Quick Pitch: A contemporary women's fashion brand featuring clothes designed and voted upon by the community.
Genius Idea: Velvet Brigade is not your average fashion label, staffed by full-time designers, marketers and sellers. Instead, the fledgling label -- whose first four dresses are currently on pre-order -- is made up of designs submitted by outsiders and voted upon by the community.
Conceptually, Velvet Brigade is similar to a Garmz, a startup we profiled last fall. Like Garmz, Velvet Brigade shares revenue with community-supported designers to produce and sell their clothing. Unlike Garmz, however, all designers are attached to Velvet Brigade's label and Velvet Brigade -- not the designers -- sets the price.
It's a big distinction: Garmz is more like a platform for emerging designers to get their work produced and sold. But Velvet Brigade collaborates with guest designers, just as H&M has done with Vera Wang and Karl Lagerfeld, or as Threadless does with graphic designers.
Garments are priced in the $75 to $150 range and designed for women ages 18 to 30.
The San Francisco-based startup's ultimate goal is to become a wholesale brand that is sold through a mix of larger offline and online retailers -- a goal that, given what we know of their strategy, seems perfectly feasible to us.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
