Thirty-four year-old Chinese-born entrepreneur Ada Yi Zhao combined her knowledge of finance and love of fashion to create Curated Crowd, the world’s first integrated crowdfunding and e-commerce platform for emerging designers. Ada took what she had learned working at the world’s top banks, from Lehman Brothers to Barclays, and applied it to the slightly softer world of high-end retail. Working direct-to-consumer with young designers, Ada has created an online community where the designers earn more and the consumer pays less. The only stipulation for working with Ada’s team is the quality of conviction behind your brand. Forbes Lifestyle recently caught up with Ada to discuss growing a profitable business with a 10 month-old, why the retail world is stuck in the 1960s and how she’s shaking it all up.
Fashion Square: How did you go about finding designers?
Ada Yi Zhao: I found the designers from three different sources. One is just by talking to them at their showrooms during London Fashion Week or at showrooms during the fashion weeks around the world. I travel quite a lot. The other way of finding our designers is by looking at Instagram and Facebook and the magazines- because these days there is so much new information coming up every day and we reach out to them when we see the design or the stories we like. The third is really just by word of mouth because you talk to one designer and she’ll say I have other friends who are doing this or friends from different backgrounds who say they have friends who are designers. It’s a community and people are genuinely willing to help.
FS: Are the designers always changing or are some constant?
AYZ: We have both. We have two areas on the platform. One is called the campaign area, so ones that are time limited, each campaign is around for two months. So that’s basically a limited-edition launch to grab at a discounted rate to retail. The other part of our website is called the atelier, which is just the shop front that every designer can set up and that’s not time sensitive, so as a designer they have the full flexibility to decide when they want to pull back or change the stock levels and merchandise. The main benefits to the designer are that we are not driven by seasons or stock levels, so it’s completely up to the designer what they would like to present to the audience. We often encourage them to commercialise the entire portfolio they have, it can be just a sketch. We believe art and fashion are entwined and anyone who wants to buy the sketch gets an original piece of work.
FS: How do you communicate the stories behind each brand?
AYZ: We have a content curation team at Curated Crowd, and we encourage the designers to tell us as much as possible about themselves. I always meet and talk with the designers in person. I like getting to know them on a personal level. If you look at a designer on Curated Crowd you will find that we present them as an artist, as if you go to a gallery with the curator’s note. We want to bring back the whole artist and patron model, so when you buy into something you’re buying the whole concept for the artwork.
FS: What does a typical work day look like?
AYZ: There’s not really a typical day. I get up at 6.30am and I do my workout between 6.45-7.15am, and then I drop off my son who is 10 months old at nursery at 7.30am. Then my day starts with checking emails and calling designers. I do that for two hours and then I get off the phone and have a meeting with my team and I work until 1-1.30pm. I pick up my son Henry and he comes home for an afternoon sleep and that’s when I catch-up with my emails again and do meetings. In the afternoon when my energy levels are low I tend to do a lot of calls. In the evening I always cook dinner for Henry because I don’t want to buy anything that’s premade. So between 6pm and 8pm it’s cooking time for Henry and putting him to bed. After 8pm I try not to work but inevitably I have to spend two more hours in front of a computer. I try to go to bed before 12am, and if I’m lucky I can do that, if not it can be open ended.
FS: How are you staying on top of what consumers want?
AYZ: I think that’s where the technology angle can come in very nicely. I just came back from the advertising league conference, and so much is about AR and AI. I think some people think computers are going to take over the human brain but I disagree. I think we have to use it to our advantage, so how I look at the brand curation now is that 80% of our brands are currently from handpicked or human brains making the decision, and 20% of that is actually coming from our Instagram feed, Facebook feed. So direct to consumer, Instagrammable brands are becoming more popular and part of our product curation is focusing on that. Once we grow bigger and bigger we are going to introduce the AR and AI element to really find out what our consumers like and what are the patterns out there in the market so we pick the right products. Beyond that we want to build Curated Crowd as a brand in itself, so if there is a designer out there who has launched his or her career through Curated Crowd, I want people to say wow she/he is a Curated Crowd brand/designer. So we want to give that quality stamp.
FS: Tell me about your future plans?
AYZ: The five-year plan is to build Curated Crowd as the leading marketplace for people who want to discover not only good-quality emerging fashion but also for interior design and also soft furnishing in general. I think people now care more about the quality of living and how they dress themselves and how they are surrounding themselves with beautiful things. Also, they are craving that personal connection. So I think Curated Crowd strives to be the destination for that. Looking beyond that with my finance hat on, obviously it’s to draw on the connection between Europe and China. That generation is changing so rapidly; they don’t want mega brands anymore, and when they come to Europe they are looking for small niche brands that are hard to find in China. So, I think Curated Crowd can be the perfect link between the two countries, helping the Chinese consumer to find the up-and-coming young brands here and vice versa. A designer no longer has to be from a rich family or know the right people to launch a brand. If you have the people to back you, who like you, you can launch collection after collection. Equally, if I like a designer, I can just buy directly from her or from him. It’s basically like how in the 1960s the great artists were founded and fuelled by their patrons.