SwatchOn, a fashion fabric aggregator, announced Thursday it has secured $10 million in additional funding, which included an investment from Pavilion Capital, Kakao Ventures and TBT Partners.
With this significant strategic investment, SwatchOn plans to develop new initiatives focused on revolutionizing digital fashion. SwatchOn aims to provide new ways for fashion designers to highlight their creativity and share their collections with the world.
This new focus will begin to carry the company into the future of real-life fashion (IRL) and digital fashion (URL). The company’s upcoming roadmap is set to include soon-to-be-announced initiatives in digital fashion, metaverse wearables, NFTs, digital fabric, AR and virtual experiences.
“We are grateful for our investor’s support and excited for the opportunity to expand our direction into digital fashion,” said SwatchOn co-founder and CEO Will Lee. “There is a shift in values in how Gen Z is consuming fashion and SwatchOn wants to be a leader with these emerging trends. We saw firsthand how economies of scale made it difficult for smaller brands to compete with their larger counterparts. Fortunately, in the virtual world, that is not the case. We want to create a digital fashion marketplace that will level the playing field and give emerging brands the opportunity to share their creativity with a broader audience.”
Kakao Ventures senior associate Hyunik Cho said SwatchOn has set itself apart by streamlining fabric supply chains and creating opportunities for designers both large and small.
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“Led by an expert team of industry veterans, we believe in their ability to create the same experience in digital fashion,” Cho said. “Along with SwatchOn’s stable growth in [its] fabric sourcing platform, we expect their new vision in digital fashion will create a strong synergy effect, and we look forward to helping them drive that mission forward.”
Since its inception in 2017, SwatchOn, a member of the CFDA Materials Hub, has grown to serve a range of fashion brands, including independent labels, mid-size brands and some of the world’s largest apparel manufacturers, by digitizing the fabric sourcing process. This innovative platform brings the South Korean wholesale textile industry online, connecting hundreds of thousands of fabric products to more than 17,000 brands around the globe.
SwatchOn has streamlined the fabric supply chain, allowing designers to quickly search and access over 200,000 textiles from 750 different suppliers on its free, members-only website, SwatchOn.com. SwatchOn boasts one of the largest digital fabric libraries in the world in compliance with CLO3D software, SwatchOn’s partner and Series B investor. In addition to its dedicated Eco-Forward fabric section, SwatchOn ships in eco-friendly packaging to 52 countries worldwide.