What is Blockchain, and what does it have to do with fashion?

• Toshendra Kumar Sharma
• February 05, 2018

Blockchain seems to be taking over all of our social media platforms – from news channels to Facebook feeds; everyone is excited about this revolutionary new technology. Blockchain will no doubt help usher in a new era of financial services and payment gateways. Thanks to lower settlement fees due to its decentralized nature. Real Estate and Law are other prominent industries that are sure to reap the benefits of this technology thanks to smart contracts. However, the benefits of blockchains are not limited to these industries. Let’s take a look at one of the overlooked industries for Blockchain – fashion.

What Is a Blockchain and Why Should I Use It?

Blockchain, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is at its core, merely a distributed ledger. What this means is that no central authority can modify the Blockchain database because the users protect the network by sharing their computational resources. In effect, that makes Blockchain resistant to tampering and censorship. Information recorded on a blockchain is permanent. Naturally, this is a groundbreaking breakthrough in the world of internet that allows us to ensure records are safe from corruption.

One of the most significant use cases of such a tamper-resistant ledger is in the supply chain management industry. The supply chain management industry is one of the largest industries in the world as it deals with the flow of goods and services. It deals with everything from procurement of raw materials to the shipping of the final product. Since this is such a massive scale process, there are several points where materials could go missing or records tampered by a rogue agent. VeChain is one of the frontrunners in the blockchain based supply chain management market. With already some very high octane partnerships and in-house RFID (Radio-frequency identification) chip production, VeChain have the first mover advantage in this space. Several large corporations are expected to join VeChain’s platform to reap the benefits of their platform for lowering the wastage in their management.

How Can Blockchains Help The Fashion Industry?

The Fashion industry is no different when it comes to supplychain management. Once clothes are designed, they still have to be manufactured, transported and retailed. This is a very inefficient process that is prone to corruption. With blockchains, every batch of clothes could come with their own set of NFC (Near-Field Communication) chips. This would ensure that at every checkpoint in the process, the product is in fact original. This would help corporations save billions every year from losses they incur while manufacturing and distributing. A few upper-end fashion brands are already embracing this new digital paradigm.

BABYGHOST is a new New-York based fashion brand founded in 2010 by Qiaoran Huang and Joshua Hupper. BABYGHOST is a pioneer when it comes to fashion technology. With their unique approach to blockchain tech, BABYGHOST is shipping all of its new 2018 collection with NFC (Near-Field Communication) chips. This is unprecedented as this allows their users to authenticate their clothes with their smartphones like they would any other commodity. BABYGHOST’s founders believe in the future of fashion technology and were quoted, “this technology needs only to be swiped in proximity to a garment and in an instant our customers can exchange what we thought of as the next generation of playing cards. Imagine that each garment now goes from being one of many to a one of a kind.”

Incorporating NFC chips in garments certainly adds more security to garments, something that luxury goods brands care deeply about. In addition to checking the authenticity, consumers can also see all of the information about an item like where it was manufactured, how the raw materials were obtained, etc. Once these records are added to the blockchains, the end user who buys the product becomes the final owner of the garment. They can then transfer ownership in the future, and the future buyer could see all of the information about the garment and be certain of the origins. From this unique experiment, it is clear that blockchains are here to stay and that they hold the potentialize to revolutionize almost every industry we can think of.