Designer Incubator Nineteenth Amendment to Relaunch Soon

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Boston is putting itself on the map as fashion-meets-tech innovation hub. From Kendall to Fort Point Channel, here are the start ups that caught our attention.

If you've followed the slowly emerging Boston fashion-meets-tech scene, the name Nineteenth Amendment may ring a bell. Founders Amanda Curtis and Gemma Sole took their designer-centric e-commerce platform to Indiegogo last summer for crowdfunding, subsequently leading to a rebranding in 2014.

While the core mission of the start-up remains the same—helping indie designers find, manufacture, and sell clothing through its online portal—the aesthetics of Nineteenth Amendment now reflect a more polished approach to complement the artisan quality and price point of its designers' work. Also pursued in this redesign is a two-fold pricing model: the first is a pledge to buy a specific style and once ten shoppers pledge, the item is guaranteed to go into production and will sell at wholesale; the alternate being a "Buy Now" option, where you can receive a style immediately but pay retail price.

Of its pilot program, Curtis mentions "While we were being very Boston tech in a way, in our branding we weren't being very 'fashion.' So we needed to make our branding more along the lines of our price point and more of a blank canvas." Along with the visual redesign, the company is recruiting 200 designers for an official relaunch later this spring. Having received applications from as far away as Tokyo and Paris, the roster still includes more than a dozen designers based in New England. Scouting at schools and fashion weeks nationally, Curtis and Sole are seeking formally trained talent that can put together a pattern and tech pack, offering resources including a manufacturing facility in Brooklyn, customers ready to engage in a social selling model, and a "designer dashboard" compiling data to help designers market themselves to buyers.
· 19th Amendment Is Crowd-Funding [Racked Boston]
· Nineteenth Amendment [Official Site]