Westfield Stratford City is proud to support Fashion District - a not-for-profit organisation helping connect and support emerging fashion businesses, designers, retailers, manufacturers, and start-ups across five East London boroughs.
Fashion District adds to the existing creative strengths, repositioning London’s fashion sector as a creatively-led digital manufacturing centre. The cluster is at the heart of the UK’s knowledge economy, focusing on strengths in generating intellectual property. It is a destination for investment in UK fashion business, incubating new companies, business models and providing support for innovation in products and services. It attracts global talent, catalysing production corridors across East London and the Upper Lea Valley, and driving growth in regional textiles manufacturing.
We hosted a Fashion District Festival Pop-Up Shop with 64 fashion brands, businesses and independent designers across 5 days. From upcycling platforms to local and emerging talent, the pop-up enabled festival-goers to experience different ways of buying sustainably.
The Fashion District, in collaboration with the Fashion Innovation Agency, launched the Retail Futures 2020: Fashion District Innovation Challenge Prize, sponsored by Westfield. Fashion District challenges were designed to find innovative solutions to current industry issues across retail, and manufacturing and design. Retail Futures 2020 gave start-ups and subject matter experts the chance to win cash prizes, support, and the opportunity to pitch to some of the industry’s leading retailers & innovators.
Applications from tech start-ups who believed that their business had the potential to revolutionise any part of the fashion & retail supply chain. In line with our annual retail report - How We Shop: The Next Decade - we were particularly interested in start-ups looking to:
- Enrich retail data and consumer choices
- Create experiential, creative and/or “gamification” retail moments
- Transform sustainable supply-chain and retail
- Enhance personalisation
- Develop localised activations and community engagement
The first prize winner received £15,000 to invest in their idea, while runners up received £5,000.
