Hello and welcome to Paris. For one day only, Business Daily is in what
is arguably the fashion capital of the world as part of our business series. I'm Hannah
Mullane and today I'll be walking the streets of this beautiful city, heading to some of its
fashion hotspots. I'm taking a look at how important the fashion industry really is.
There is always some kind of inspiration out there in the city. So it could be museums,
art galleries. You can see people in the streets wearing different things.
Here, the fashion industry is worth more than $160 billion. It makes up
almost 3% of the country's GDP and brings in more than a million jobs.
I have a lot of people coming from Milan or Italy or New York actually
now and London. And so, yeah, I think Paris is definitely the place to be for fashion.
Today, we'll find out why Paris is so important to the world of fashion, how the capital supports
fashion businesses, and why millions of tourists flock to the city every year for the
classic Parisian shopping experience. That's all coming up on today's episode of Business Daily.
My first stop is the Marais. It's an area just north of the River
Seine that runs through the centre of Paris, and it's full of thin streets,
lined with shops from independent boutiques to well-known French brands. And you don't have to
walk far before you find some of those vintage high end pieces. It certainly gives tourists the
Parisian experience they'd hoped for. But it's more than that for Linda Ciccarelli. For her,
it's a workplace. She's a personal shopper and has been taking tourists from all around
the world on shopping trips to the Marais for the last ten years. Today, she's taking me for a tour.
It's one of those places where also Parisians come and hang out like
it's very Parisian. So it's a charming little neighbourhood. And what I love about La Marais,
it's very diverse. So you find everything from tight budget to thrift shopping second
hand to luxury clothing lines. What I mean by luxury is none of those big brands like
Louis Vuitton. For those things it is more second hand. But you can find really nice,
high quality clothes, and it's not always the same brands that you can find everywhere. And also,
it's fun. It's like a gay Jewish area. So you find all kinds of different shops. And now we
are at a very nice boutique in the Marais. We usually come with mother and daughters,
and I always know that I have something prepare. We prepare something for you today.
Oh, exciting.
You have a few pieces. I think this will be looking great on you. The jumpsuit.
That is lovely.
The jumpsuit is everything. It's a saver for when you have one of those floating days. For what you
don't want to think about how shall I put my outfit for travelling? But you still want to
look stylish and nice. You can just set up with, like, high heels, sandals, sneakers. You will
always look great. I think this is a must for you. And that's what I felt when I was thinking
of you with the jumpsuit. And then we have all kinds of different, you know, more, you know,
for weekends hanging out, lounging. That's why the French do it so well. They are casual,
but they still look like they spend hours putting the outfit together. But it comes naturally.
And of course, you can not miss the stripes of the French. They could die with their stripes.
Okay, let's stop that before I spend every penny I have. Instead,
I ask Linda about the types of clients she has and what they want from a personalised shopping trip.
I have a lot of mother and daughters that come to Paris, especially from the US and Australia, and
when they come here, they really want to have like an effective time during two hours, they want to
absorb the Parisian fashion. But at the same time, they want to like, have like, you know, little
advices. They want to get out of the box and get like a cute Parisian outfit. That's where I come
in. I also do a lot of surprises for husbands. Like, there are a lot of men that are romantic.
It's nice to find out that. And I have to organise the more VIP experience for their wife. There's
usually a driver involved, a longer experience. Three, four hours, or maybe half of the day.
Tell me about the kind of budgets your clients come to you with and sort of how you manage that.
It could go very low. I’ve had people telling me I have €200, or they're saying $500 or I have €8000,
€30,000. So it goes very fast and it can go. Mother and daughters that have to pick them
up at the Ritz or mother and daughters would like a little of budget that they’ve saved during the
year. So I would ask them some questions about their lifestyle, where they live,
and I would try to really get an idea of their lifestyle through a photo. Like a photo is very
important for me. Because right away I would get, you know, their body shape and their style.
I'm not a psychic, but I can tell by looking at photo like the person kind of like fashion soul.
So whilst Linda's helping people find their fashion soul, I'm looking for some fashion
businesses. So I'm jumping on the metro and heading north of the city to the International
Fashion Academy. Peter Jeun Ho Tsang is the CEO of Beyond Form. He left the UK for Paris to set
up his company that works with and supports new fashion businesses starting out in the city. One
of his jobs is to run a fashion incubator. I asked him what this does for startups here.
Things like masterclasses, mentoring, introduction to our network. So that
could be potential investors, that could be to potential clients or anybody that a startup may
feel that they feel could have a meaningful and an engaging conversation with to get the idea off the
ground. And actually by being in a fashion school as well, of course we have a support network. Of
the school to be able to plug them into a module within an academic course, for example. Or it
could be putting them in a specific project to get them a little bit more visible in the industry.
So talk to me about some of the businesses that have come through the program.
In this specific school. There's around 50 nationalities in terms of some of the ideas,
it ranges anything from starting a tech company like could be a solution dealing with server
stock right through to fashion brands. So they want to create a collection and they
want to get it into a retailer. So we help them with the whole breadth of the fashion industry.
And how important are incubators in bringing new talent to Paris,
keeping the reputation of Paris as a place for fashion going.
We are fashion tech specific and I come from the UK, and when I first arrived in Paris,
I was really surprised that there wasn't much happening here. And for me, it's really important
to nurture some of these new and more innovative subjects that potentially are not necessarily
taught yet in fashion schools. So where do these founders go to? They want to do a set platform
or they want to do a service, for example, that isn't necessarily your mainstream fashion. Having
an incubator that allows them to explore those spaces is super, super vital and sends about
the more traditional elements, for example, like creating a fashion brand. When it comes to the
creative they’re not necessarily as hot, shall we say, in creating a business. And that's where we
will then come in and help them to think about, okay, your designs are great, but how do we put
that into a retail store? How do we get a buyer in front of you to look at your collection? I'm like,
okay, I want to buy X, Y, Z to put it into my store. Besides the hard skills that we can teach
them it's also about getting to think about those relational aspects as well within an incubator.
Paris is so well known for lots of big brands that have been around for a really,
really long time. They perhaps haven't had to rely on tech and new savvy things as
much because they have the reputation that they do. Do you think that meant
that Paris was a little bit behind in some of those kind of new advancements?
Well compared to London, I would definitely say yes. Obviously,
there are the biggest groups here, LVMH, Kering Group, who own brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton,
they are catching up. So they do obviously have their own business units that look into
innovation and technology. But compared to the UK, it wasn't necessarily up to speed.
Are there things that Paris does to kind of help businesses grow and support new business?
Paris has a lot of things here that will help them to do business eventually in the future.
Whether that is getting their first client in Paris or their first partnership, for example,
or it's about meeting X, Y, Z person because it is an international city. A lot of the mentors that
we work with don’t actually come from Paris as well, but they've also come to Paris for that same
experience. And then also to pass that knowledge on myself, being an expat coming from the UK, you
know, I chose to stay in Paris because of those same reasons that I can eventually create the
next evolution of an incubator slash my business within the city for Paris and France in general,
with the President Macron's startup agenda over the last term that he has come into office,
he's actually launched things like STATION F that is the Public Bank or BPI as well,
which does a lot of funding of startup ideas. And also there is the French tech visa. So
what does that mean specifically? If you are a foreigner, you want to come here to create
a tech led startup. You can actually get a talent passport to stay for four years, which is amazing,
to be honest. As long as you are affiliated with an incubator like foundry that you can actually
get the French tech visa. So there's a lot of the mechanics there helping the startup ecosystem.
One fashion brand making the most of the startup culture in Paris
and Peter’s Incubator program is FINDS. It's a tech platform that
helps fashion brands deal with excess stock. Andrea Herget is the co-founder.
So just to give you a little bit of context, like every third garment that
is produced today is not sold at full price or not sold at all. So obviously
that generates enormous economic but also ecological problem for the brands. Overall,
like 45 billion clothes yearly are not sold. So that generates season over season different
kinds of quantity, sizes, compositions to manage for brands to find like acquirers,
like the receiving party and the whole process is managed manually today. So basically what FINDS is
doing is taking out the complexity of unsold inventory management for brands and matching
them automatically to the right reseller recycler NGO. So we centralise all the aspects of unsold
inventory management into one dedicated platform so that the brands can optimise monetisation.
Tell me how you go about starting a business like that. You notice a problem,
you want to fix it, how do you go about doing that?
So we started in 2020. Pivoted multiple times. The first idea was to alter and repair clothes.
And then the pandemic happened, and we couldn't really have the service because we needed, like,
to measure the bodies, etc.. So we switched more to B2B, proposing a service to brands,
extending the life of the clothes. And then we started to see that brands have
like a big issue with unsold inventories. We saw that this is like a common problem,
and today there isn't really a tool that's helping them to manage that. Still,
you need a network ecosystem, and that's where we joined Foundry. We knew that we need like help.
How did programs like the Foundry and then other programs that you've
gone on to since help you, what kind of things could they offer?
So the foundry was a good start because it's fashion techs. We needed industry specialists who
can help us and give like insights on the fashion industry. But then also, like business people,
entrepreneurs who can give us help on any topic, you know, like legal stuff or like
how to create financial forecasting or how to do a marketing plan. Like, you need so many skills.
How significant was being in Paris to starting up the business?
Last year, France has prohibited the destruction of unsold clothes as the
first country in the world. And actually the EU is right now talking about to prohibit it
for the EU. And that will of course even give another push for the brands to act faster and
to be more transparent about their stocks and everything. There are a lot of luxury
and fashion groups here. So also now we are approaching a lot of French brands to
use FINDS as a solution. It's a good start, but we want to be global and we feel like
this solution needs to be global because the stocks are everywhere in the world.
The allure of Paris is certainly attracting entrepreneurs like Andrea and Peter. The city
itself remains the most visited in the world, according to the Paris ils-de-France Regional
Tourism Board, 44 million people visited the city last year, contributing more than $35
billion to the city's economy. Of course, not all of those visitors come for fashion, but it does
mean there's plenty of opportunity and opportunity that Simona Foti took advantage of. She moved from
Italy to Paris to work in fashion, and she now runs her own fashion agency business, a business
that she says would have been much more difficult to set up had she not made the move to France.
So my role as an agent is to find clients for my stylists and bring clients and deal
with all the contract, the agenda, the priority and of course, the strategy.
So I work with the brand clients that asked me to give some ideas for a collaboration,
or maybe they are looking for something specific, like our sportswear talents
or men's also. And I bring some ideas, some names, so this is what I'm doing.
It's a job that lots of people want to do. They want to get into the fashion
industry. How do you go about doing what you do? How do you get to that place?
I started very young, like a PR, and so I met the good people and I started my career like
an agent when I would say 15 years ago. And now I have my own company. So it was interesting. I
was same processing, but I think, yeah, it's a nice job, but you need to have this skill also
like a commercial skill that is important to have. And of course, a lot of passion.
You're not from Paris originally, you are from Italy. What made you choose to come to Paris
to work and start your business in Paris rather than Milan or London or somewhere?
Because I think it is the city to be to work in fashion. So I have a
lot of people coming from Milan, Italy or New York actually now,
and London. So yeah, I think Paris is definitely the place to be for fashion.
Why do you think Paris is the place to be over those other
sort of fashion cities? What makes it stand out?
I think the creativity that is here. But also I would say there's a lot
of opportunities. There's a lot of open minded that is very interesting.
Is it easy to start a business like yours in Paris?
I would say yes, because I would say the French industry is helping the young to open companies,
small company like mine. So I would say yes, definitely. Just go for it because it is a very,
very interesting and creative business. So be really focused, have a vision and just if you
like and you love what you are you doing I'm sure that you will succeed for sure.
Simona Foti there, just one of many business owners working in the fashion
industry here in Paris, ending this episode of Business Daily. Thanks for listening.