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 working with a lot of fashion brands in Asia Pacific and 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 really a fashion week to be held in the southern hemisphere, which there wasn’t any at the time – there was really only London, Paris, Milan and New York. So I said about the task of establishing a new stop on the international fashion week circuit, which was an Australian Fashion Week, which is just celebrated its 25th anniversary and really has introduced a lot of international retailers and fans to Australian designers. It was interesting though that part of my life, we really became the go-to 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 weekend 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 really thought that the industry really needed to move much more rapidly towards digitisation, and we sold our physical build businesses, and we started to focus exclusively digitally. 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, which allow buyers to place orders for wholesale collections without having to fly all around the world to appointments. Also all 360-degree technology which is 360-degree view technology is now used by everyone from Louis Vuitton through to Alexander Wang and 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, well, 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 status on the pathway developing or virtual, we will probably be ahead of the curve in developing web-based virtual showrooms. And it really took a pandemic for the industry to really embrace this new technology because all the buyers couldn’t travel anymore. But designers still had a need to be able to present new season’s collections. So virtual showrooms are now a must-have for every major fashion designer in the world. And I’m really pleased that we’re the industry leaders in this sector.

How have things evolved since you launched Ordre?

Well, I think it’s interesting, I think the speed of digitisation has really accelerated. I think the pandemic has really been a major factor in that the fashion industry are wild prides itself on its innovation and creativity is really has been really slow to embrace new technologies. But I think when they were disconnected physically from their customers, during the pandemic bet consumer customers or their retailers that sold their product, they realised how important digitisation was in every part of the business. And we’ve seen a huge acceleration in the last 24 months.

How have you seen the technology being used by Ordre further enhance the relationship between designers and fashion retailers?

I think what’s really important with old virtual showrooms is for over a while to build a beautiful showroom. But you really got to understand the product that’s in it. And we developed our old 360 tech which really allows buyers to come into a virtual showroom and to see products in 360 to spin them around to see every aspect and to be able to zoom in on the detail. So this is really what made the buyers feel very comfortable about placing wholesale orders. We’ve now seen a lot of designers that we work with, particularly people like Luber time, really embrace all 360 in e-commerce because it’s just as applicable for consumers. Consumers want to understand the product and be more engaged online. And so we’ve seen great growth in all 360 minutes slowly.