Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
DOLCE & GABBANA CEO READY TO OPEN CAPITAL TO NEW INVESTORS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Reuters
🗣 “We are now ready to consider opening our capital to third parties through a listing or other financial instruments,” CEO Alfonso Dolce said in an interview published on Monday in Corriere della Sera’s L’Economia weekly supplement.
📈 Dolce & Gabbana’s revenue for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, which ended in March, was up 17 percent to €1.871 billion ($2.04 billion), said Dolce, adding that he hoped to repeat this growth this year.
🏪 The fashion house will open 12 new stores in the US, including at 695 Madison Avenue in New York, the former Hermès location, with more than 2,000 square metres over five floors.
🌎 “The United States are vital, we already have 72 stores, plus four in Canada, together they represent 28 percent of our turnover, compared to 16 percent in China,” said Dolce.
GEN Z FEELS GUILTY OVER LAST SUMMER'S SPENDING, CITING DINING OUT AS A MAJOR REASON | [COMMONWEALTH]
WWD
⛱ When it comes to Generation Z, the cohort continues to surprise retailers with their general attitudes toward money, spending and taking on debt. A new report titled “Gen Z Money Manners Report 2024” by Cash App examines how the cohort’s consumer behavior sentiments toward summer spending, the costs associated with weddings and more.
📊 Fifty-three percent of Gen Z surveyed said they have spent beyond their means. Moreover, 79 percent of people surveyed said they have some regret from spending too much last summer — with 42 percent of people citing dining out as the most common reason.
👯 As previously reported by WWD, Gen Z has also continued to experience losing friendships over money — 73 percent of the demographic reported that they had at least one negative experience due to cost sharing with friends. Eighty percent of Gen Z went on to say that they’re stressed about going on vacation with friends because of this.
🗣 “Gen Z was raised in an era of clear communication and naming their boundaries,” Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, financial therapist at Cash App told WWD. “This has translated into their relationship with money and friends.”
👰 Overspending on weddings and related activities and trips has also become a major source of stress. Forty percent of Gen Z said that they feel it’s “inappropriate to ask attendees to pay their share of a large bill that may be out of their means.” Bryan-Podvin notes that Gen Z is a generation that is value-driven and empathetic, driving them to challenge the status-quo assumption that friends should “suck it up” and spend more money than they’re comfortable with or incur debt for major life events such as weddings.
DUBAI FASHION WEEK TO RETURN IN SEPTEMBER | [FASHION SYSTEM]
FashionUnited
👚Dubai Fashion Week (DFW), co-founded by D3 and the Arab Fashion Council, has announced it will return for spring/summer 2025, ahead of New York Fashion Week from September 1 to 7.
💥The preliminary SS25 schedule features more than 30 established and emerging designers from France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Palestine, Russia, the UAE and the UK.
👯They will showcase streetwear and haute couture collections alongside internationally acclaimed guest designers, which will be announced shortly. In the past, the guest designers have included Carolina Herrera designed by Wes Gordon, Iris van Herpen, Jean Paul Gaultier, Antonio Marras, Blumarine, and Moschino.
🏛DFW will be held at Dubai Design District (D3) alongside a wider citywide events calendar featuring 40 invite-only presentations, private dinners and collection launches hosted by global brands and industry stakeholders.
📅The first three days of DFW SS25 will focus on haute couture collections and the final three days will showcase ready-to-wear collections by designers such as Alia Bastamam, April & Alex, Benang Jarum, BLSSD, Lama Jouni, Mrs. Keepa, Dima Ayad, Born in Exile, Buttonscarves, Choice, Heaven Lights, Riva, Viva Vox, and Weinsanto, presented and supported by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the governing body behind Paris Fashion Week.
LEGENDARY VENTURE CAPITALIST MIKE MAPLES HAS REVEALED THE ONE THING WORLD-CHANGING STARTUPS HAVE IN COMMON. USE IT TO SPOT THE NEXT WINNERS IN THE AGE OF EXPONENTIAL TECH | [SINGULARITY]
Fortune
🤖 Today, exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and synthetic biology are redefining what’s possible. These rapidly advancing fields create inflection points that can transform industries overnight—and pattern breakers are uniquely positioned to create solutions that address these global challenges.
ℹ By combining inflections (pivotal environmental changes) and insights (non-obvious truths about how these changes can be harnessed), breakthrough ideas can be created. For example, the introduction of the GPS chip in smartphones enabled Uber and Lyft. The insight that people would trust staying in strangers’ homes, combined with smartphone technology, led to Airbnb. Similarly, the advent of cloud computing allowed small startups to scale rapidly without massive upfront infrastructure investments, paving the way for companies like Dropbox and Slack to revolutionize how we store and share information.
💡 Inflection theory challenges the conventional wisdom of first analyzing large markets for unmet customer needs. While the approach of initially targeting sizable markets may seem logical, it rests upon a flawed assumption, Maples and Ziebelman argue: It presumes that the primary path to a breakthrough startup lies in addressing what established companies have failed to provide for their current customers, thereby implicitly conforming to the established rules set by existing incumbents.
📈 Successful pattern breakers do more than launch innovative products—they create movements. Movements rally people around a shared vision of the future, involving effective storytelling, bold leadership, and the ability to inspire and mobilize others. A movement turns an innovative idea into a widespread phenomenon, changing not just a market but the way people live their lives.
💪 Leadership plays a vital role in pattern-breaking. Leaders need to be visionary, resilient, and adaptable. They need to inspire their teams and create an environment where innovation can flourish. This involves fostering a culture of experimentation, encouraging risk-taking, and being open to new ideas. Great leaders are unafraid to challenge the status quo and push the boundaries of what is possible. True innovation comes from challenging the status quo and embracing a seemingly unreasonable mindset. It’s about recognizing inflection points, generating insightful ideas, and creating movements that drive transformative change. As Maples and Ziebelman emphasize in their insightful book, better ideas don’t have a massive impact—remarkably different ideas do.
THE JOURNAL OF ONE AI-POWERED CONTENT AGENCY | [OP-ED]
Sombrero Galaxy Agency for Metaverse Fashion Magazine
Once the shift of marketing agencies from offline to online significantly changed the game's rules in the market. It is only a matter of time before AI becomes widely used, leading to significant industry changes.
So, what is AI, and why is it necessary for a content agency?
There are two types of AI: weak and strong. Weak or narrow AI has been used in marketing for a long time. It can solve a limited range of tasks for which it was created, such as processing photographs, interacting with users, and guessing client preferences. However, it will never learn anything fundamentally new. On the other hand, strong AI still needs to be fully onboarded. It can make decisions in situations it was not trained, such as creating engaging content.
We shouldn't dwell on analyzing weak AI since its functionality is familiar. Instead, let's look at how we implemented a more advanced artificial intelligence model.
More visuals at lower costs
Several services can generate images based on text descriptions. This is convenient if, in reality, it is difficult or impossible to make such a picture. For example, it can be challenging even if it is possible to photograph a person looking at the solar system's planets.
Artificial intelligence has become our salvation for creating extraordinary images. It's no secret that building a 3D image takes much more time than making a 2D image. With the current content volume being produced, we would need an entire 3D design department to generate the required volume of images.
"As someone with experience in advertising, I believe in the evolution of content. We have come a long way from printed ads to video ads. Over the past few years, I have promoted 3D content as the next big thing in ad production. Therefore, it was natural for me to try to shape SGA's services narrative around this concept. AI has helped us empower our design team and create advanced and versatile content." shared SGA’s co-founder Leila Salieva
Reducing the cost of producing text content
Artificial intelligence is used to reduce the costs of content production. For instance, Alibaba Group replaced copywriters with AI. The developers have created a program to write 20,000 lines of text per second. The AI was trained on more than a million texts people wrote to do this. Now, the seller just needs to insert a link to the product page to create a description on platforms and select a narrative style.
Speaking about the work of Sombero Galaxy Agency, we have introduced AI capable of writing texts based on a database and a given topic and analyzing similar materials. Thanks to this introduction, we increased the volume and speed of content production by 50% and 40%, respectively.
The process works as follows: the content manager sets the artificial intelligence parameters for writing texts, which are generated in a few seconds. After this, all he has to do is proofread and publish the text.
Regarding management processes, artificial intelligence has enabled us to keep records of every meeting, whether communicating with a client or within a team. We just give the bot access to the conference, and it automatically converts the conversation into text and highlights the main points of the meeting.
Preference Analysis
AI can recommend appropriate products, adjust landing pages based on consumer interests, and create personalized selections.
For instance, the order of user stories on Instagram is determined by user interests. The more frequently you view a specific user's stories, the more prominent their stories will be in your interface. This also applies to posts and music recommendations in popular applications.
This has enabled us to gather more information about our target audience, allowing us to align our content and services with their online and social media activity.
Advertising and targeting
Artificial intelligence helps optimize advertising and make it more effective. Google, Meta, and other digital giants have used it in their systems.
For example, Google Performance Max is an artificial intelligence system that manages advertising on all Google sites simultaneously. We just provide materials for creatives, describe the target audience, and make a few more settings.
With these tools, we could predict more accurately which ads, audiences, and offers would perform best. The effectiveness of our advertising campaigns has increased by an average of 20%, and we are confident that this is not the limit—Google artificial intelligence continues to become more innovative, opening up more opportunities for creating effective advertising campaigns.
Final thoughts
Technologies will develop and take on more of the routine of marketers. And we don't mind.
However, AI will only partially replace humans. Even with the optimization and automation of many of our business processes, artificial intelligence cannot follow our central values — user focus and individual approach to each client.
As technology advances, many routine marketing tasks will be automated and taken on by AI-powered tools. This will free marketers to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of their work. While AI can assist with tasks such as data analysis, content creation, and campaign management, more is needed to fully replace the human touch.
At SGA, we embrace AI's potential to optimize and automate many processes. However, AI enhances the work of our talented human team, not replaces it. AI cannot fully replicate or understand our core values of user focus and an individual approach to each client.
While AI can provide valuable insights and automate specific tasks, it lacks the empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking required to develop effective marketing campaigns. Our team believes the best marketing results are achieved through a harmonious collaboration between humans and AI. We are committed to leveraging the latest technologies while maintaining a strong focus on our core values of user focus and an individual approach to each client.
Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.
DOLCE & GABBANA CEO READY TO OPEN CAPITAL TO NEW INVESTORS | [FASHION SYSTEM]
Reuters
🗣 “We are now ready to consider opening our capital to third parties through a listing or other financial instruments,” CEO Alfonso Dolce said in an interview published on Monday in Corriere della Sera’s L’Economia weekly supplement.
📈 Dolce & Gabbana’s revenue for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, which ended in March, was up 17 percent to €1.871 billion ($2.04 billion), said Dolce, adding that he hoped to repeat this growth this year.
🏪 The fashion house will open 12 new stores in the US, including at 695 Madison Avenue in New York, the former Hermès location, with more than 2,000 square metres over five floors.
🌎 “The United States are vital, we already have 72 stores, plus four in Canada, together they represent 28 percent of our turnover, compared to 16 percent in China,” said Dolce.
GEN Z FEELS GUILTY OVER LAST SUMMER'S SPENDING, CITING DINING OUT AS A MAJOR REASON | [COMMONWEALTH]
WWD
⛱ When it comes to Generation Z, the cohort continues to surprise retailers with their general attitudes toward money, spending and taking on debt. A new report titled “Gen Z Money Manners Report 2024” by Cash App examines how the cohort’s consumer behavior sentiments toward summer spending, the costs associated with weddings and more.
📊 Fifty-three percent of Gen Z surveyed said they have spent beyond their means. Moreover, 79 percent of people surveyed said they have some regret from spending too much last summer — with 42 percent of people citing dining out as the most common reason.
👯 As previously reported by WWD, Gen Z has also continued to experience losing friendships over money — 73 percent of the demographic reported that they had at least one negative experience due to cost sharing with friends. Eighty percent of Gen Z went on to say that they’re stressed about going on vacation with friends because of this.
🗣 “Gen Z was raised in an era of clear communication and naming their boundaries,” Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, financial therapist at Cash App told WWD. “This has translated into their relationship with money and friends.”
👰 Overspending on weddings and related activities and trips has also become a major source of stress. Forty percent of Gen Z said that they feel it’s “inappropriate to ask attendees to pay their share of a large bill that may be out of their means.” Bryan-Podvin notes that Gen Z is a generation that is value-driven and empathetic, driving them to challenge the status-quo assumption that friends should “suck it up” and spend more money than they’re comfortable with or incur debt for major life events such as weddings.
DUBAI FASHION WEEK TO RETURN IN SEPTEMBER | [FASHION SYSTEM]
FashionUnited
👚Dubai Fashion Week (DFW), co-founded by D3 and the Arab Fashion Council, has announced it will return for spring/summer 2025, ahead of New York Fashion Week from September 1 to 7.
💥The preliminary SS25 schedule features more than 30 established and emerging designers from France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Palestine, Russia, the UAE and the UK.
👯They will showcase streetwear and haute couture collections alongside internationally acclaimed guest designers, which will be announced shortly. In the past, the guest designers have included Carolina Herrera designed by Wes Gordon, Iris van Herpen, Jean Paul Gaultier, Antonio Marras, Blumarine, and Moschino.
🏛DFW will be held at Dubai Design District (D3) alongside a wider citywide events calendar featuring 40 invite-only presentations, private dinners and collection launches hosted by global brands and industry stakeholders.
📅The first three days of DFW SS25 will focus on haute couture collections and the final three days will showcase ready-to-wear collections by designers such as Alia Bastamam, April & Alex, Benang Jarum, BLSSD, Lama Jouni, Mrs. Keepa, Dima Ayad, Born in Exile, Buttonscarves, Choice, Heaven Lights, Riva, Viva Vox, and Weinsanto, presented and supported by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the governing body behind Paris Fashion Week.
LEGENDARY VENTURE CAPITALIST MIKE MAPLES HAS REVEALED THE ONE THING WORLD-CHANGING STARTUPS HAVE IN COMMON. USE IT TO SPOT THE NEXT WINNERS IN THE AGE OF EXPONENTIAL TECH | [SINGULARITY]
Fortune
🤖 Today, exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and synthetic biology are redefining what’s possible. These rapidly advancing fields create inflection points that can transform industries overnight—and pattern breakers are uniquely positioned to create solutions that address these global challenges.
ℹ By combining inflections (pivotal environmental changes) and insights (non-obvious truths about how these changes can be harnessed), breakthrough ideas can be created. For example, the introduction of the GPS chip in smartphones enabled Uber and Lyft. The insight that people would trust staying in strangers’ homes, combined with smartphone technology, led to Airbnb. Similarly, the advent of cloud computing allowed small startups to scale rapidly without massive upfront infrastructure investments, paving the way for companies like Dropbox and Slack to revolutionize how we store and share information.
💡 Inflection theory challenges the conventional wisdom of first analyzing large markets for unmet customer needs. While the approach of initially targeting sizable markets may seem logical, it rests upon a flawed assumption, Maples and Ziebelman argue: It presumes that the primary path to a breakthrough startup lies in addressing what established companies have failed to provide for their current customers, thereby implicitly conforming to the established rules set by existing incumbents.
📈 Successful pattern breakers do more than launch innovative products—they create movements. Movements rally people around a shared vision of the future, involving effective storytelling, bold leadership, and the ability to inspire and mobilize others. A movement turns an innovative idea into a widespread phenomenon, changing not just a market but the way people live their lives.
💪 Leadership plays a vital role in pattern-breaking. Leaders need to be visionary, resilient, and adaptable. They need to inspire their teams and create an environment where innovation can flourish. This involves fostering a culture of experimentation, encouraging risk-taking, and being open to new ideas. Great leaders are unafraid to challenge the status quo and push the boundaries of what is possible. True innovation comes from challenging the status quo and embracing a seemingly unreasonable mindset. It’s about recognizing inflection points, generating insightful ideas, and creating movements that drive transformative change. As Maples and Ziebelman emphasize in their insightful book, better ideas don’t have a massive impact—remarkably different ideas do.
THE JOURNAL OF ONE AI-POWERED CONTENT AGENCY | [OP-ED]
Sombrero Galaxy Agency for Metaverse Fashion Magazine
Once the shift of marketing agencies from offline to online significantly changed the game's rules in the market. It is only a matter of time before AI becomes widely used, leading to significant industry changes.
So, what is AI, and why is it necessary for a content agency?
There are two types of AI: weak and strong. Weak or narrow AI has been used in marketing for a long time. It can solve a limited range of tasks for which it was created, such as processing photographs, interacting with users, and guessing client preferences. However, it will never learn anything fundamentally new. On the other hand, strong AI still needs to be fully onboarded. It can make decisions in situations it was not trained, such as creating engaging content.
We shouldn't dwell on analyzing weak AI since its functionality is familiar. Instead, let's look at how we implemented a more advanced artificial intelligence model.
More visuals at lower costs
Several services can generate images based on text descriptions. This is convenient if, in reality, it is difficult or impossible to make such a picture. For example, it can be challenging even if it is possible to photograph a person looking at the solar system's planets.
Artificial intelligence has become our salvation for creating extraordinary images. It's no secret that building a 3D image takes much more time than making a 2D image. With the current content volume being produced, we would need an entire 3D design department to generate the required volume of images.
"As someone with experience in advertising, I believe in the evolution of content. We have come a long way from printed ads to video ads. Over the past few years, I have promoted 3D content as the next big thing in ad production. Therefore, it was natural for me to try to shape SGA's services narrative around this concept. AI has helped us empower our design team and create advanced and versatile content." shared SGA’s co-founder Leila Salieva
Reducing the cost of producing text content
Artificial intelligence is used to reduce the costs of content production. For instance, Alibaba Group replaced copywriters with AI. The developers have created a program to write 20,000 lines of text per second. The AI was trained on more than a million texts people wrote to do this. Now, the seller just needs to insert a link to the product page to create a description on platforms and select a narrative style.
Speaking about the work of Sombero Galaxy Agency, we have introduced AI capable of writing texts based on a database and a given topic and analyzing similar materials. Thanks to this introduction, we increased the volume and speed of content production by 50% and 40%, respectively.
The process works as follows: the content manager sets the artificial intelligence parameters for writing texts, which are generated in a few seconds. After this, all he has to do is proofread and publish the text.
Regarding management processes, artificial intelligence has enabled us to keep records of every meeting, whether communicating with a client or within a team. We just give the bot access to the conference, and it automatically converts the conversation into text and highlights the main points of the meeting.
Preference Analysis
AI can recommend appropriate products, adjust landing pages based on consumer interests, and create personalized selections.
For instance, the order of user stories on Instagram is determined by user interests. The more frequently you view a specific user's stories, the more prominent their stories will be in your interface. This also applies to posts and music recommendations in popular applications.
This has enabled us to gather more information about our target audience, allowing us to align our content and services with their online and social media activity.
Advertising and targeting
Artificial intelligence helps optimize advertising and make it more effective. Google, Meta, and other digital giants have used it in their systems.
For example, Google Performance Max is an artificial intelligence system that manages advertising on all Google sites simultaneously. We just provide materials for creatives, describe the target audience, and make a few more settings.
With these tools, we could predict more accurately which ads, audiences, and offers would perform best. The effectiveness of our advertising campaigns has increased by an average of 20%, and we are confident that this is not the limit—Google artificial intelligence continues to become more innovative, opening up more opportunities for creating effective advertising campaigns.
Final thoughts
Technologies will develop and take on more of the routine of marketers. And we don't mind.
However, AI will only partially replace humans. Even with the optimization and automation of many of our business processes, artificial intelligence cannot follow our central values — user focus and individual approach to each client.
As technology advances, many routine marketing tasks will be automated and taken on by AI-powered tools. This will free marketers to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of their work. While AI can assist with tasks such as data analysis, content creation, and campaign management, more is needed to fully replace the human touch.
At SGA, we embrace AI's potential to optimize and automate many processes. However, AI enhances the work of our talented human team, not replaces it. AI cannot fully replicate or understand our core values of user focus and an individual approach to each client.
While AI can provide valuable insights and automate specific tasks, it lacks the empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking required to develop effective marketing campaigns. Our team believes the best marketing results are achieved through a harmonious collaboration between humans and AI. We are committed to leveraging the latest technologies while maintaining a strong focus on our core values of user focus and an individual approach to each client.
Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.