Intersecting Fashion and the IoT

By Stephanie Bauer Marshall, The Wireless Registry

March 15, 2016 — The Smart Women Smart Ideas Fashion Geeks’ Pitch Perfect event in The Girls’ Lounge at South by Southwest brings together female entrepreneurs with companies in the fashion space, industry experts, and venture capitalists. The opportunity to present The Wireless Registry ‒ an identity and intelligence infrastructure for the Internet of Things ‒ may not seem like an obvious fit. The fashion industry, however, is evolving into the IoT age.

As the industry moves from simple clothing to performance-measuring smart fabrics and accessories, fashion’s intersection with the IoT becomes more apparent. Fashion-inspired wearables are playing a significant role in bringing the world closer to Cisco’s prediction of 50 billion connected devices by 2020. Like every other IoT device, each fashion wearable has a wireless signal.

In fact, during my brief 24 hours at SXSW, our system observed thousands of unique signals from a broad variety of devices. These include not just the SXSW, The Girls’ Lounge, and various hotel Wi-Fis, as well as Bluetooth and BLE beacon signals from cool, innovative smart home devices, but also those from fashionable devices presented at Pitch Perfect. Each signal is another datapoint in the dynamic Signal Graph of IoT devices that we continue to build at The Wireless Registry. As ever more devices hit the market, the importance of a cross-silo, scalable, and privacy-sensitive platform becomes apparent. Today’s wearables report from Frost and Sullivan notes interoperability and privacy as key challenges. Fashion wearables are no exception.

I’ve tried my share of wearables. They all left me wanting more — more features, more data, and definitely more fashion. Seeing incredibly smart women with great ideas pitch their wearables proves that the industry is getting closer. My fellow entrepreneurs shared an array of devices, like the brilliantly designed Caeden heart rate variability stress-management Sona bracelet, Pressure Analysis Company’s athlete monitoring concussion sensor SMACKCap, and Kenzan’s wearable ECHO patch, which measures dehydration and will soon monitor other vital signs.

Each of these innovative, fashionable devices has an opportunity to alter the way we think about and use wearables. As they evolve and offer increasingly compelling use cases, demand for wearables continue to grow, and fashion is likely to become an increasingly significant differentiator.

It will be nearly impossible to deliver a single wearable with every feature a girl (or boy) could want. The Wireless Registry, however, will ensure that many different devices for all different tastes are able to recognize and interact with each other. I am excited to be part of a company that is making this a reality.