The Tamesis
Welcome to The Scoop: a weekly email series in which I ask fashion insiders about the week’s stories. This will be a way for the Vogue business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines every Friday and get a little inside scoop.
This week’s guest is Leanne Elliott Young, CEO of IoDF. In 2020, Leanne co-founded what was then the Digital Fashion Institute with Cattytay as a technology consultancy for fashion brands. Essentially, their goal is to help people like you and me understand what things like Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are and how to use them.
Leanne is also a very well-known figure in the London fashion industry. She always dresses for grand, sculptural fashion moments, and with her signature long white-blonde hair and alien sunglasses, she looks like the CEO of a tech company. I called her before London Fashion Week (LFW) to get the scoop.
Hi Leanne! What is a scoop?
We launched a new entity, the IoDF Platform, focused on DPP. This is a new business independent of the IoDF (the agency) and it means a lot to us. For LFW, we wanted to build something that could demonstrate our new model to the DPP.
We looked at the London Fashion Week schedule and designer Maximilian Raynor was a gem of a show that fit exactly what we were looking for. We care about people and the planet, and how we can bring more people into the Fashion Week experience. We contacted Max and together we will release 20 limited edition hats for the upcoming London Fashion Week. Each hat comes with a snapshot of the IoDF DPP system, which in this case allows consumers to attend the brand’s LFW after-show party. We also really like the idea of body tilting your hat to get through doors.
In addition to attending a party, will the cap lead you to a website?
Snapshot DPP acts as a portal. You scan and connect directly to the IoDF system, which verifies that the product belongs to you. It serves as your ticket, with additional branded gifts as rewards for scanning. We don’t replace CRMs, Shopify or resale platforms; we sit on top of them and activate product identity in these systems.
Resale is especially important because so many brands are losing out to resale these days. If you look at a brand like Rick Owens, you buy something in the store and then the value of it is much higher on the resale platform due to scarcity. The brand gained nothing. So for us, it’s really about increasing the ROI on brand resale. With DPP, brands not only know how many products they sold, but also how many times they resold them.
It’s really interesting that you chose Maximilian Renault as your partner. I personally loved the outfit he designed for Lisa Rinna at the Fashion Awards, but regardless, his name is getting bigger. How do you know what is the right talent to invest in?
I’ve been with LFW for a long time and I have a lot of affection for all the designers. We launched the IoDF Creators Fund to support that, but as you said, I spend time in the London community, arts, fashion and tech, and when you see people outside of London’s arts scene wearing them, you really know there’s someone going to make a ripple. The arts and music communities are always the first adopters of cool zeitgeist brands.
Artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence… this is the theme of this year and this century. I know you guys at IoDF are early adopters. How would you recommend other business leaders and brands adopt this to manage their teams?
