Investors should be weary of people from the fashion industry. I say this as someone who has both a computer science degree and a fashion design degree, and 90% of my friends were in the fashion industry at some point. Coming from tech, you'll find people here are much flakier and just unreliable. In the NYC fashion scene in particular, people have huge egos and they don't always act out of pragmatism or logic. The tendency to keep up appearances manifests itself in many ways. Look at Barney's, it appears great on the outside, but recently considered bankruptcy before receiving a capital injection.

Recently, I went into one of the top streetwear brands in the world, a staff member tried to start a fist fight with me after a piece of paper fell out of a hat, and I refused to pick it up and told them to screw off after the guy tried to disrespect me in front of my girlfriend. I've never been to a retail store where a staff member told a customer "meet me outside p___y", but that is the nature of streetwear culture in NYC. In case you aren't aware, these streetwear stores in NYC have BOUNCERS. Let that soak in. They're just accustomed to bullying customers because people are so desperate to buy clothing that they are willing to put up with the nonsense. They particularly like to single out mainland Chinese who don't realize (or maybe don't care) when these staff are disrespecting them, and, since I'm Asian, the guy who picked the fight thought I would not stand up for myself. If you want more examples of ridiculousness of streetwear, search "ym bape compilation" on YouTube. This dude loves the clothing brand called "Bape" and goes around and assaults everyone he sees wearing the brand Supreme.

There's economic demand and money to be made here, but just know the demographic you're dealing with. The customers and investees are of the same thread. I'm looking to start a fashion tech company myself, and aren't intimidated by potential competitors considering how disjoint these two worlds are, both network-wise and culturally. The typical engineer won't see the value of all this vain-ness, and people in fashion business aren't always the most reasonable people. A UX designer I work with recently told me a story of how they were redesigning a website for a top fashion brand, and the brand requested they make the shopping experience as UN-usable as possible and difficult for people to actually make a purchase (but it works I guess). At any rate Investors, find a leader who can bridge that gap while still being able to attract engineering talent.

Don't get me wrong, you can fund leaders in the FashionTech who are completely unreasonable, and even incompetent, but the company will still do well since product-market fit and demand will outstrip all other factors, until something like this happens. One of my professors owns a set of retail stores in NYC that was acquired by one of the largest clothing manufacturers in the US, but they did not know a single thing about accounting, business operations, engineering, and non-artistic things. Super unreliable, super unprofessional professor but they had a really good intuition for branding.

Luxury brands, corporations (Adidas, Nike), and the LVMH conglomerate are a slightly different story