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She got to thinking how technology could help make her work more efficient and easier to scale. What she landed on was Sourced By, Waller’s newly founded AI-powered tech platform designed to make fashion sourcers’ lives easier by offering an all-in-one platform to manage their product requests, inventory and payments.
“I know every pain point,” Waller says. Her day to day was — and still is — her test. For the Headstart team (the AI services business that built the software), this expertise is key. “When you have someone who has a proprietary skill set, and you apply AI technology to whatever they want to do, that combination is so powerful,” says Chris Hedley, who runs Headstart alongside his sister Nicole. Waller’s first-hand experience convinced her first investor, Emir Talu of Pentas Ventures, to get on board.
Now, Waller is announcing her first capital raise, which will kick off this month. The goal is to secure $1 million, and the first action item will be to hire a founding engineer who will lead the development of the platform based on feedback from sourcers and shoppers (those who shop for sourcers’ requested items; Waller calls them her “sourcing assistants”) currently trialling the tech.
The timing is right, experts agree. The personal luxury goods market is set to grow from €540 billion to €580 billion by 2030, per Bain — which would be twice the value of that same market in 2019 (estimated at €281 billion). Fashion sourcing makes up an estimated 5 per cent of the industry, per Pentas Ventures’s estimation. This market size was what sealed the deal for Talu: “The direct market that Sourced By is going to address is a massive market.”
The timing also aligns for the tech. This wouldn’t have been possible two years ago, says Headstart CEO and founder Nicole Hedley, because Sourced By is built on a multimodal functionality (the ability to read images), combined with large language models (LLMs) to structure this data. Sourced By’s capabilities were only brought to market within the last year by the likes of Open AI. It’s an indicator of how AI can impact backend work in fashion.
That said, AI search and labelling has its flaws. Though the tech solves for human error in data entry and logging, it can’t yet match the human eye when it comes to identifying products. That’s why Sourced By has both editing options and a notes section to amend results and add clarity when needed. This will teach the AI so that, by launch, errors should be few and far between.
Solving pain points
Waller’s primary pain point is the sheer volume of manual labour involved in sourcing one item. Not the search itself, but the logistics of documenting, tracking, invoicing and recording payments.