The Virtual Frontier
Driving a path for the future of the fashion industry, Ordre is championing one-of-a-kind technological innovation to bring new designers and the most influential fashion retailers together. Founder Simon Lock talks us through the company’s journey and how the pandemic transformed the virtual fashion space 98 emirateswoman.com
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IMAGE: SUPPLIED
WORDS:OLIVIA MORRIS
Can you talk us through your career prior to launching Ordre? I started in the fashion industry with a fashion marketing communications agency in Sydney, Australia, which quickly led to me working with a lot of fashion brands in Asia Pacific. Then we also opened an agency in New York primarily working for a lot of the emerging Australian designers at the time. I recognised the need for a fashion week to be held in the southern hemisphere, because there weren’t any at the time – there was really only London, Paris, Milan and New York. So I set about the task of establishing a new stop on the international fashion week circuit, which was an Australian Fashion Week, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary and has introduced a lot of international retailers and fans to Australian designers. It was interesting through that part of my life. We really became the goto company for developing fashion weeks around the world. And I was very proud of the fact that we were asked to assist on the development of Dubai Fashion Week for a couple of seasons. I was the creative director of Dubai Fashion Week, which was a fantastic opportunity. Then, about eight or nine years ago, we thought that the industry really needed to move much more rapidly towards digitisation, so we sold our physical businesses and started to focus exclusively on digital. And since then, the old group has launched down three technologies, specifically for the luxury fashion industry. Ordre virtual showrooms, which are day-to-day virtual showrooms, allow buyers to place orders for wholesale collections without having to fly all around the world to appointments. Also 360-degree view technology, which is now used by everyone from Louis Vuitton through to Alexander Wang, is probably the default technology in that business. And then we are just working on our new very exciting technology, which is an NFT marketplace called Authentic. And this will hopefully be the definitive fashion NFT marketplace. You launched Ordre in 2015 and it really is a game-changing concept. Where did the inspiration for the concept come from? The inspiration for Ordre really came from seeing the demise in buyers turning up at Australian fashion week come following the financial crisis, we saw the number of international buyers really plummet. And I just thought there needs to be a better way for designers to be able to present their collections to buyers, particularly when buyers can’t travel. So that led to developing web-
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2/1/22 11:25 AM
