New Fashion Innovation Partnership Unveiled By PDS And FFA

Why Fashion Innovation Rarely Reaches The Factory Floor

​At the time (March last year), Strazzanti, CEO of FFA, was operating version 1 of her digital platform, offering subscribers access to a digital showroom of technology and material solutions that she had vetted as being “scaled, growing, and with proven customer service [success]”. FFA is a global innovation platform designed to connect fashion brands, retailers, and manufacturers with proven technology and sustainability solutions. The company serves brand clients, some of whom have entered the orbit of snake-oil purveyors and overly enthusiastic, but ultimately out-of-depth, startups with buzzy but as-yet-unproven solutions. In addition to a digital showroom within the FFA platform, Strazzanti offers one-to-one diagnostic assessments of brand businesses, including British menswear brand Oliver Spencer, to identify innovation needs and opportunities.

The Hidden Cost Of Fashion Innovation Discovery

​“As business gets a lot more complex, with Brexit, Covid, and [managing] brick and mortar retail, channeling better practice while remaining commercial is a challenge,” says Tom Bodaly, General Manager of Oliver Spencer. “Sofia’s experience has helped us by giving a full audit to identify necessary steps and the various solutions”. A major challenge the brand faces, like others, is the rate of returns on eCommerce sales, which Bodaly says hovers at “25-30 percent”. With eCommerce representing 30 percent of the business’s revenue, the general manager says any tech solution to reduce returns should offer wins across their priority areas: “boost site conversion, minimize shipping costs, and [unlock] hidden value in customer satisfaction”.

​Back in March 2025, when the Oliver Spencer audit was completed, several projects were started, some requiring system changes that Strazzanti explained were too time-consuming and resource-intensive for a brand needing to deal with immediate commercial realities.

​By contrast, the adoption of Measmerize to address online shoppers’ size selection to avoid placing orders in multiple sizes (and the inevitable returns) was targeted. “From the initial workshop to implementation, deployment end-to-end will take around 2 months,” says Strazzanti.

Previously, Bodaly says they struggled to select the right tech solutions. “We did a [tech] project that cost a lot of time and money [and didn’t materialize], which in a small lean team was frustrating. We were an early adopter of sustainability in British Menswear, so we were used as an opportunity to test tech solutions. You have to kiss a lot of frogs… It’s easy to be sold [on the promise rather than performance]”.

Fashion Innovation Doesn’t Have A Creation Problem. It Has An Adoption Problem

The success of the FFA audit service for Oliver Spencer coincided with the PDS interest in the platform and desire to partner to improve deployment rates. PDS sources production of apparel, homewares, and accessories for more than 300 brands globally, and its investment arm, PDS Ventures, invests in software, hardware, and materials solutions at varying stages of development that all seek to solve fashion industry problems. But even the proven ones struggle to get over the line with time-strapped, innovation-immature brands. Complex supply chains and poor communication between brands and innovators on scaled solutions with calculable benefits make for a noisy and confusing ‘ecosystem’.

​“When we get excited about a solution, we send an email to [brand] clients and contacts, but how many emails must they be getting, and how do they decipher what to do, and how to differentiate and filter [these solutions]?” asks Ankur Agarwal, Head of VC Investments at PDS Ventures. “We were looking for a frictionless way of connecting end-users with these innovations”.

​Building The Missing Layer Between Startups And Brands

But innovation platforms that connect brands, innovators, and manufacturers do already exist. “We are partners with Fashion For Good; they are catering to broad innovators and finalizing projects where brands have a buy-in [but] it’s not a discovery and evaluation process, and the brands need more hand-holding,” explains Agarwal. “We want to do that with the vetted and ready-to-scale innovations that we have, put forward proactively. Sofia has a ready-to-go platform where they can help brands immediately to evaluate their problems and the viable solutions”.

Why Fashion Innovation Platforms Must Unite With Supply Chains

​What PDS brings to the party is a scaled portfolio of companies within its venture arm, a network of global suppliers capable of deploying solutions, and a slew of industry experts in daily conversation with brands and manufacturers.

​On the brand side, fashion businesses tend to operate in siloed departments—the enemy of diagnosing the integrated solutions with commercial and environmental returns, according to Strazzanti. “Working holistically across the value chain, instead of siloes, we need to think commercially from ideation through to sourcing, supply chain, country, merchandising, and customer.”

Solving For The Real Constraints

​Paul Wright, Group Executive Director of PDS, says: “Budgets are under pressure, and the innovation and sustainable materials focus has moved to legislation and compliance. [This platform] is a more cost-effective way [to identify solutions] and the bar to entry is low”. Wright adds that saving the cost of one speculative business trip could be equivalent to the fee for finding and deploying the right and already proven solution via FFA.

​FFA’s version 2 of their digital platform, which its CEO says has successfully digitized the framework that Oliver Spencer followed in adopting Measmerize, went live today. For PDS’s part, the partnership they entered into with Future Fashion Assembly toward the end of 2025 led to a fee-sharing arrangement. The platform operates a SaaS business model with a monthly subscription for innovators costing from $130 (£99) per month, and for brands, from freemium to Pro access at around $79 (£59) per user per month, as explained by Strazzanti.​

Bodaly says they will continue to use the platform on a subscription basis. “The thing I’m most excited about is creating a dynamic approach to bring together thought-leaders and brands to solve problems—I’m really interested in the community and learning space [within the working groups on the platform] to help update and evolve the culture here at Oliver Spencer and to bring more solutions”. In the general manager’s experience, everyday constraints make it especially difficult for SMEs to find and implement solutions.

“As the cost of doing business and the pressure and amount of work everybody is having to do increases; having Sofia and FFA helps to stress test and sell solutions [internally]”.

The Rise Of Fashion Innovation Infrastructure

Further drawing comparison on resource grounds, Bodaly adds: “Within corporate company culture, there’s usually a department assigned to push technology and innovation forward, [with] full oversight, cross-department, to do what FFA has helped us to do, and understand the [risks] of inaction”. He concludes that: “[FFA] can help us make a collective decision as to where to act first to deliver longer-term value.”

From Fashion Innovation Marketplace To Operating System

​As FFA version 1 gives way to version 2, Strazzanti reflects: “Partnering with PDS [gives us] the operational platform, the factories, subsidiaries, sourcing companies, and the clients; we have the innovation knowledge, the tools, and the pathway.” The CEO likens the partnership to a meeting in the middle where the combined structure for implementation “is simply providing that [necessary] connective tissue”. Next, that ‘connective tissue’ should ideally unite fashion innovation with operational deployment.