts agree. According to Bain, the personal luxury goods market is expected to grow from €540 billion to €580 billion by 2030, double the market in 2019 (estimated at €281 billion). Pentas Ventures estimates that fashion sourcing makes up an estimated 5% of the industry. This market size was the deciding factor in Tal’s contract. “The direct market that Sourced By addresses is a huge one.”
The timing of the technique will also be adjusted. Headstart CEO and founder Nicole Hedley says this would not have been possible two years ago. That’s because Soured By is built on multimodal capabilities (the ability to read images), combined with large-scale language models (LLMs) to structure this data. Sourced By capabilities have only been brought to market within the past year by Open AI and others. This is an indicator of how AI is impacting back-end work in fashion.
That said, AI search and labeling has flaws. While this technology eliminates human error in data entry and recording, it still precludes the human eye from identifying products. That’s why Sourced By provides both editing options and a notes section to correct the results and add clarity if necessary. This will teach the AI to have fewer errors by the time it launches.
Solving problems
Waller’s main problem is the amount of manual labor it takes to source a single item. It’s not the search itself, but the logistics of documenting, tracking, invoicing, and recording payments.