❝ ...it’s not all been plain sailing. Recently Lookk (a startup out of Vienna which secured funding in London and scaled up) hit a rocky patch when it lost its CEO and co-founder Tamas Locher after realising the problem it was tackling was going to be a lot bigger (though the company is continuing under the other founders). ❞

I almost fell into the same situation where we were going to parlay shop-by-size technology into "fit as a platform".... monitization was not as much the issue as was getting the fit locked down so well (like > 95% accurate) that it could be overlayed to 1M+ commercially available products that could convert easily with affiliate channels.

In the end the CA Affiliate Nexus Laws came along in Sept of 2012 and tamped down all hopes of building a shop-by-size platform on top of affiliate inventories... at least doing it while living in CA.

So are you of the opinion that the fashion world is ripe for disruption by software as long as the laws don't get in the way of the software makers?

That's a generic statement I agree with--that laws should not get in the way of business (unless people are selling Malk). The affiliate nexus laws had more baby than bathwater; they leveled the playing field against the Amazons. The unintended consequences were decimating new businesses dependent on affiliate inventories to get bootstapped.