About Evo Fashion
Evo Fashion is a Grow London Early Stage programme delivered by Fashion District and The Trampery that supports fashion businesses to improve their sustainability practices and credentials, increase team effectiveness and accelerate growth.
Discover how the Evo Fashion programme helped women's fashion brand Isabelle Pennington Edmead and deeptech fashion production platform Tailr with their sustainability and get investment ready.
Isabelle Pennington Edmead
Founded in 2023, Isabelle Pennington Edmead is a womenswear brand that designs statement pieces in unique, handpainted prints. Drawing inspiration from the founder's Caribbean heritage and British craftsmanship, its made-to-order model both minimises waste and promotes inclusivity.
All its clothes are produced in the UK, with the brand compensating for any emissions it generates through carbon offsetting. Customers can trace the lifestyle of garments using Fabacus Digital Product Passports.
The challenge
As an independent, designer-led fashion brand, the key challenge faced by Isabelle Pennington Edmead before joining Evo Fashion was accessing the funding, industry connections and strategic mentorship required to grow sustainably.
Sourcing sustainable materials, developing collections and producing small product runs all require significant resources and an industry network. That’s what the business hoped to gain from Evo Fashion.
How the programme helped
While participating in Evo Fashion, Isabelle Pennington Edmead benefitted from one-to-one support with specialists in production and manufacturing, finance and marketing and communications. The sessions helped the brand to improve its products and services and encouraged it to reconsider its supply chain and pricing structure.
Isabelle Pennington Edmead also had the opportunity to attend workshops that provided essential skills in business and financial planning, investment readiness and pitching, legal and intellectual property and planet and ethical practice.
Our impact
Equipped with the knowledge and skills it gained on the programme, Isabelle Pennington Edmead plans to expand its retail presence and develop new collections, with a focus on scaling its textile-led womenswear while remaining true to its principles of small-batch production and responsible fashion.
As well as its statement garments, the brand has plans to continue developing its line of circular accessories, including bags and corsets made from fabric scraps.
It also plans to build on existing retail partnerships with the likes of ASOS and independent boutiques, and to increase its international reach by exploring new global markets, such as the US. With its bold designs and hand-painted prints, the brand sees lots of potential in the holiday retail market, especially on cruise ships, hotel boutiques and resorts.
Isabelle Pennington Edmead has also now hired a fractional CFO and a freelance marketer to support the next stage of growth.
About Tailr
Tailr's deeptech fashion production platform is on a mission to solve the problem of fabric performance inconsistency, helping to reduce waste, sampling and costs, while increasing speed to market.
It connects fabric mills with production teams and provides them with AI-driven insights into fabric behaviour. This helps brands and manufacturers ensure the production process for each garment is consistent, efficient and sustainable. Its modular product suite includes automated tech packs and tools for advanced fabric feasibility checks.
The challenge
The key challenge for Tailr was bridging the different worlds of emerging technology and fashion production. While confident about its technical development and industry knowledge, it needed advice on how to position itself in the market, communicate its vision to investors and scale its commercial strategy.
In particular, Tailr wanted to refine how it communicated the value of fabric intelligence and production data to the brands and manufacturers it was already building relationships with.
How the programme helped
Evo Fashion played an essential role in helping Tailr develop its approach to investment readiness, strategic communication and ESG positioning.
This support came in the form of workshops and mentoring sessions on business and financial planning, communications and branding, investment readiness, pitching and more.
It was also able to attend events, including a promotional callout event at Spitalfields E1, a welcome dinner at INIS and an evening showcase at Whitechapel Gallery. These events increased Tailr's visibility within the London fashion tech ecosystem and resulted in conversations with brands, production specialists and potential collaborators.
Finally, Evo Fashion helped the business understand how to better explain the commercial value of its production data and fabric intelligence to investors, brands and manufacturers.
Our impact
Tailr is currently focused on becoming the data infrastructure for modern fashion production by increasing take-up of its platform among brands and textile manufacturers. As a result of refining its messaging and investor readiness, it is already progressing collaborations with global fashion brands and enterprise-level manufacturers.
On top of that, Tailr is exploring a potential partnership with another Evo Fashion participant, demonstrating the value of the peer-to-peer connections the programme fosters.
The programme created an environment where founders working on different parts of the fashion ecosystem could connect and identify opportunities for collaboration.
These conversations are ongoing and reflect the value of bringing together complementary innovators within the same programme.Shana Chu
Founder and CEO, Tailr