kylie, posh, madonna dressed by hackney

Hackney is a pressure cooker for new fashion ideas, a place where designers from the very top end of the industry rub shoulders with aspiring newcomers to the trade. The results frequently catch the eyes – and attract the cheque books - of global celebrities like Kylie Minogue, Victoria Beckham and Madonna. So it’s not an industry the borough can afford to lose.

Dalston Lane designer Christopher Kane – whose clients include Kylie Minogue, Victoria Beckham and Beth Ditto - has been grabbing fashion headlines worldwide for the last three years. One of the best known names on the British catwalk, Hackney is an important source for Kane’s work. The ideas behind some of his latest snakeskin shirts and dresses come from a camouflage T-shirt he bought in Dalston Lane as a teenager ten years ago. Kane's designs are now best sellers in the upmarket stores of Paris, Milan, Tokyo and London Angeles. This year he is launching a high street range of cashmere knitwear and jewellery for Swarovski.

Kane honed his design skills at St Martin’s School of Art, alongside Marios Schwab, another big name in the industry who is based just around the corner in Arcola Street. Schwab was recently named Best New Designer in the British Fashion Awards. This year he is using scientific body imaging – such as heat scans – to develop unusual colour schemes for his dresses. He has Kylie Minogue and Kate Moss among his regular customers.

Kylie Minogue recently commissioned Mare Street fashion designer Emma Roach to make a costume which the Australian superstar has been wearing as she promotes X, her latest album. Roach created a very striking and unique outfit which looks like body armour. “There has been strong interest from a number of other chart bands since that order,” she says. The Emma Roach studio has just been awarded a grant from the Hackney Enterprise Network to purchase more computing equipment to help the young design practice.

Superstars also queue up to buy underwear from Buttress and Snatch of Broadway Market, the hottest news in the fast growing luxury underwear trade. The company is benefiting from a backlash against cheap and disposable knickers by upmarket shoppers who are fuelling a "lingerie renaissance." Designer Rachel Kenyon uses vintage trims and hand-clipped lace from the last surviving real lace company in Nottingham, and all her garments are made in the UK from local materials. Her buyers include Christina Aguilera and Madonna. Buttress and Snatch sells well in Barneys department store in New York, which Rachel says is because "I don't scrimp on the frills and fanciness."

A large number of new designers are hoping to follow in the footsteps of Kane, Schwab, Roach and Kenyon. Of these Kelly Shaw and Goodone are strong contenders.

Retro-womanswear designer Kelly Shaw recently took second place and a cash prize of £2000 in the River Island awards for garments which evoke memories of the 1950s. Victoria Beckham is rumoured to have purchased three of her dresses.

Nin Castle and Phoebe Emerson of Goodone, an ethical fashion business based in Tudor Road, create their garments from hand selected recycled fabric. They call this "mass producing the one-off". Goodone supplies retail outlets in London, Manchester, Brighton and Glasgow along with customers in Europe and Japan The company recently won a Trevor Campbell award for enterprise. A recent grant of £16,000 from the London Development Agency means that Goodone has time to provide advice and guidance to students and other companies on how the fashion industry can become sustainable. "We enjoy instigating positive change in the industry," they say.

All these companies expect to benefit from the extension of the tube line to Dalston over the next two years. But many are also worried about rent rises for studios and the demolition of workshops to make way for new apartment blocks.

“We need to make sure that the affordable studio and workshop spaces which attracted these growing companies to Hackney when they first started out remain a feature of the business landscape,” says kevin Davey of the Hackney Enterprise Network. “Innovative designers create new markets for businesses of all kinds in the capital, and these trailblazing small companies are precious assets in Hackney’s economy.”

masterclass on software development

“If you don’t get to know the needs of your customers better, and check out their willingness to buy first, you’ll waste more money on developing new products than you will ever get back,” software millionaire Ben Finn OBE warned a masterclass for local computing companies last week.

When it comes to making money from carefully crafted software, Mr Finn – who received an OBE in 2007 for his services to the industry - knows what he’s talking about. Early last year he sold the international music notation company Sibelius to American media giant Avid Technology for $23 million.

The musically minded brothers started work on the specialist software – which was used to make movies including Billie Elliott and James Bond – when they were still at school. After twenty years of product development, clever pricing, and well chosen distribution partnerships, Sibelius is now the industry standard worldwide. The educational version of the package is also used in three quarters of the schools in the UK.

Mr Finn’s presentation converted two decades of experience into ninety minutes of expert advice. He explained how to develop radical new products and ideas, choose the right business model, set up the best distribution channels, and select the best strategies for pricing and copy protection, right through to the best way of demonstrating new products and how to pick a name for new software that customers will like and understand.

“Windows is short, evocative and memorable, and it translates well internationally,” he said. “It’s a great name for software. But the first name Microsoft came up with was ‘Interface Manager.’ It was clunky, too long, and dreamed by technicians unable to see the product from a general customer’s point of view. A bad name can kill an new and innovative product.”

He gave detailed advice on international sales, explaining that American buyers are the largest market in the world but they expect to pay half the price that software is sold for in London. “When you get a distributor in the States, you’ll still have to go there to do your own marketing,” he pointed out. “They are great at shifting boxes, but that’s all.” He also highlighted how difficult it is to make money from software sales in Asia. “You can buy Sibelius in every city in China,” he says. “The problem is, it’s all pirated. We’ve never sent a single box east, nor received a penny of income back.”

Mr Finn placed a huge emphasis on the need for companies to research the real needs of their customers, and to check that new features they are planning to add to software products really are wanted, will be purchased, and can be created at a profit before going ahead with expensive development work. He set out a detailed mechanism for prioritising the development of new features and a tested formula to analyse benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) of software development work.

“The latest trend, providing software as a hosted service, reduces the delivery costs of companies and lends itself to charging subscriptions,” he explained. “It’s cheaper to get a new software business up and running now than it was when I first started out, and that’s good. But it’s also easier to lose sight of what your customers want, and to make the same old mistakes.”

Mr Finn was speaking to a group of software architects attending a masterclass the Innovatory on Old Street, where he is an associate of the business advice team.

His words has a strong and immediate impact on the twelve companies taking part.

“I feel that the transfer of knowledge from software gurus like Ben to a company like mine is invaluable for someone like me, as I move from factory management to software development,” said Marcia Lazar, the director of F2IT in Great Eastern Street, which is designing software to manage production processes in the fashion industry.

“He was really well informed on all the key issues facing software companies which want to grow,” said Leon Tong, the manager of Bright Lemon, which builds social networking sites for the government and the British Council in its studio in Provost Street. “I’ll be putting some of his advice on marketing and pricing into practice straight away.”

"It was well worth attending," said Geoff Marchant of Coublis in Tabernacle Street. "I found Ben's comments about internationalisation, particularly differential pricing, interesting, the distribution discussion was very relevant and his views on brand names were entertaining."

The masterclass was sponsored by the Gateway to Investment, which has helped more than thirty new companies in London raise a total of £22 million of private equity investment over the last two and a half years.

top end but temporary apartment hotels

Eye catching temporary apartment hotels could be erected in the north and south of Hackney over the next few years, before being donated to charities for the homeless, as the result of a radical design breakthrough by local architect Tim Pyne.

Sclater Street in Shoreditch has been selected as the most likely first location for a pioneering thirty two unit self-catering hotel which will take only nine weeks to build, and operate for eight years, before being taken apart and relocated to another piece of wasteland somewhere else in the capital.

The M-hotel – pronounced motel - is a development of the highly acclaimed M-house, a luxurious two-bedroom metal bungalow Pyne designed with Michael Howe of Mae Architects.

The apartment units are made from insulated aluminium panels and lined internally with plaster walls. Made in Newcastle, they contain state of the art kitchen and bathroom fittings, and top end furnishings in the living and sleeping areas. The apartments, each of which has a balcony, slot into a customised steel rack, and are designed to last one hundred years in a changing series of locations..

“At average rental costs for the area the self-catering units will pay for themselves within twenty four months,” Pine explains. “The new hotels will put unused land waiting for development to good use, and give a better return to landowners than temporary car parks, an all too common use of land in limbo. They will draw the European business people arriving to work in the City’s new skyscrapers into Hackney, which will benefit from higher council tax revenues and increased spending in local shops, bars and restaurants. At the moment international business staff are often put up in hotel chains or distant suburban flats with long commute times. Temporary self catering hotels of this kind are also an obvious way to accommodate people working on Olympic projects in the north and east of the borough over the next four years.”

The hotels could turn Hackney’s backstreets into designer locations. “Attractive visual branding from fashion labels like Paul Smith and Prada will be mounted on the external panels of the hotels, sharing and promoting their visual cool,” he says. “Olympic sponsors may also be interested in this feature.”

As well as providing much needed accommodation for the growing international business community, at high speed and low cost, Pyne believes that his innovation will benefit some of the poorest people in the capital too.

“I would like to think that when the apartments are removed from temporary sites, having paid for themselves many times over, the units could be given to charities so that homeless people and couples caught in miserable, temporary accommodation could benefit from them,” says Pyne. “I believe that many large companies could be persuaded to do this. I also think that housing associations and charities will realise that units of this kind can be deployed more quickly than traditional new build, and can complement their modernisation plans.”

“The M-hotel is an innovation with potentially huge local benefits,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “Hackney’s daytime workforce in Broadgate and in the Olympic Park will get local accommodation, landowners will get higher rental income, local traders will get increased business, the Town Hall will get more Council Tax, and charities and the homeless will get a valuable trickle down too. It’s a great idea.”

Pyne’s rapid assembly, mobile M-Hotel has already generated enquiries from developers in Libya and Dubai, from enthusiasts for extreme sports who need accommodation near mountains and glaciers, and from the organisers of an international sports event shortly to take place in Africa.