StyleHop Corp.

 StyleHop Our mission is to be the #1 fashion destination for wisdom-of-crowd industry analytics.

David Reinke, Founder & President.  David Reinke is a versatile general manager with fifteen years experience in brand marketing, sales and operations within the consumer products and apparel industries.  A true leader with a brand management mindset, Reinke has a proven track record of delivering results with fresh ideas and a clear focus on execution.  Prior to founding StyleHop Corp, he spent five years at Liz Claiborne. He was hired by the CEO after completing his MBA and accelerated through roles in operations, production, strategy, sales and planning. His last job at Liz was Vice President of DKNY Jeans where he managed a $70mm budget authorizing and negotiating all trade spending.  Additionally, he had responsibility for all new business development for the brand.  While completing his MBA at Harvard, David was the President of the Retail & Apparel Club.  Before business school David worked at Procter & Gamble in sales and brand management.

Gopal Pillai, Managing Partner - Operations.  Gopal Pillai is a results-focused executive with over thirteen years expertise in delivering innovative scalable digital products for both entrepreneurial and mature firms, balancing strategic priorities with evolving market needs. Gopal currently heads product management for BusinessWeek Digital.  Prior to BusinessWeek, Gopal co-founded an early stage technology startup with a focus on providing implementation and integration services for best of breed SaaS software firms. Gopal has held leadership roles in management consulting and technology services firms.  Gopal completed his MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from University of Madras, India.

Andrew King, PhD, Managing Advisor  - Analytics.  Andrew is an Associate Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Andrew’s research topics include technological discontinuities and disruptions and knowledge spillovers.  Andrew holds a PhD in management from MIT.

Beth Regan, Managing Advisor – Business Development.  Beth has fourteen years experience as a business development executive at Liz Claiborne, Tommy Hilfiger and Mossimo Inc.  She has consistently used her deep analytical and planning skills to develop and implement revenue driving growth strategies in collaboration with her customers.

THE PROBLEM: Matching supply with demand is the biggest challenge facing every fashion company today.  Fashion companies currently rely on individual merchants to determine which styles to produce and in which quantities.  It is their inconsistent qualitative judgments that contribute to the wildly erratic financial results prevalent in the industry.  Approximately $.25 of every full price dollar in fashion is lost in markdowns due to the inability to predict consumer demand accurately. 

THE SOLUTION:  StyleHop provides the fashion industry with a consumer-driven forecasting tool to capture value currently lost in markdowns.  Scalable, fast-turnaround forecasts designed exclusively for the fashion industry systematically improve merchant-driven demand forecasting leading to lower markdowns and increased profits. 

BUSINESS MODEL: StyleHop’s business model is comprised of 3 key value drivers that provide significant competitive advantage and create substantial ROI for its customers:

·          Predictive Panelists – StyleHop is creating a proprietary consumer panel leveraging StyleHop.com and agreements with other large destination websites that serve our target segments.  Our affinity panels are a competitive advantage which yield best-in-class response rates from highly screened, predictive fashion consumers.  We use an engaging forecasting game to collect the data that feeds our forecasting algorithms.

·          Proprietary Analytics – We have developed a proprietary demand forecasting methodology incorporating consumer preferences, risk and other proprietary measures. StyleHop is successfully building data history that allows us to continuously improve, validate and excel in predictive forecasting analytics.

·          Deep Industry Knowledge – Our significant insider knowledge of the fashion industry and its idiosyncrasies provides a meaningful advantage in designing, marketing and implementing a demand forecast tool that offers a significant improvement over traditional qualitative fashion forecasting.   StyleHop’s studies are web-based (no IT involvement) and designed to be simple, lightweight tools with 72-hour turnaround time.  Our studies supplement current merchant qualitative decision making and require no changes to current processes. 

On the industry side, StyleHop has no current competition from technology players trying to improve style-level demand forecasting in short cycle fashion.  We anticipate market research firms leveraging predictive market tools may pose the biggest threat.  However, our significant insider knowledge of the fashion industry and its idiosyncrasies gives us a meaningful advantage in designing, marketing and implementing a demand forecast tool to suitably complement traditional qualitative fashion forecasting.  First-mover benefits are also available to StyleHop by successfully building data history that allows us to continuously improve, validate and excel in demand forecasting analytics versus future competition.