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.
How did you get the idea for your business?
The idea was born three years ago while I was working in banking, and I was a passionate fashion consumer, but I was also trying to find a way to change how people shop for fashion, especially shop for emerging designers. I had two very good friends at the time, and they had left the big fashion houses they used to work for and were setting up their own label, so I was helping them as an investor. I invested personally, and I also invested my time and effort into the business. I realised that to grow a brand from its inception to a marketable, reputable brand, how much effort there is. And then the biggest problem for designers of that calibre is really getting the products out there to the market and getting people to know about their brands. And then from the consumer’s point of view I very often find that I pay such a high price for a piece of clothing that doesn’t have such good quality.
So I thought, how can I find the solution to solve the problem from both sides of the equation. And Kickstarter I remember was super popular and then I remembered reading an article in the Evening Standard that said one London jeans factory based in East London were recruiting all the employees that had been redundant because lots of fashion production jobs had moved away from the UK. So the Kickstarter campaign was to really launch a UK-based jeans brand and recruit local employees. They raised £80,000 for that project, and I thought wow this is a great concept because with the power of the crowd you can actually make things happen.
How do you find the designers?
I was very lucky that I got lots of good support from people in the industry. So when I first started Curated Crowd, purely as a project, I approached people at the British Fashion Council. For me I come from a finance background, I really don’t have that much connection to the fashion industry.
Was that ever a problem?
Initially there was some resistance, but I’ve learnt that if you believe in what you do and are persistent, people are willing to help. I spoke to individuals from the British Fashion Council and also the Fashion Trust to tell them my idea and they loved it- especially Tania Fares, she’s the founder of Fashion Trust, and she invited me to become a member to get to know the designers and also to become a part of the community.
How did you go about finding designers?
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.
Are the designers always changing or are some constant?
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.
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