MILAN — A recent fashion tech tool is promising to make the lifetime of fashion professionals much easier, combining functions normally split across different software in a single platform. It has already helped to place together Hunter Schafer’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party outfit, amongst other fashion moments.

Called Sève and introduced late last 12 months on an invitation-only basis, the platform, accessible without spending a dime via browsers on desktop and mobile, was launched by HEC Paris business school pals Julia Sisto and Joshua Kelly.

The pair put their backgrounds to good use. Sisto, formerly employed at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Diane von Furstenberg, and Bergdorf Goodman, was most recently the right-hand woman to Olivia Palermo, experiencing firsthand the hurdles in keeping track of clothing samples and the social personality’s “always evolving wardrobe.”

Kelly pitched in along with his background in tech geared at process-heavy industries similar to business administration, pharmaceuticals and clinical trials.

Sève helps image-makers track sample requests, approvals and check-ins; collaborate with their team; and export PDFs of confirmed looks and final credit sheets all from one centralized board.

“I used to be lacking a tool to centralize all the data,” said Sisto, recalling her experience with Palermo. “It seems like that quite a lot of stylists are swimming in a sea of screenshots and attempting to make sense of all of the clothing that they’ve coming in… [with tools that are] just not adapted to their workflow,” she added.

Joining forces in 2020, Kelly and Sisto began interviewing stylists from across the globe who would then beta-test the platform.

“The overarching sentiment was that, yes, this can be a creative job, but half of their job, especially for assistants, is administrative and it’s an enormous logistics job,” Kelly explained. “It sometimes entails reaching out to 50 to 100 brands for one shoot or event or press tour,” he said.

“We were lucky to have some really very involved beta testers who gave us quite a lot of feedback,” he offered. “I mean the app is actually made by them,” Sisto added.

Leveraging a clean and easy interface, the platform allows stylist users to create recent projects and workboards for every of their celebrity styling jobs or editorial shoots, fill in a form with all relevant information, including client, location and collaborators, and add documents similar to call sheets and moldboards.

Once created, the workboard is able to be crammed with fashion selections and screen grabs, which could be organized via one other fill-in form, adding brand, category tags (these could be manually created but an API tool is to be implemented for automatic recognition of clothing categories), request status and press contacts.

The 2 young entrepreneurs claimed the game-changing aspect of the platform sits in the flexibility to sort all records by multiple filters, offering stylists quick and useful glances on the workflow.

Any workboard configuration could be exported right into a clean PDF, making it easy for sharing with press representatives and some other professionals involved within the job.

“Sève has totally transformed the way in which I work and communicate with my assistants, clients and collaborators. It’s a brilliant functional tool which helps massively with the organization of my work and it’s so far more visual than a spreadsheet,” said celebrity stylist Karen Clarkson, considered one of the early adopters. “I can see exactly how my prep is evolving in real time and that permits me to be more focused creatively. It’s really made my life a lot easier.”

“That is life changing for us stylists: you may organize all of your projects/requests in a single place,” echoed Amandha Gaio, a Latest York-based fashion stylist and coordinator working with publications similar to Vogue, Elle, Glamour and Forbes.

Originally a self-financed project, Sève has been recruited through the HEC Paris incubator at Station F, a campus for start-up incubation in Paris. Investors were intrigued by the concept, Kelly and Sisto said, while keeping more details on a possible investment under wraps.

“Fundraising is in the method; there’ll hopefully be some exciting news on that front soon,” Sisto said.

The platform currently counts almost 170 stylists signed up and actively using the tool, including Elizabeth Saltzman, Tom Eerebout, Clarkson, and Rachael Wang. It gained popularity amongst celebrity image makers first, but editorial stylists have increasingly been adopting it.

“We’re seeing quite a lot of organic invitations… and assistants have been key in sharing word of mouth,” Kelly said. “They work one week with one stylist and the next week with one other one and that’s amazing because they’re bringing the tool with them,” Sisto added.