Our Woman to follow of the week is 34-year-old Katrina Lake's founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, a online fashion subscription company. Her secret: entwining technology and fashion to help women discover their own sense of style.
Picking up an outfit for an important business meeting or the dress to impress at a party can be quite the task for people everywhere, regardless of how many clothes you have hanging on your closet. But, would you let an algorithm tell you what to wear? For Katrina Lake the answer is a definite yes. The San Francisco-Based business-woman is the CEO and Founder of Stitch Fix, an online fashion subscription service that uses data science to provide customers a personalized styling experience.
Prior to launching Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake was a blog manager for fashion e-commerce Polyvore and served as an associate at The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, and at Leader Ventures, a venture capital firm. Like many other women entrepreneurs, she began her business at home, while still a student at Harvard University’s M.B.A. Program. Her idea was to help women find their own style by offering a client-focused shopping experience. For that, she follows a simple yet effective piece of styling advice.
“Don’t be afraid to stick to a uniform. Finding a silhouette and color palette that really works for you and flatters your body makes it so much easier to get dressed, and ensures you’ll leave the house feeling great every day,” says Katrina on Stitch Fix website.
The Stitch Fix experience begins with a quiz, where customers can detail their style, fit and price preferences and create an account. Then, a personal stylist curates five pieces of clothing, shoes or jewellery for them to try at home, according to the preferences detected by the company’s algorithms. Customers only buy the clothes they like. If they don’t like the selection or need a different size fit, they can send the clothes back to Stitch Fix with no further shipping costs. Styling services cost a $20 fee, while the items range from $20 to $450, all according to the customer’s price selection.
The fashion retailer holds about 2.2 million active customers and reported numbers of $997 million in sales over the current fiscal year. On November 17th 2017, Stitch Fix made its IPO debut at Nasdaq, raising its market capitalization to over $2.1 billion in roughly ten days, according to Forbes. This was the only tech IPO led by a woman this year and is poised to make the company’s CEO Katrina Lake into one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women and one of the youngest as well, at only 34-years-old. She's also was ranked 22nd on Fortune's 40 under 40 list, an annual ranking of the world's most influential young people in business, topped by the likes of French President Emmanuel Macron and Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Stitch Fix also goes beyond personal styling. The company’s website has a blog called Multithread, where they discuss digital technologies like data engineering and algorithms, as well as other data science topics.
For more information, visit Stitch Fix’ website.
Photo courtesy of Stitch Fix.