Women Of The C-Suite: Olivia Dicopoulos On The Five Things You Need To Succeed As A Senior Executive
An Interview With Vanessa Morcom
“Just get in the room, the rest will follow.” — Frank Dicopoulos. My dad has always recognized how valuable it is just to put yourself out there and be seen. Half the battle is getting to the right place, and being in front of the right people. It inspires me to continue to be bullish, to network and hustle, and to always look for the room where opportunity may strike.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, we had the pleasure of interviewing Olivia Dicopoulos.
Olivia Dicopoulos, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Fytted: the Fashion AI Stylist, has a rich background in the entertainment and fashion industries, bringing creative direction, unique features, style and vision to the company. At Fytted, Olivia brings her storytelling and creative vision to the forefront, enhancing the app’s unique features and style. With a vision to make Fytted a global household name as the go-to app that anyone can use conveniently anytime on their device, Olivia’s mission is to help people feel more confident in their bodies by finding the perfect fit more easily, spending less time worrying about what to wear and more time enjoying life.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Thank YOU! My journey into the world of fashion and technology has been both unconventional and serendipitous. Having grown up in the entertainment industry, I developed a passion for all the creative departments on sets, with a particular fondness for the wardrobe department. My early experiences on TV and fashion shoots gave me a firsthand look at the transformative power of costumes in storytelling. Over my 20 years as a model and actress, I continually encountered the challenge of finding the right fit and style for my body, which sparked my curiosity about how technology could solve these universal fashion problems.
My career in entertainment, particularly my roles at Love Productions & Citizen Cain Productions, honed my skills in creative development and production, working alongside A-list talent and fashion icons. These experiences also sparked my interest in innovative fashion solutions, driving my passion for blending aesthetic vision with practical functionality. This led to my role at Fytted, where I saw an opportunity to revolutionize the fashion industry by integrating AI with personal styling, making great fits accessible to everyone and reducing the environmental impact of returns. It’s been an exciting ride, transforming how people engage with fashion through technology.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
At Fytted, we’re shaking up the fashion industry by tackling some of the biggest challenges in online shopping: fit, style personalization, and return rates. Traditional online shopping often feels like a gamble with sizes and styles. We cut through this uncertainty by using advanced technology.
Our platform captures over 50 precise body measurements using AI, enabling us to tailor clothing recommendations specifically for each user’s unique body shape and style preferences. This precision drastically reduces the guesswork and dissatisfaction often associated with buying clothes online.
In addition, our AI-driven virtual fitting room offers customers a photorealistic preview of how clothes will look on them before they make a purchase. This technology not only enhances the shopping experience but also significantly cuts down on returns.
By ensuring a better fit from the start, we not only improve customer satisfaction but also contribute to sustainability by reducing unnecessary shipping and waste. This approach is what sets Fytted apart, making online shopping as precise and personal as a visit to a tailor.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Of course my family, my mom Teja Anderson, my dad Frank Dicopoulos, and my brother Jaden Dicopoulos (and his partner Bailey Warder) for their endless love, support, and friendship. My soon to be husband, Greg Auerbach, for consistently pushing me to live up to my potential and for inspiring me to achieve anything and everything I want out of life. Without them, the doors I walked through wouldn’t have been opened.
To Joe LaBracio and Al Edgington who took a chance on me at Love Productions and let me be a part of every conversation and every room despite my age and experience at the time. They gave me the chance to be a sponge and never questioned my abilities. They only gave me the tools to amplify them. I will forever be grateful. And to the magnificent Meghan McCain who has shown me you can 100% have a strong voice and opinion as a woman in any space and you should never let anyone tell you otherwise or make you feel inferior. She has been an exemplary mentor, and continues to show me pure class and perspective.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruption often gets a positive spin because it brings innovation and can shake up stale industries to make them more efficient and accessible. But it’s not always a good thing. Sometimes, it can throw things off balance and ignore the benefits of systems that have been effective for a long time.
A good disruption brings a clear improvement. Take the shift from film to digital photography. It made photography easier and cheaper for everyone, expanding the field and opening up new opportunities in digital editing and online sharing. That’s a clear win because it solved real problems without creating bigger ones, and it also gave more people more opportunities.
However, disruption isn’t great when it bulldozes through without considering the fallout. Look at ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft. They revolutionized how we travel in cities and made it super convenient to get around without your own car. But they also rocked the market for local taxi drivers and brought up issues around job security and regulation that we hadn’t fully figured out before they hit the scene.
With Fytted, our kind of disruption is the good kind — we’re tackling real issues like the hassle of returns and the difficulty of finding clothes that fit right when shopping online. By using AI to match people with the right clothes, we’re making shopping more satisfying and less wasteful. It’s all about enhancing the shopping experience in a way that’s also mindful of its broader impacts.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey?
1. “Just get in the room, the rest will follow.” — Frank Dicopoulos. My dad has always recognized how valuable it is just to put yourself out there and be seen. Half the battle is getting to the right place, and being in front of the right people. It inspires me to continue to be bullish, to network and hustle, and to always look for the room where opportunity may strike.
2. “Be kind to the assistants. They might end up being your boss one day.” — Al Edgington. One of my first jobs in LA was being an executive assistant to Joe LaBracio and Al Edgington at Love Productions. Since that time, I have found that many of the other assistants I interacted with like myself are indeed now in power positions at their respective companies. You never know who anyone will become, and it is always the right thing to treat everyone with respect no matter their position. You are NOT above anyone.
3. “You’re not a machine.” I am a perfectionist, and I used to get so upset with myself if I even accidentally misspelled a word in a work email. I also would sometimes go even years without taking any personal time off. Although AI is a great tool to help us, I am human and there is beauty in the imperfect. I’m not a robot at the end of the day, and you can’t run a company unless you embrace the human(e) side of yourself. Not everything is going to go smoothly in business, if fact, it rarely does, and that’s okay. You can make mistakes and still achieve everything you want to achieve. Also make time for yourself — you can’t be the best version of you at work unless you step away and rejuvenate every once and a while.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
With the success of Fytted, I aspire to start my own production company or venture capital firm. My goal is to invest in and share the stories of women and others who deserve to make their mark on the world but may not have had the opportunities I’ve been given.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
One of the biggest issues is the stereotype of what a leader is supposed to look like. As women, we often find that we have to prove ourselves over and over again, showing we’re just as capable, if not more, than our male counterparts, just to be taken seriously.
The business world can still feel like a boys’ club, especially in industries like tech or finance. For women, breaking into these networks or even getting fair consideration can be hard. When it comes to funding, it’s a similar story. Despite all the talk about equality, women-led startups often get just a fraction of the venture capital that male-led ones do. I would like to change that.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” has deeply impacted my perspective. It reveals how every event in human history unfolded precisely as it needed to for us to exist on this planet today. Seventy thousand years ago, there were over six different human species, yet today, Homo sapiens are the sole survivors. This book emphasized that everything in life happens for a reason, filling me with immense gratitude for being alive in the present moment.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
As an animal lover, I would like to make sure this question doesn’t exclude any and all creatures. I adopted our dog Olive a few years ago, and I truly believe she saved my life. As you know, dogs are man’s best friend and they offer endless love and support. There are millions upon millions of animals sitting in shelters right now while you’re reading this. Therefore I think a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, would be something that included bringing the most amount of good to the most amount of animals too. I would inspire a movement that everyone with the means and the ability would have to adopt an animal from a shelter so they too could experience unconditional love. Life is better when you have a puppy giving you kisses.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Not a quote, but a question: “Will it matter in 10 years?” My mom still tries to instill this into me! It’s very easy to get caught up in the day to day, but don’t let something small get you down when it most likely won’t be relevant in the future. If anything is important enough to matter in 10 years, then you can take it very seriously. I love this question, because it gets you to focus on the larger issues and not the minor inconveniences. Stuck in traffic? That’s frustrating, but it most likely won’t matter in 10 years. Didn’t prioritize your health and well-being? Well that might matter.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can follow me on Instagram @oliviadicopoulos and on YouTube you can follow me and my fiancé Greg @OliviaxGreg. Visit our company online at: https://www.fytted.com/.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Vanessa Morcom is a millennial mom of three and founder of Morcom Media, a performance PR shop for thought leaders. She earned her degree in journalism and worked for Canada’s largest social enterprise. She can be reached at vanessa@morcom.media
