This article was taken from the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Vivienne Westwood's Cut, slash and Pull dress was iconic in red -- but what if you wanted it in green? New York-based startup Tinker Tailor can help. Founded in May 2014 by Aslaug Magnúsdóttir, Matt Pavelle, Gabriel Levy and Cleo Davis-Urman, the e-commerce site lets you customise existing designer clothes using 3D tools. You can modify colours, silhouettes, fabrics and embellishments in collaboration with 105 designers, including Westwood, Marchesa, Rodarte and Giambattista Valli, and visualise the finished product -- something you can't do on the individual brands' sites.
Icelandic entrepreneur Magnúsdóttir cofounded the site to give female shoppers more control over their style. "The Middle East is a very important luxury retail market, for example," she says. "Women there are often concerned about covering their skin, so would like to add sleeves or lengthen hemlines."
Magnúsdóttir claims the average transaction values on the site are $1,500 (£1,000). Although the US market makes up 75 per cent of the buyers, the UK, Middle East and Russia are also major customers. Investors include Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia and Gilt Groupe founder Alexis Maybank. The startup recently launched its own brand of clothing for shoppers to create tops, dresses and skirts from scratch; it also offers a customisable accessories section for designer bags, shoes and jewellery. The Tinker Tailor own-brand clothing tool is the startup's proprietary tech. "We use digitisation and 3D-render programs such as Optitex and ClO3D to create the silhouettes, but we invented our system to let users mix and match components in real time," Magnúsdóttir says.
Next up: an ioses app, which includes a sharing feature. "We want every woman to have something unique," says Magnúsdóttir, "a wardrobe she can really make her own."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
