With Nineteenth Amendment, Amanda Curtis and Gemma Sole are democratizing fashion

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Ideometry

6 min readApr 26, 2017

Boston isn’t a name you expect to come up when you think of innovative fashion cities. If anything, the city is known for it’s thriving tech and healthcare industries. That’s what makes Boston’s growing fashion scene so interesting — those other industries are having a major influence on the apparel and footwear companies coming out of the city.

Here, fashion, tech, and health come together seamlessly. In this Future-Forward Fashion Founders interview series, we’ve interviewed the leaders of the most exciting fashion companies that started in or are based in Boston to learn how they started, what they’re doing to grow, and what makes them different.

To start things off, we interviewed Amanda Curtis and Gemma Sole of Nineteenth Amendment. Though they’re now based in New York, Amanda and Gemma met and started their company here in Boston, where their love of fashion collided with their tech experience to create a unique marketplace for stunning designs.

This is part 1 of our Future-Forward Fashion Founders series. Don’t forget to check out part 2 (Ministry of Supply), part 3 (Tyme Wear), part 4 (Pixi), part 5 (Forsake), part 6 (Sebo Designs) and part 7 (Bow and Drape).

Why did you start Nineteenth Amendment?

Amanda: Gemma and I met in 2012 at the Harvard i-lab as members of the first class of Startup Institute. I was Head Designer at a fashion company. At the time, fashion and retail hadn’t changed in about 120 years. We saw the intersection of tech and fashion and knew there was an opportunity there.

We first got the idea that became Nineteenth Amendment on the Red Line to Harvard. Shortly after that, we were accepted to The New York FashionTech Lab. By then, we felt confident enough to join and work with seven other fashion startups and established retailers to develop our technology.

How did you know you had something you could go to market with?

Amanda: From day one. You have to have faith in what you’re doing and the validity of it. We had a lot of validation along the way and we just kept growing. Boston was a good sounding board — you have to prove everything to investors in Boston because fashion isn’t very big there. Getting accepted by investors in Boston, and then again in New York, made it clear that we had something that solved a real problem.

What makes Nineteenth Amendment different from other online platforms that sell apparel?

Gemma: With Nineteenth Amendment, there’s a marketplace aspect of discovering new brands that you can’t find anywhere else. Our technology is also a differentiator. We have lots of data that enables smart retailing by giving retailers the ability to launch intelligently and not waste. We have a big network of manufacturers.

The customer is also updated in real-time — once they order something off our site, they follow it through the 4–6 week production process. These are unique pieces of art and fashion. In this way, we’re democratizing fashion. Today, fashion is largely dictated by huge companies telling people what’s in style. We’re saying that you can get unique stuff from a designer — as a customer, you have a direct vote in who makes their product.

You’ve been known to say that fast-fashion retailers create a lot of waste. Do you think that will eventually be the downfall of that industry?

Amanda: Every day. We are one of the most sustainable models out there. Our designers only produce what has already been purchased. Fast fashion and other retailers place inventory without any guarantees it will sell. For them, excess inventory will get thrown away or sold at rock bottom prices.

What did your partnership with Macy’s signify to you about your business and the industry as a whole?

Amanda: It signified we’re awesome enough to do that in 6 months! It showed that change needs to happen for the industry to survive. It showed most brands struggle to attract the millennial base. There’s lots of cache around fashion as an experience, not just a product. This shows we have a bigger vision, and that the industry is getting it.

How do you vet the designers you work with?

Gemma: We don’t personally vet them because we want our platform to be democratized.

What we do instead is have our designers use our platform and go through a self-vetting process. They come onto our site, signup, upload their tech pack (the specs for making a garment), and enter all of their pricing, branding, and sourcing information so everything lives in one place. We also have a custom product lifecycle management (PLM) system that communicates directly with our manufacturing base. From there, there’s a bidding process with manufacturers to get pricing. Through the whole process, we give our designers insights on best practices.

Once that information is in place, they can launch on the consumer site. We do 19-day presales, and in that time we gather customer data and feedback. The designer gets feedback and understanding of who their customer is while generating sales and gaining an understanding of what’s resonating with our customers without investing in inventory.

If they can’t make it through our process, they probably aren’t ready.

Who are your ideal customers?

Amanda: People who are looking for unique fashion. They want something with meaning, not just throwaway products. Our customer base are patrons of fashion as art. People who want to hone in on their own voice and style.

If you weren’t running your company, what would you be doing?

Gemma: I would be in a startup still. I’m not sure if I would have started my own. I was in VC before this, so I’m guessing I’d be in a startup in healthcare or enterprise back in Boston.

Amanda: A fashion tech startup.

What has been the biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome so far?

Amanda: When you start with a totally new concept, it’s a struggle to get people to understand. We’ve had to prove ourselves every step of the way to designers, retailers, and investors. The industry has been stagnant and people are cautious. So, being first has advantages and challenges.

What’s the most important thing you’re working on right now, and how are you making it happen?

Amanda: Right now it’s all about scale. We want to start reaching designers earlier while building partnerships and our consumer-facing reach. For consumers who don’t like waste, we want to reach them and show how we’re sustainable in a business-sense — our manufacturers don’t produce anything until an order is placed. Sustainability isn’t necessarily only about being eco-friendly and green. It’s about supporting local makers to cut down on consumption and making sure your dollar goes toward supporting your community.

Consumerism can be good, but we have to rethink the model for all parties involved.

What were your first products like compared to what you’re offering now?

Gemma: As a platform, we started out overseeing manufacturing ourselves. We offered designers a way to sell, but we structured the relationships differently. This was a massive undertaking, but it gave us the understanding of what we needed to build into the platform to make it more intuitive.

On the design side, the products have always been great. Our designers gather inspiration organically, and these are makers who have a lot of pride. It’s not a manufacturing company overseas. There’s just a lot of pride in what they do.

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Read the rest of our Future-Forward Fashion Founders series here:

If you liked this interview, check out our Boston’s Booziest Businesses series, featuring interviews with founders from Boston’s alcohol industry.

Also, don’t forget to read about the top three marketing lessons we learned from business and marketing leaders at CIC Boston.

This interview was conducted and written by Camden Gaspar, Content Strategist & Copywriter at Ideometry. You can follow him on Twitter @camden_gaspar.

Ideometry is a full-service marketing agency located in Boston helping awesome companies and organizations amplify their growth strategies.