Decoded Fashion Hackathon

Overview

We balanced conflicting aims — attracting serious developers while simultaneously not turning off fashion VIPs we’d need to make the event genuinely useful for industry innovation. Resisting suggestions to tone down the high-fashion feel of our graphics and collateral, we reasoned that as long as the challenge was interesting, hardcore technologists would still be intrigued by the chance to connect with the fashion space. I brought in an event planning expert to assist, and the two of us supervised the volunteers and our internal team. "The World's First Fashion Hackathon" ended with an unprecedented demographic blend; over 40% of participants were women, with a very high number of attendees of color – far more than most hackathons, and our 5 finalists continued to Decoded Fashion: New York for final pitches.