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Boohoo's Kamani family invest in fashion tech creative platform RangeRoom

Lauretta Roberts
18 July 2018

The Kamani family, the Manchester fashion dynasty behind the boohoo and PrettyLittleThing online fast fashion businesses, has invested in London-based fashion technology startup, RangeRoom.

Using the Kamani Capital Fund, which is headed by Adam Kamani who co-founded PrettyLittleThing with brother Umar, the Kamanis have joined a string of industry backers of the start-up, including New Look’s Tom Singh.

RangeRoom was launched in 2017 by Brendan Baldrey, who, following 15 years as a designer in the industry, identified the need for innovation in fashion technology that would allow all stakeholders – from designers to buyers, suppliers, manufacturers, brands and retailers – to collaborate more effectively to create ranges that not only respond to changes in the market, but drive them.

The technology aims to help fashion brands keep up with the pace of change that has resulted from the "see now buy now" culture that has been driven by the consumer's use of mobile technology and social media. Baldrey noted that many designers, buyers and product developers were still served by traditional, analogue supply chains and manual merchandising processes and systems.

As such many designers and brands have been "making important decisions blind", due to a lack of consistent information, and an inability to collaborate – in-house or out. This has resulted in a number of agile manufacturers crossing over and creating their own fast-fashion brands, of which boohoo is the prime example.

The business had been a client of RangeRoom from the start and Kamani said he saw the technology's potential early. “RangeRoom provides a solution to the digital disconnect between customer, retailer, and manufacturer, but also a visual collaboration platform for internal and satellite teams, a showroom for suppliers with direct-to consumer ambitions, a tool for transparency that caters to socially conscious consumers, and more," he said.

“RangeRoom is already doing amazing work and I’m confident in the vision of Brendan and the team and the future plans that I have seen that not only will I get a solid return on my investment in the coming years, but the platform will become paramount to driving innovation through the industry and addressing many of the challenges currently being faced,” Kamani added.

Baldrey added: “It’s fantastic that we have already secured the backing of a number of high calibre influencers within the industry who have put their faith in RangeRoom. The lack of options (and sometimes appetite) available across the industry to innovate, create efficiency and drive cost savings were the key challenges that we set out to address.

“We designed the solution for simple, secure collaboration and information-sharing - with the emphasis on ‘Visual’. Now RangeRoom offers centralised co-creation and communication features to enhance the development of products and collections across global cross-functional teams. All data is archived in one place, and is used to inform everything from in-house conversations about macro trends, tracking the progress of sample revisions with a supplier overseas, wholesaling to third party vendors and providing vital business insights and intelligence through the data points it collects. But this is just the beginning. Forget fast fashion – the future has to be about smart fashion.

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