Summary
In this episode of the Tech4Good South West podcast, host Arielle Tye speaks with Weronika Stelmach, co-founder and CEO of Weaving Change, a social enterprise focused on sustainable fashion.
They discuss the launch of their app, Swerve, which aims to help users digitise their wardrobes and make sustainable fashion choices. Weronica shares her journey from a chemistry background to creating a tech startup, the challenges of funding, and the ethical considerations of using AI in fashion. The conversation highlights the importance of using technology for social good and the future of digital fashion.
Takeaways
Tech for Good aims to tackle societal challenges.
Weaving Change focuses on making sustainable fashion accessible.
The Swerve app allows users to digitize their wardrobes.
Only 10% of clothes in wardrobes are regularly worn.
Funding is crucial for startups in the social enterprise space.
Aura is an outfit recommendation algorithm based on personal style.
Ethical considerations in AI development are essential.
Digital fashion is the future of the industry.
Tech for Good requires a multifaceted approach.
Understanding the impact of technology on the environment is vital.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Tech for Good South West
01:45 Sustainable Fashion and Weaving Change
05:05 The Journey of Weaving Change
09:00 Funding and Business Model
11:20 Developing the Aura Algorithm
15:41 Ethical Considerations in AI and Fashion
21:29 Future Plans for Weaving Change
24:24 Defining Tech for Good
Transcript
Tech4Good South West (00:03.168)
At Tech for Good South West, we're passionate about building momentum for the Tech for Good movement across the south west of the UK. Our mission is to amplify the positive impact of technology in tackling societal challenges and creating stronger, fairer and more connected communities. By fostering a regional Tech for Good community, we aim to support initiatives that ensure technology serves the greater good and enable everyone to thrive in the long term.
Throughout this podcast, we'll be joined by a diverse range of voices from across the tech sector, charities, investors, startups and community-driven projects as they share their stories, challenges and hopes in harnessing Tech For Good. Join us as we explore a world of Tech For Good right here in the Southwest, brought to you by Annie, Alicia and Arielle.
Tech4Good South West (00:51.382)
Welcome to the Tech for Good Southwest podcast. I'm Arielle Tai, today's host, and I'm really excited to be joined by Weronika Stelmach, who's the co-founder and CEO of Weaving Change, a social enterprise on a mission to make sustainable fashion more accessible. Weronika and the team have launched an app called Swerve, which they describe as the ultimate clueless wardrobe app in which you can digitise your wardrobe and try on your clothes.
I'm super excited today talking about sustainable fashion, growing a tech for good startup, and also an outfit recommendation algorithm called Aura. So great to have you here, Weronika. Hi, good morning. Very good to be here. Very excited. So let's start. If you can introduce yourself and weaving change. Okay. Yeah, I'm Weronika. You did a really good introduction. You kind of said what I always say.
so I'm Weronica. am the CEO and co-founder of Weaving Change. Yeah, we've been running Weaving Change for a year and I want to say two months now. so we're still fairly new to the activity. The main things I always say is that we're a social enterprise on a mission to slow down fast fashion. We want to help people wear their clothes because that is the most sustainable thing you can do. So all our approaches are looking at different ways in which we can actually help people do that thing. And we're making our apps work, which you beautifully described.
The Autoniculous wardrobe app, you can take pictures of your clothes, you get a digital version and then try on to an avatar of yourself. Our goal is to minimize the like, floor-drove madness which you have and kind of make fashion fun and democratic and creative and all those things which fashion should be, I think. And bring that to all people outside of kind of mass fast fashion. Such an amazing...
Such an amazing organization and a really cool thing that you're doing. For those people that haven't heard of you or haven't used this app yet, because it is very new. Can you tell us like a little bit more about what it's like? What does it look like? What's the experience of using the app? Okay. This is a really fun question. So the idea is that you're in your slow fashion paradise. You go into the app and you create your avatar.
Tech4Good South West (03:10.056)
all of the imagery and referencing is kind of tied to the early 2000s. I grew up in the early 2000s and I wanted to kind of make it reminiscent of like Barbie dress up games, which I used to play on like the big family computer. also big references to Clueless. So, it's super personalisable. You're in a room, which should be like your bedroom. And we're to be working on making that more personalisable at a disco ball and whatnot.
And then once you're in the main, like your little room, you can go to the camera button and then you from there, you can take pictures and add things to your digital wardrobe. It takes you to the wardrobe page and then you can see your avatar in your mirror. And then you pull along a little hanger, which was very cleverly designed by one of our designers and it opens your wardrobe. And then you can just click around and play around with what you've got, try and all your different combinations. we've also got features so that you can save your outfits to different, to the calendar and collections. So you can.
If you're super organised, plan ahead. And then from there, you can also share those outfits onto your social media. So you can kind of follow your friends and this also, we're going to integrate features so that you can swap those clothes with your friends and share clothes. So when you're going on a night out or something or a big fancy dinner, you don't have to buy the sparkly dress if your friends already got one. But yeah, that's kind of the energy of Swerve. Hopefully, hopefully I've communicated that. Hopefully you can all feel.
Like you're sitting in front of your 2000s computer too. Well, everyone can go and download it straight after they've heard it. Cause it's so cute. I was playing with it last night. and yeah, it's such a lovely design. it feels really fun. It feels friendly. love the bedroom. So you said that you've only been, you know, you're a startup organization. so you've been going for, what was it just over a year? So could you tell me a bit about the journey so far? Like, how did you come up with the idea?
What made you set up this organization and start tackling this key issue of sustainable fashion? Yeah. So it's a fun little story. I'm actually a chemist and so is my co-founder, which kind of confused a lot of people at the start and now everyone seems to have normalized it. We were studying our chemistry masters together and I studied for a year in Heidelberg in Germany.
Tech4Good South West (05:33.37)
and I had watched Clueless and I think I came up with this idea of this like sustainable fashion app. We were looking at like SDG goals in one of the courses I was doing. And I was thinking about how damaging the fashion industry is. and how do we actually help people to make more sustainable fashion choices? It's really easy to shop fast fashion. It's been made to be really easy. And it was like, how do we kind of break those cycles and actually facilitate sustainable fashion choices?
So when I was back in Bristol in my final year of my chemistry masters, I was sitting in my research group and scrolling on social media rather than looking at my NMRs. Sorry, sorry, Claydon. And I saw this poster, there was a competition and one of the tasks in the competition was to create an app for sustainability. And I was like, I've already got this idea. And I turned to Will, who was actually doing chemistry and said, you can code, right? And he was like, yeah, I kind of know what...
this is, and so I gave him the elevator pitch, which I didn't know was an elevator pitch at that point. And he was like, yeah, it sounds really interesting. And there was a five grand prize as well, so that got everyone a bit more excited. We entered the competition with this idea. We kind of fleshed it out a bit. And then we won the competition. And then after that, we were like, this is actually quite cool. People seemed to be really excited about the idea. And we had a lot of sort of support of people being like, let's make this happen. And then Will and I went to the pub and he said,
Let's give it a go. Basically. I was like, how could we do this? We're only 22, 23. And he was like, yeah, but what if it works? and that's kind of what we roll on nowadays. So then we basically burnt it back down to the ground and we're like, okay, let's figure out how to actually start a business and create something. And then sort of. Respoke to our user group, try to really understand that problem and like what the pain points were for people within sustainable fashion. What was actually preventing them from making those sustainable fashion choices?
and we kind of learned that like only 10 % of the clothes in your wardrobe are actually worn regularly. And we were like, there's so much potential within what we already own. How do we help people like unlock it? How do we get that little t-shirt at the back, which you never wear because you can't really figure out to style it. And then you just give it to the charity shop in the end because you're like, just taking up space. How do we like reimagine those cycles? so yeah, after that we started, we found a weaving change and spent a long time thinking about what actually.
Tech4Good South West (08:01.102)
called for many months. We entered the new enterprise competition. did the, the few stages of that at the university of Bristol. So we were one of the winners of that competition last summer. And since then, we now work at future space in the launch space space. So we're kind of in that incubator space too. And we kind of developed through there. It's been great. It's I think the best thing about developing something like an app is that you can kind of.
squeeze it into the world a bit more easily. I think if we doing hardware, we would have struggled a bit more because we all work remotely and in different places and we've worked with people all over the place and that's worked really well because it's all just been, we just have a Saturday meeting at 10 a.m. and no one moans too much about it because everyone gets to get on with their Saturdays after and we've kind of just built from there, chipping away at the problem. Yeah. It's so exciting. It's such an amazing journey.
from, you know, coming up with this idea and actually going through that process because it is a big process, isn't it? To actually design something that meets a need that actually works that people are going to use. and I know you are still new on, know, fairly new on your journey. You said that you had 5k prize, which I imagine you've, you've put into this. I suppose how else are you funding this? Like what's your business plan? Yeah. So.
That was a massive point at the start of what we were doing. think a few, when, when other people I know who kind of came out of university and started a startup, they'd like done innovation degrees and had some kind of concept of how all of that works. And I honestly had none. So it was a fun bit of learning at the start. We had that bit of funding. We just kind of got on with it funding list for a whole few minutes. at the start, we got.
quite a bit of funding through the new enterprise competition through their various stages, which was also really encouraging because they have three stages and kind of get a bit more confident as you go with that. We also engaged in some internship schemes, really, which allowed us to hire people whilst they were being paid. So that was really beneficial for us to be able to grow and develop. But our main bit of funding came from My World AI Development Grant, their challenge called 2Grant, I'll give the full name.
Tech4Good South West (10:24.44)
So we got 50K from them to develop Aura, which you mentioned earlier, and that was over the summer. So that kind of massively accelerated our development. It meant we could really kind of invest in people and the tech and get to a point where we released an app in one year. So that's kind of, yeah, it's all, it's so, so far we've always been looking at grant funding kind of avenues. And yeah, I think what I learned this year, if anyone is listening, if you want to start a startup and doesn't.
know anything about it is that you just have to like talk to a lot of people and do a lot of Googling and read those bits of emails. Most of the time is what I do when I procrastinate is like actually look through the emails, which everyone sends. And then normally people like link grants to there and I'm like, cool. And then they sometimes even give you money. So that's cool. Well, you've done really well. And I do want to go back to Aura, your algorithm in a bit.
But sticking on sort of like the funding and business model conversation, you've set up as a social enterprise, which again, I'm super a fan of. work for social enterprise myself, and I think it's the business model of the future. know, having great jobs, profit, the planet, and people all into that same conversation around business. So what are your plans going forward? Because, you know, it is notoriously difficult to fund for good.
initiatives, what are your plans? Yeah. So we set up as a social enterprise kind of on purpose, because we wanted to have mission at like the core of what our offering was. That was like very important to us. then, but we also knew that we had to make a profit and we had to have the opportunity to gain investment in order to actually develop something like this. We were like, it's not something which you can kind of have as a lifestyle business. It just doesn't work.
A social enterprise quite beautifully balances both of those ideas, I think. So our business model going forward, we're developing Swerve on a freemium model. Our goal is to slow down fast fashion and we want people to have the access to Swerve and be able to use it and engage in different cycles of consumption. And we didn't want to put a financial barrier in place at the start. It also allows people to engage in a new technology, which people don't have the clueless wardrobe at.
Tech4Good South West (12:48.054)
on their phone yet. And so we appreciate that that would also allow them to understand what it's all about in the first place. And I can talk about Aura now because Aura is relevant to our premium offering. Over the summer, we developed Aura. So it's our outfit recommendation algorithm. And it basically finds you your best outfits from within the clothes you already own based on your personal style. So in the same way, of social media algorithm shows you photos, which you like.
or it can understand how you engage in your wardrobe and other users' wardrobes. And it can understand those patterns and find you outfits. We had a really fun time of making it and trying to figure out what fashion and style actually is all summer. We sat on Saturday morning, like, what does it even mean? And we realized that a lot of fashion style comes from sort of public opinion on what it is. And so we've created a model which can transform and adapt.
to that understanding of fashion style, but also identify clusters of those ideas like color theory and silhouette. Because those things kind of will come out of any bit of any data set, which you give it if you just, so we didn't impose any like regulations on Aura. She just decides herself, but that's within our free, our premium offering. So we're going to be kind of experimenting with how that will look.
With a five pound a month subscription, you would have the cheapest personal stylist ever. And through conversations with our users, we really did find that people would be interested in things like personal stylist, but it's completely inaccessible to most people. And so we wanted to develop something in which people could have that kind of fashion advice from AI, which understands what fashion is based on your personal style.
which is actually accessible. So I love the name that outfit recommendation algorithm also is called aura. Yeah. It's got this energy, right? It's like aura feels like she will know what outfits to get. everyone I have to say, I so dyslexic the way the letters go. R a, it kind of, I wish it was a U R a like aura.
Tech4Good South West (15:12.12)
But it feels like it's got this magical kind of fairy godmother energy to it, which I think is what I would want from a personal stylist, definitely. Yeah, I love the name. in simple terms, because I don't want to get into the tech, but like, how do you go about developing an AI algorithm? Where do you even start? Can you give me just a couple of sentences on what is the process? Okay. How do you make an AI?
101, figure out what your output you want and the input you have, maybe I'd say is probably the first step. So for us, it was like understanding that process of like, what is style? and then make an architecture, which, which can do that is how I'm going to put that. I don't know if that makes any sense. Trying to, trying to make it simple. It's a bit tricky. and then get.
some data and give it to your architecture and see how it trains basically. So everyone, there's like when people talk about AI, they're obviously talking about like training a training a model. That's like something which people talk about. I don't know if that's sort of known what that means, but it's basically giving the data to like this architecture and it then can understand this quotation that's there, those patterns and
use that to make decisions. I don't know if that was at all helpful. I don't know that's helped anyone understand what an AI, how to make an AI. That helped. And a lot of our listeners will, will understand that there will be lots of people like me who I didn't sort of understand how to do that. And it just seems so impressive that you're super new and you're, you're tackling all of these different things and you're building this AI algorithm as well. but I think it's really important. And when we spoke last time.
It's really hard now, isn't it, to have a conversation around AI without touching on the ethical considerations, but particularly in your business, the environmental impact of these generative AI and how much energy they take. So really interesting to hear about how you're balancing that in your, in your, in your business model. Yeah, it's a really important point. And I think sort of start by saying that there's probably a few too many AIs being made not thinking about that.
Tech4Good South West (17:37.614)
we haven't developed a generative AI yet, partially for those reasons. We're hoping to develop one, but we know that we need to it super mindfully. Otherwise it completely reduces the point of what we're trying to do. So throughout our development, that's something which we've been speaking about. also within even making an app because coding something is the data has to be stored somewhere that takes energy. We're like, is this the best approach to solving the problem we want to solve? and we kind of spoke to a lot of people and realized that.
A lot of the issues around sustainable fashion were that they kind of kept in like an echo chamber and like the people who know about it will talk to each other about it it's great. And they're having a massive impact. The small scale like grassroots sustainable fashion work is brilliant, but a lot of people aren't hearing about it and it sort of gets drowned out by mass fashion. And so we did want to create an approach which actually everyone could use and could have impact and scale and therefore actual impact.
So that kind of informed a lot of our decisions. And then when we've been developing our AIs, it's something we've had to think about a lot. It's tricky to say at this point, especially because we've just launched the app, how much impact Swerve can have. We hope it will have amazing positive impact and really change the fashion industry. But at this point, we don't have those figures. So it's still speculative.
And we know that if it does have the impact, which we hope, then it will outweigh the impact, which the development of those AIs has. But it's when we were setting up, I was talking to Will, my co-founder about like how, where we're creating them or like where the data centers are and stuff. And I was like, it's actually really tricky to find somewhere to, which has like green energy and whatnot. And so one of our long-term goals is to kind of have a
like a data center, which is called well, it's how I'm going to say, not called massively water. A lot of water is used to call like kind of data centers. and it's kind of run on renewable energy and has also efficient computers because that reduces the impact within what we do right now. We just try to, we try not to retrain, over train our models and things like that. So that we only use as much computing resource as actually needs to be used.
Tech4Good South West (20:02.69)
But it's always a consideration and I think it's a really useful thing to think about as well when you're developing something, it makes you think about like, actually what are the tech impacts of what we're doing? I think it's kind of overlooked often. So I'm happy to be having this conversation. Yeah, it's so interesting and it's just brilliant that, you you are having this conversation, you're making these considerations. And I think that's, it's a topic that we're all learning more about.
And I think it's interesting, isn't it, that these conversations seem to have got, we're hearing more of them at the moment because of generative AI, like you mentioned. At same time, all technology has this impact and it's about thinking responsibly in whatever it is that we're doing or creating and recognizing that, you know, just because it's digital, it has a huge impact. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, I think it's hard because you can't see it. Yeah.
with something like the fashion industry, you can't see a lot of it. You can't see a lot of the kind of start and end of life of garments. but this may be slightly easier to understand, but there is a massive digital footprint. Like even us recording this right now has an impact and, yeah, it's about like balancing those ideas, I think. And like holding all those ideas and trying to make choices which like align with what we're trying to achieve. Yeah. So we've been talking a lot about the impact that you'd like to.
May, what are your future plans? Like what does the next few years look like for you or what does the future look like for you as an organization? Yes. So, okay. What's next? So as you mentioned at the start, we've just released Swerve and this is our first model of Swerve. And we're hoping now to kind of rapidly integrate the feedback, which we're going to be getting from our users and create something.
which is super useful and exciting and not buggy or anything like that. So that's sort of stage one. And then stage two is make it much better. think I've been thinking about digital fashion recently and how digital fashion will become the future. There's kind of no doubt in my mind about it. And so we want to create algorithms and like digital infrastructure, which allows for this.
Tech4Good South West (22:25.614)
the feeling of textiles to be felt through your mobile phone, which is quite tricky. We want to show the movement and the kind of structure of fibers, like those sorts of things, which we understand when we think about fashion, we want to be able to communicate that within Swerve. So we're to be working on developing algorithms, which do that basically. We're working alongside the University of Bristol in developing
the start of that generative AI I spoke about. So that will take the picture of the item of clothing and create like an individual digital version for the user. So that's kind of our main big goal, our main next big goal. So we're looking at more kind of collaborative projects. It's really exciting because it's also like cutting edge research. So everyone also wants to be involved in it, which we love and we can definitely get behind. We're still very sort of in the university little spheres. So that makes it really fun.
But we're kind of hoping to get some investment to really kind of accelerate that process too, at the moment. So that's kind of what I get up to is trying to make those things happen. But that's the, that's sort of a very loose next few years is make it really good. Yeah. Yeah. Making it really good, isn't it? Something that people want to use. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's really cool. And, hopefully we can follow you, you know, on your journey and have you back.
When it's really good. Wow. How this is all going. We always ask on the podcast, what tech for good means to you? What does it mean to you? Tech for good. I was thinking about this this morning because I knew you'd ask it. I, okay, tech for good, think means using our like technological capacities, like the brilliant technology which people have been able to create and develop in order to
tackle like wicked problems, the ones which are like really hard to untangle. And we can, and we need to use a multitude of approaches in order to be able to make a dent in these problems in order to try to untangle them. kind of don't know if you have the like necklace drawer where they're all tangled up. That's kind of how I kind of see a wicked problem where it's like, they're so tangled. The fashion industry is so tangled up. It's so all of those little
Tech4Good South West (24:54.092)
chains and you sit there for hours and you're trying to untangle. And I think Tech for Good means using and like leveraging that tech, which we do have in order to actually kind of pull through that shiny little strand and do something which helps people and the planet. Great answer. 100%. And using jewelry as well, like so on brand.
I'm wearing seven necklaces, I think. That's great. And, you know, how can we continue to follow you on this journey? Like, is there a place people can go and download the app? How can, you know, how can people follow what's going on with, with weaving change and swerve? Yeah, please follow along. So all of the good normal places. So the app you can download on App Store and the Android version of that.
As you can see, I'm not the person who clicked the button to make that happen. So I've forgotten what that's called. They're all there. You can download it there. If you want just more like gossip and stuff, Instagram's really good for that. We WeavingChange UK on Instagram and let's swerve. you're just thinking about app world, if that's all that interests you. We post a version of...
All of those sorts of things on LinkedIn too. So if that's your choice of procrastination, we'll try to entertain you there and give you information about AI and slow fashion all in one. All right. Well, I've already followed you on Instagram and trying out different things in my wardrobe. I'm really excited about this. And is there anything else that you want to say? Thank you for having me. It's been really lovely to talk to you.
yeah, I, it's really amazing to be able to sort of speak about sustainable fashion within, the tech community. I think, yeah, I speak to lots of people who do lots of brilliant things like mending and darning. And, that's what excites me the most about what we do is being able to help people understand the problem a little better, little bit better, and try to do something which actually helps us to all solve the problem together in a fun, fun little way. Yeah.
Tech4Good South West (27:15.394)
Well, I am feeling so inspired. I had a massive smile on my face the whole time. Thank you so much for bringing all your energy and telling us about your journey. Yeah. Good luck with the future. Thank you so much. I'm sure I'll be talking to you anyway. So yeah. Thank you. Amazing.