ShihYun Kuo and her business partner Lorenzo Albrighi, were spurred to create Lablaco after witnessing fast fashion’s excessive waste. We talk to them about how they use blockchain technology to digitise the fashion industry, and how they are short circuiting the industry’s wasteful production cycles
Startup Lablaco is digitising the fashion industry, using blockchain to make second-hand luxury clothing traceable and short circuiting the industry’s wasteful production cycles.
Founded by Gen.T honouree ShihYun Kuo and her business partner Lorenzo Albrighi, were spurred to create Lablaco after witnessing fast fashion’s excessive waste.
Since its beginnings in 2016, Lablaco has partnered with some of the biggest names in the fashion industry, including The Lane Crawford Joyce Group, Alibaba, Unilever, Swarovski and H&M.
With the coronavirus wreaking havoc to their plans to host a Circular Fashion Summit, the duo innovated once again by recreating the entire summit in virtual reality—a first of its kind. The VR summit replicated the Grand Palais, a historic Parisian exhibition hall often used by Chanel for its fashion shows. Through avatars, participants were able to watch talks while also networking with other attendees from around the world.
Here, we talk to ShihYun and Albrighi about their work, the summit and the future of fashion.
Can you introduce Lablaco?
Lorenzo Albrighi “We create a circular fashion platform for customers to pass from consumption to ownership of their garments. The blockchain is an encrypted technology that enables you to create a timeline history of events that cannot ever be modified. So long story short, as a customer, it's an end-to-end transparency system, where I can see who's the manufacturer, I can see who is the brand, I can see who is the retailer and if I’m the second customer I can also see who the first customer was. Every layer of the product journey is traced in layers of blockchain, making it impossible, for example, to modify what happened before. That's the valuable part—there's no counterfeit. There is no way of saying that this garment was owned by Justin Bieber if it wasn't. Using a QR code or an NFC chip I can just open my camera, scan the product and receive all this information.”
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What sparked your interest in making the fashion industry more sustainable?
Albrighi “I was a bespoke tailor and designer before starting Lablaco, and after creating my first ready-to-wear collection I became more familiar with the ready-to-wear fashion industry. That’s when I learnt a lot about the issues in [the fashion] industry—it’s one of biggest polluting industries in the world.”
ShihYun Kuo “For me, my background is in merchandising and buying management for Giorgio Armani. At the same time, I was also helping some independent designers via consulting, helping them to understand how to go to market and basically sell their collections. So, I had the ability to see it both from a corporate point of view and an independent perspective. It was around 2012 or 2013 that we began to see the role of social media in changing how customers were consuming fashion—it was becoming a lot more digitised. That was when we started to realise that there should be a platform that helps designers and brands to digitise their products and trace the data of the products. Soon after, Lablaco was born.”