More and more influencers are sliding into their followers’ DMs.

They’re doing so via Instagram’s broadcast channel feature, which was first introduced in February 2023, and essentially acts as a (one-sided) group chat that appears in a user’s direct messages inbox. Any user with over 10,000 followers can create one to share images and text, as well as features like polls and question boxes. Though members can’t respond the way they would in an actual group chat, they can react with emojis.

Broadcast channels were rolled out globally in September 2023, and since then, uptake has picked up. Influencers including Courtney Grow, Mallory Goldman, Megan Roup and Sara Walker have launched channels in recent months, as have founders like Gen-Z favourite fashion company Parke’s Chelsea Kramer, fashion and lifestyle brand Hill House Home’s Nell Diamond and lab-grown jewellery label Dorsey’s Megan Strachan.

In the channels themselves, much of the content influencers share is the same sort that they’d post on Instagram Stories, such as outfit selfies (followed by links to purchase), new online shopping finds or photos from vacation. But because it’s a private channel that you have to elect to join, there’s a sense that the broadcast channels are a gathering place for your most devoted followers.

Brand founders are using them as a place to solicit customer feedback — even if only by emoji. Influencers see broadcasts as a way to connect with followers in a less formal setting. For both, it offers an easier method to respond to the countless direct messages they receive daily.

“It takes the pressure off of making the perfect story or announcing it in the perfect way,” said Goldman. “You can just get the information out quickly.”

But what broadcast channels really do is provide a deeper connection point at a time when brands and creators are seeking new ways to engage with — and reward — their most loyal fans and consumers, whether it’s inviting them to a broadcast channel, rolling out a paid subscription for additional content or offering top customers special perks.

“We’re moving toward this world of creators wanting the same tool sets that marketers might have; to collect email addresses and phone numbers, and just get closer to that direct to fan relationship,” said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of influencer marketing platform Captiv8. “This is a perfect example of creators getting that opportunity.”

The Need for a ‘Safe Space’

In a world of curated Instagram feeds, broadcast channels — which appear as a direct message in a member’s inbox — offer the opportunity to give followers the casual content they so often crave.

“It’s a little bit more transparent,” said influencer Rachel Cohen Smolyar. “I’ve shared a mirror selfie in the morning where I’m in workout clothes, and I’ll just say ‘This is what I’m actually wearing today.’” The accompanying text, too, she said, can feel like “word vomit,” or more spontaneous and off-the-cuff than what they’d show their wider audience.

Influencers also use the channels as a place to reward their most loyal followers. Goldman said she does so by sharing links to products earlier, hosting giveaways or even uploading a Starbucks gift card so a follower can treat themselves to a cup of coffee. And unlike Instagram Stories, which expire after 24 hours, content in a broadcast channel lives on indefinitely, meaning that the shoppers who are most likely to take an influencer’s recommendations have an easier way to find previously-posted content.

As well, the channel’s privacy can offer a layer of protection from criticism and trolls, particularly when disclosing more personal details.

“People are there because they care about you,” said Goldman. “They’re loyal to you, so you can speak more openly about topics that you wouldn’t necessarily blast to all 100,000 of your followers.”

Brand partners are taking notice of their potential, too: Parke founder Kramer said that for an upcoming sponsored content deal, posting in her broadcast channel was included in the deliverables.

A Testing Ground

Just as influencers are using the channels to present a more candid picture of their day-to-day, so are brand founders. Shrugging off the “girl boss” era of the 2010s, which was defined by glossy success stories plastered on the covers of magazines, they’re using channels to give a more realistic picture of what it means to be an entrepreneur.

“A lot of what we, and what a lot of what consumers saw were perfect founder stories on stage,” said Stratchan. “That’s just not been my experience building a company.”

But the benefits go further than transparency.

As more consumers, particularly Gen-Z, say they want to play a role in building the brands they shop from, broadcast channels offer a way for founders to give their customers a behind-the-scenes peek at product development or marketing photoshoots. They can essentially serve as a focus group for immediate feedback, which can be used to get a sense of demand for a particular product, which can help them determine how much of it to order — or if they should make it at all.

“This generation, right now, all they want to do is be a part of your brand. They want to look at someone and they relate to them in some capacity,” said Kramer. “That’s how I’ve grown the business, is just showing these glimpses of being a brand owner in my 20s.”

It’s still early days for the broadcast channel feature, but already, users have feedback. The most common point of frustration with broadcast channels is that they can feel a bit like the host is shouting into the void or “talking to myself,” as Goldman said, because members can’t reply. The addition of the question box and the ability to react helps, but two-way communication would help increase the feeling of community within the channel, they say.

Instagram, for its part, seems open to evolving broadcast channels. Just this month, it introduced new features, including allowing channel leads to select their own image to serve as the channel’s “background,” giving leads the ability to host Instagram Lives specifically for their channel members and providing QR codes that link back to the host’s main feed.

“This really has to evolve into either [allowing] additional feedback to the creator or they will think about if there is another medium or platform that allows that to happen,” said Subramanian.

PARIS — A handful of designers notwithstanding, the fashion industry’s lack of engagement with the horrors unfolding before our eyes will follow it to its grave. So hat’s off to the ever-prescient Michel Gaubert for the opening gambit of his soundtrack for the Chanel show on Tuesday morning. He resurrected an obscure 1969 track called “Sympathy” by Rare Bird, whose sonorous vocalist intoned the following lyrics: “Half the world hates the other half, and half the world has all the food, and half the world lies down and quietly starves ‘cause there’s not enough love to go round.”

It was an audacious entrée to an haute couture show, especially at this moment, and especially for this show which celebrated a level of glittering luxury that hasn’t really been part of Chanel’s repertoire under the creative directorship of Virginie Viard. Her abrupt departure after 38 years with the brand is still shrouded in mystery, and on Tuesday, everyone was towing the company line. Viard had nothing to do with this collection, design duties were handled by an entity called the Fashion Creation Studio.

Assuming this was a placeholder collection until the next creative director fronts up, the studio did a good job of honouring the location – the Palais Garnier, the legendary home of the most famous phantom in the opera world – with a collection that had the requisite amount of drama and theatricality. The show opened with Vittoria Ceretti striding through the opera house’s shadowy corridors like a highwaywoman in a sweeping black taffeta cape. Many capes followed, in feathers or knit or more taffeta, in a peachy pink. But the drama was balanced by sensible tweed suits with box-pleated skirts, and equally sober coat dresses. Granted, they were bedazzled with sequins and, in one significant instance, little metallic bows, but still, they highlighted the fact that Chanel’s audience, as evidenced by at least three-quarters of Tuesday’s audience, has a very specific notion of what Chanel means to them. And it’s defined enough to suggest this is one brand that is essentially creative director-proof.

The show notes seemed to acknowledge as much when they emphasised the staying power of the couture ateliers “where some 150 people work in six ateliers at 31 rue Cambon next to the Chanel Fashion Creation Studio.” God help the hire who tries to mess with that, unless he/she is a master coder. Because codes are ultimately what Chanel is about. There is a history (today, a tutu, as a reminder that Chanel designed for the ballet in the 1920s) and there is a vocabulary of that history honed by the Lagerfeld years: the sparkly tweeds, a principal-boy black corduroy tux, the sleeveless shift with a Klimt-like encrustation of gold sequins and beads, a showgirl tassel on a skirt. A wink to the overdone, in other words. Virginie Viard never got that quite right.

When the models disappeared at the end of the show, and the lights went out, and the sound of spectral footsteps echoed through the darkness, I thought for a moment it might be Virginie making an appearance as the Phantom. But no, it was just The Bride, Angelina Kendall in a fantasy bridal gown, with ruffles, full sleeves and a train.

That is one couture trope which would never engage Maria Grazia Chiuri. In her couture show for Dior on Monday, she was, as usual, illuminating the exigencies of feminism, this time through the lens of sport. Chiuri was captivated by an exhibition at the Louvre which looked at the heroic fantasies of antiquity that prevailed until the 19th century, when competitive sport was off limits to women. Chiuri has also always loved the classical peplos silhouette. She showed it at its purest in this collection. That gave her a tight focus: body, clothes, performance. She found a contemporary co-relative in the work of American artist Faith Ringgold whose L.A. Subway Commission Mosaics were recreated for the walls of Chiuri’s showspace by the ateliers of the Chanakya School of Craft in India, which has been an invaluable resource for Dior. In this case, however, Ringgold’s hyper-coloured, hyper-energetic images of Black athletes in action were an overwhelmingly incongruous backdrop for Chiuri’s pallid collection.

It’s not the first time the designer’s ideal and execution have been at odds, however much it always starts so well, here with the transition between a traditional structured wardrobe and the easier knitwear-based outfits of the 1920s. Chiuri liked the experimental notion of using sporty jersey where couture would have usually called for chiffon or georgette. Instead of the traditional corset, she introduced tanks or bodysuits. They ended up lustrously beaded, feathered or embroidered.

But, as she herself acknowledged, these were the kind of experiments she was used to conducting in ready-to-wear. The stark white peplos had all the casual charm of an elongated t-shirt. What looked like a carpet was swept up as a shawl. And then a long line of pale permutations of what goddesses might wear on Olympus, accessorised with sandals they would surely recognise. It’s a shame it didn’t feel Olympian.

Chanel Autumn/Winter 2024 Haute Couture

Dior Autumn/Winter 2024 Haute Couture

The Business of Fashion and Vogue Philippines are coming together to connect fashion professionals in Manila on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. As a BoF Professional member, we are delighted to invite you to join us for Imran Amed’s first speaking engagement in Southeast Asia.

From analysis of the global fashion industry to career advice, BoF’s founder and CEO, Imran Amed will share his personal and professional journey with Vogue Philippines editor in chief Bea Valdes and fashion director Pam Quinones and reflect on the market forces and consumer trends shaping the future of the global fashion industry.

This will be followed by a Q&A session with Imran where you can ask your own questions.

To secure your place, please use the email address linked to your BoF Professional account. Spaces are limited so please secure your ticket now to avoid disappointment.

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This special event, Imran Amed on the Past, Present and Future of The Business of Fashion, will be hosted on Tuesday, July 9, 2024 from 1pm to 3pm at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Manila.

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🇮🇳 Aditya Birla Group’s Tmrw invests in Virat Kohli-backed brand Wrogn. The company will inject 125 crore rupees (around $15 million) into the streetwear-inspired youth-focused fashion brand founded by siblings Anjana and Vikram Reddy which is backed by venture capital firm Accel and Virat Kohli, an Indian Premier League cricketer and former captain of the national team. Tmrw is a unit of Aditya Birla Group, a Mumbai-based diversified conglomerate whose portfolio includes local joint ventures with international retailers like Reebok and Galeries Lafayette and domestic holdings like Pantaloons, Sabyasachi and The Collective. [Economic Times, BoF]

🇨🇳 China-founded Shein files for London IPO, Reuters reports. The ultra-fast fashion e-tailer valued at $66 billion in a fundraising round last year confidentially filed papers with Britain’s markets regulator in early June for a potential London Stock Exchange listing, two sources told Reuters, as the company moves ahead with what could be one of the largest IPOs globally this year. Shein’s London filing marks a shift from its long-running US IPO plan, which has run into obstacles at home and abroad. [BoF]

🇹🇷 Turkish manufacturer Migiboy Tekstil rescues French brand Naf Naf. The Istanbul-based company exporting fabrics globally has reportedly offered more than €1.5 million ($1.6 million) to take over the iconic French brand founded in 1973, saving around 90 percent of its employees and a hundred of its shops. Migiboy Tekstil, part of a conglomerate owned by the Canpolat family which spans construction, energy, agriculture and hospitality, is the fourth owner of Naf Naf, which has been in receivership since last September, in less than seven years. [Le Figaro, FashionNetwork]

🇧🇷 Brazil’s cotton exports more than treble in Jan-Apr period. Driven by a surge in the China market, the Latin American country’s exports surged 237 percent to $1.93 billion, compared to the same period in 2023. China represented the top buying country followed by Vietnam, Bangladesh, Turkey and Pakistan. [Fibre2Fashion]

🇨🇳 China’s fashion exports rise slightly in Jan-May period. The country’s textile, garment and accessory exports increased 1.36 percent to $115.842 billion, compared to the same period in 2023. The garment category saw an increase of 0.2 percent, while textiles were up 2.6 percent. [Fibre2Fashion]

🇿🇦 South African designer Loice Dube wins AFI Fastrack Prize. The Gauteng-based designer of the brand Lo’ice was granted a prize package valued at 150,000 rand ($8,200), including mentorship at the AFI Privé Atelier. The prize is an incubator programme launched in 2011 by Dr. Precious Moloi-Motsepe, the founder and executive chair of African Fashion International, the company behind Joburg Fashion Week, Cape Town Fashion Week and multi-brand boutique House of Nala. [BoF Inbox]

🇮🇳 Ananta Capital firm acquires Indian beauty group Anveya Living. The Mumbai-based private equity firm’s beauty and wellness company Guardian Group has acquired a 55 percent stake in the group that holds three brands offering hair, skin and personal care products – ThriveCo, Curlvana, and Anveya – for an undisclosed amount. Anveya Living co-founders Vivek Singh and Saurav Patnaik said that the capital would be used to expand internationally. [Economic Times]

🇮🇩 The Indonesian government will probe Chinese-owned e-tailer Temu. The imminent entry of the e-commerce giant could negatively impact Indonesia’s SMEs and disrupt supply chains, a trade ministry official suggested. “Factory-to-consumer [trade] is not compatible with our policies. Every activity from factory to consumer must have an intermediary,” Isy Karim said. The move follows last month’s probe by the country’s anti-trust agency into Singapore’s Shopee and Lazada. [The Jakarta Post]

🇮🇳 Indian beauty major Lotus Herbals creates $50 million startup fund. The natural cosmetics, skincare and body care group founded by Kamal Passi in 1993 has launched the Lotus Innovation Fund to invest in Indian startups. “We will back select two-three companies every year [and] hand-hold them for five [to] seven years,” said Nitin Passi, MD of the group that holds its namesake beauty brand and stakes in Fixderma India, Conscious Chemist, Vanity Wagon and Better Beauty among others. [Economic Times]

🇨🇳 China’s cosmetic retail sales in May surge 18.7% year on year. Sales amounted to 40.6 billion yuan ($5.6 billion) during the month, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. From January to May 2024, sales reached 176.3 billion yuan ($24.4 billion), up 5.4 percent over the same period last year. [Jing Daily]

🇮🇳 Indian B2B fashion platform Zyod secures $18 million investment. The Gurugram-based firm founded by Ankit Jaipuria and Ritesh Khandelwal, has raised the capital in a mix of equity and debt funding in a round led by RTP Global, with participation from Stride Ventures, Trifecta Capital, Alteria Capital and existing investor Lightspeed Venture. The end-to-end design, manufacturing, and delivery services firm will use the funding to expand further overseas. [Economic Times]

🇨🇳 Swiss watch exports drop in May as China slowdown persists. Exports to mainland China, the second-biggest market behind the US, skidded 18 percent by wholesale value as a downturn in real estate values battered consumer sentiment. Shipments to Hong Kong, a key watch-trading hub, plummeted 23 percent. [BoF]

🇮🇳 India’s The Pant Project raises $4.25 million in debut funding round. The trousers brand founded in 2020 by Dhruv and Udit Toshniwal, members of the founding family of the Rajasthan-based Banswara Syntex textile firm, has secured capital from Sorin Investments, with participation from MGA Ventures, Huddle, Dexter Ventures and Indian Silicon Valley among others. [Economic Times]

🇨🇳 Chinese multi-brand beauty retailer Sa Sa International sees profits surge. The Hong Kong-based company has reported an annual net profit increase of about 2.76 times to HK$219 million ($28 million) for the year ended March 31, 2024, and a revenue increase of 24.8 percent year-over-year to HK$4.37 billion ($558 million). [Jing Daily]

🇮🇳 Indian luggage maker Eume raises $1.8 million in funding round. The Mumbai-based premium digital-first brand founded by Naina Parekh in 2018 has secured 15 crore rupees in capital from investor Ashish Kacholia to streamline operations, expand the team and create a physical retail presence. [Economic Times]

🇨🇳 Beiersdorf warns of difficult quarter ahead in China. The German skin care company said the luxury skincare market in China has continued to “decline strongly” during the second quarter, but the group has managed to gain more market share with its La Prairie brand. [BoF]

🇰🇷 Korean fashion retailer Handsome opens System’s first international flagship. The company, a subsidiary of Hyundai Group, one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates, has opened a store in Paris for its brand System. The move follows Handsome’s shuttering of its multi-brand store Tom Greyhound in the city earlier this year. [InsideRetail Asia, BoF]

🇧🇷 CeraVe names Brazilian singer Ana Castela as its brand ambassador. L’Oréal Group’s mass-market skincare brand has partnered with the musician, known for her songs fusing the local sertanejo genre with pop, who has over 14 million followers on Instagram and is also called “Boiadeira”. [FashionNetwork]

🇬🇹 Guatemala’s Apparel Sourcing Show attracts record visitor numbers. More than 5,000 visitors, including many US fashion brands interested in increasing their production in the CAFTA-DR region (beneficiary countries of the free trade agreement between the US and the Dominican Republic-Central America region), attended last month’s show in the capital. [FashionNetwork]

🇨🇳 Moncler Genius to reveal its collaborations at Shanghai Fashion Week. The Italian luxury brand’s partnership-focused collection is planning to show its next series on the last day of China’s main fashion week, October 19. The move follows a previous showcase in London. [Hypebeast]

🇰🇷 Louis Vuitton names South Korean actor Gong Yoo as its brand ambassador. The French luxury brand has partnered with Gong Ji-cheol, star of films like “A Man and a Woman” and TV series such as “Squid Game,” who is better known by his stage name Gong Yoo, to endorse its products. [Femina India, BoF]

🇨🇳 Loewe taps Chinese entertainer Wang Yibo as its brand ambassador. The Spanish luxury brand has partnered with the actor and member of the K-pop band Uniq who has more than 40 million followers on social network Weibo. Wang also serves as a brand ambassador for Chanel, Lacoste and Anta. [BoF Inbox]

In 2008, the year Milda Mitkute co-founded fashion resale marketplace Vinted with Justas Janauskas in Vilnius, Lithuania, the country’s start-up scene was basically non-existent.

“I call it the wild, wild West in Lithuania,” Mitkute said. “It was like zero start-ups at that time.”

Vinted was among the first. In its early years, the company operated as a hobby project for Mitkute and Janauskas, who held down regular jobs while working on Vinted on the side. Janauskas did all the web development alone. After three years, during which the company had opened sites in markets like Germany, it needed to hire its first developer. The role wasn’t easy to recruit, Mitkute said. People felt ashamed admitting they worked for a start-up rather than a big corporation.

Today the situation is different. Since becoming the first Lithuanian company to capture a $1-billion valuation in 2019, Vinted has embarked on an acquisition spree, opened operations in several countries including Italy and Canada, and swung into profit. Mitkute, who stepped back from the company after having her first child several years ago, is now an angel investor in Lithuania’s start-up ecosystem, which she said is bustling and attracting global venture-capital firms looking for exciting opportunities.

The Central and Eastern European region has emerged as a hotbed for fashion-tech businesses in recent years, producing a number of start-ups serving both local and overseas markets. Vinted is an especially successful example, but also from Lithuania is Wanna, the augmented-reality and virtual try-on provider that has worked with brands like Gucci and was acquired by Farfetch in 2022.

Estonia has produced businesses including Alpha AR, which uses 3D modelling to create content for AR and try-on experiences, and Fits.me, a virtual fitting company bought by Japan’s Rakuten in 2015. Beyond the Baltic states in the wider region, The Nold, a resale marketplace that recently expanded to the UK, originated in Bulgaria, as did Remix, another resale player that ThredUp purchased in 2021. That’s just to name a few.

“The growth has been wild,” said Krista Jegorova, who was a project manager at the Baltic Fashion Federation and the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia in Riga before relocating to Spain last year. “Now every second Latvian has a start-up.”

A number of those start-ups are fashion-tech companies that have been lifted by the bigger technology boom reshaping the region. Today, Central and Eastern Europe has more information and communications technology enterprises per 1,000 inhabitants than Western Europe, according to an April report from PwC Poland and the CEE Digital Coalition. While the region’s economic productivity still lags its Western counterpart, it punches well above its weight in tech talent.

Even though most fashion markets in Eastern Europe are less developed than those in Western Europe, the region is very fashion-conscious. People place a particularly high value on their appearance, said Boryana Uzunova, co-founder of The Nold.

That environment is helping to spur the growth of fashion-tech companies, which are having an impact beyond their home markets.

“Tech-wise, we are very happy and very lucky to be located exactly where we are, because we have at our disposal all of this power that we can utilise,” said Ana Kremenlieva, another of The Nold’s co-founders along with Uzunova and Teodor Savov, the company’s chief technology officer.

Last year, the company raised €1 million ($1.1 million) in seed funding from a consortium of investors from their home country of Bulgaria and Czechia. It got its start, however, in Sofia in 2021 after Uzunova recognised the need for a resale marketplace where customers could list their clothing. Initially it had some difficulty persuading investors to fund the project, but finding developers was never a problem. Savov “got a very capable team in no time and we started to build our dream platform,” Kremenlieva said.

Cause and Effect

The tech explosion in Central and Eastern Europe that has benefited The Nold and others was brought on by a variety of factors, according to Pawel Oleszczuk and Julia Otwinowska, senior advisory manager and senior advisory associate respectively for PwC Poland. A strong macroeconomic environment with GDP growth outpacing Western Europe provided fertile ground for businesses to flourish. Accession to the EU for several countries in 2004 contributed to economic growth, created stability and opened the door to institutional reforms.

“Our transition from a socialist to capitalist economy, which started in the ‘90s, was a starting point to the development of the ICT (information and communications technology) sector, but what was really a turning point was our EU accession,” said Otwinowska. It helped boost confidence in the region, leading to more foreign investment.

What’s more, an education system that emphasised STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) topics — a holdover from the Soviet era when Moscow held sway over many countries in the region through the Eastern Bloc alignment — provided a talent pool with the right skillset. And the region built up a good digital infrastructure, offering widespread access to high-speed internet. This environment and low labour costs compared to Western Europe have attracted foreign businesses looking for IT services.

Growth of the tech industry hasn’t been evenly distributed across the region. Some countries are racing ahead while others are taking longer to get up to speed. Either way, these ingredients have created the right conditions for the region to wield outsized influence.

Estonia, for instance, has fewer than 2 million people, “so relatively small,” Oleszczuk said, “but Estonia has one of the highest numbers of [start-up] unicorns.” Successes from the country include mobility start-up Bolt, and Estonian developers were part of Skype’s founding team.

Ukraine and Russia, the two giants of the region, have enjoyed similar advantages, though their paths have been slightly different as they’ve remained outside the EU. And both countries have felt the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sanctions on Russia have constrained the country’s digital sector, while tech talent from each has fled to other locations. Many Russians have gone to countries where they can enter without a visa, such as Georgia and the United Arab Emirates. Ukrainians have gone to places like neighbouring Poland, a strong tech player and home to fashion-focused start-ups such as virtual try-on provider Wearfits and Fitly.ai, which uses AI for fit recommendations.

Ukraine in particular had a strong fashion-tech sector that produced companies such as 3DLook, a leader in virtual try-on; founders like DressX’s Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova; as well as engineering staff for many others. They’ve had to adapt to the war, which could have long-lasting effects. Ukraine also applied for EU membership in June 2022 after its invasion by Russia and formal talks are expected to begin Tuesday.

The Soviet legacy in Central and Eastern Europe may have shaped entrepreneurship in the region in other important ways, too. Under the Soviets, freedoms were restricted and opportunities scarce. After the countries became independent, everything suddenly changed.

Vinted’s Mitkute said it produced a sense of “eagerness and I would say feeling hungry — for new ideas, for new things … it was being hungry to create because you don’t have a good life, so you need to build [it] yourself.”

More to Come

That hunger is evident across Eastern Europe, which along with fashion-tech entrepreneurs, is producing a number of globally renowned design talents, including names like Kiko Kostadinov (Bulgarian), Anna October (Ukrainian), Sandra Sándor (the Hungarian founder of Nanushka), Nensi Dojaka (Albanian) and Demna Gvasalia (the Georgian artistic director of Balenciaga).

That mix of fashion and tech talent is likely to keep the fashion-tech sector flourishing, as is the ongoing explosion of tech ambition in the region more broadly and the influx of venture capital funding it. Bain & Company found that VC investment in Central and Eastern Europe increased more than nine times over from 2015 to 2021, the fastest rate for any region in Europe. “CEE has arrived on the map of European venture capital, and the growth streak is set to continue,” it stated.

That trajectory isn’t guaranteed. PwC’s Oleszczuk pointed out that economic headwinds caused by unexpected geopolitical events like the war in Ukraine, regulatory constraints and other shifts, such as rising labour costs, can have an effect. In 2023, for instance, the region did see a drop in venture capital in line with falling investment across Europe.

But for now, the years ahead look bright. Online resale marketplaces, AR companies and now artificial intelligence plays are among those gaining strength. Jegorova, the former project manager at the Baltic Fashion Federation, said there’s a strong sense of community among the companies, who all help one another. Governments are also helping by providing grants and education to entrepreneurs. In her view, the region’s rise is only beginning.

“We started maybe later than others, but we are growing so fast,” she said. “You’re going to see so much more in a few years.”