ReportWire

Tag: EC Consumer Applications

  • Deal Dive: It’s time for VCs to break up with fast fashion

    Deal Dive: It’s time for VCs to break up with fast fashion


    Fast fashion is an industry ensnared in labor issues and copyright problems, and it has an immense environmental impact due to its wastewater and carbon emissions. It also happens to have the potential to make a lot of money, fast.

    But despite all these issues, VCs won’t stop loving the sector.

    On Wednesday, my colleague Manish Singh wrote a scoop about a potential Accel investment into Newme, a fast-fashion startup based in India. Newme is an app-based retailer that produces 500 new items a week with an average price tag of $10. This news comes just a week after the company closed a seed round.

    Accel and Newme did not respond to requests for comment.

    Newme looks very much like many other VC-backed fast-fashion startups like Shein, which has raised $4 billion, and Cider, an Andreessen Horowitz–backed startup valued at $1 billion. Cider says it’s on-demand inventory makes it a more ethical fast-fashion option. That’s up for debate, though.

    Accel’s potential investment into Newme stood out to me for a few reasons, the largest of which is that I’m just not really sure why VCs back these companies.

    Fast-fashion companies gained rapid popularity and large followings because of their ability to bring clothes from the runway to your local department store in record time. But the fact is that often, they can only churn out clothes so quickly by cutting corners. The only way to make this strategy work is by using cheap materials and cheap — and likely underpaid — labor, and in many cases, by copying designs.



    Rebecca Szkutak

    Source link

  • Deal Dive: Thank god a startup is tackling bed bugs

    Deal Dive: Thank god a startup is tackling bed bugs

    Bugs can be, well, pests. They can cause serious damage inside homes and buildings, and can also wreak havoc outdoors on crops and plants. The amount of chaos and calamity these little fellas can cause is directly tied to one factor: how many of them there are.

    Most people don’t realize they have a bug problem until there are enough of them to cause noticeable damage to homes, furniture or wildlife. And by the time they do, the problem may already have become a bit unwieldy.

    That’s exactly the kind of situation Spotta hopes to prevent. Using sensors, the startup’s small devices work to spot the first few bugs so people can get rid of the pests before there is an infestation.

    “This is a sector that hasn’t innovated for decades,” Robert Fryers, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch+. “Nothing has changed. People are looking at plastic buckets and sticky paper, and surely technology can help this. Catch it early before you need loads of chemicals.”

    Spotta’s small devices attract bugs inside them, identify them and send images of the bugs to their users, Fryers explained. For this type of product to be able to scale, he said, it is key for the devices to be small, cheap and require very little maintenance.

    Rebecca Szkutak

    Source link