Here comes India’s first investment readiness programme to empower sustainable enterprises! And its Lakmé Fashion Week that is making this happen.
Roughly 20 pieces of clothing per person are manufactured each year, making the fashion industry one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. Fast fashion needs to be stabilised with eco-friendly fashion cycles and a circular economy, and answering to the industry’s need of the hour, Lakmé Fashion Week is introducing first-of-its-kind investment readiness programme, ‘Circular Changemakers’, which will recognise and empower sustainable enterprises.
This programme builds upon the partnership between Intellecap’s Circular Apparel Innovation Factory (CAIF), an industry-led platform with the mission to strengthen capabilities and build the ecosystem needed to transition to a circular textile & apparel industry in India, and Circular Design Challenge (CDC), the largest sustainability award in India launched by R Elan’s ‘Fashion For Earth’, Lakmé Fashion Week and UN Environment. IMG Reliance had developed the CDC with support from CAIF last year.
The ‘Circular Changemakers’ programme will aim to showcase innovations and solutions for the promotion of circular economy across the textile & apparel value chain and has already opened the application for start-ups across the country, offering scalable, post-prototype and revenue-generating solutions.
The only requisite for the participants is that the business solutions provided by them contributing to the textile and apparel industry must be less harmful and provide renewable inputs.
Enthusiasts falling in this criterion and looking for strategic investors and partnerships can submit their applications at https://bit.ly/circularchangemaker by 30th June 2019.
Six start-ups, or ‘changemakers’, will be hand-picked from the lot to get an access to a 3-module bootcamp by industry experts, which will enable the participants to gain exposure about important aspects of ‘Capital Raising’, ‘Business & Financial Modelling’ and ‘Investor Pitch Preparation’.
For the deciding round, the selected ‘changemakers’ will pitch their value proposition and business model to a panel of investors on the Sustainable Fashion Day at Lakmé Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2019, August 22.
The pitch will thus provide them the opportunity to seek out strategic investments and partnerships from reputed impact investment funds such as Aavishkaar Venture Management Services, innovation platforms such as Fashion for Good, foundations, industry associations, etc. A networking session will follow the pitch event where the participants will interact with key industry stakeholders such as brands, manufacturers and others.
Jaspreet Chandok, Vice President and Head of Fashion, IMG Reliance said, “This programme will focus on strategic investments for value chain start-ups while CDC remains a jury-based cash award for entrepreneurs in fashion. There is an untapped opportunity to provide circular fashion enterprises with scaling support in the form of strategic collaborations and investments. We are happy to partner with CAIF to identify and champion the change makers in our country.”
Vikas Bali, CEO, Intellecap said: “It is core to Intellecap’s footprint in India to search, seed, support and scale high impact innovations across India. One of the roles we take with CAIF is to build the market for circular innovations to reach scale. Launching India’s first investor showcase for circular textile and apparel innovators in partnership with CDC is a critical stepping stone to close gaps in the current ecosystem and create visibility for change-making circular fashion start-ups.”
