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Clients say fashion sourcer Gab Waller is magic. But there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make that magic happen.
Waller has made a name for herself as one of fashion’s (and Hollywood’s) foremost fashion sourcers, known for her ability to get her hands on the most buzzworthy, hard-to-find products and trending pieces, from The Row’s Margaux bags to the latest Dries Van Noten sneakers (“They’ve taken over my life,” she laughs).
In an age of viral products and luxury red tape, certain items sell out fast. Others aren’t easily accessible in the first place — many never make it to the shop floor, sold instead to VIP clients with sales associate relationships. Sourcing these scarce items takes time and access. Those who have money to spend but lack the time to do so put in a request with sourcers like Waller (via her business Instagram, @gabwallerdotcom) to outsource the grunt work. Consumers are catching on — it’s no longer just cash-rich, time-poor clients looking to sourcers for help.
Demand has climbed. Six years in, Waller has built a team of 10 and has established an Instagram presence (141,000 followers for the business and 82,000 for her personal). She can access items before they’re listed online as well as products that never make it to the floor, for a sourcing fee of $220. It’s landed her high-profile clients including Sofia Richie Grainge, Hailey Bieber and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Waller’s high profile, combined with the growth of the sourcing industry, drove business growth of 152 per cent from 2022 to 2023.
But behind the scenes, it’s a slog. And it’s not just the search; the entire backend process of Waller’s business is clunky and inefficient. She’s not confident she can scale the business much further with the model she’s currently operating on. “Demand is so hot, but we just don’t have the ability to increase [our services],” Waller explains, speaking from a booth at New York’s Hotel Chelsea.
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She got to thinking how technology could help make her work more efficient and easier to scale. What she landed on was Sourced By, Waller’s newly founded AI-powered tech platform designed to make fashion sourcers’ lives easier by offering an all-in-one platform to manage their product requests, inventory and payments.
“I know every pain point,” Waller says. Her day to day was — and still is — her test. For the Headstart team (the AI services business that built the software), this expertise is key. “When you have someone who has a proprietary skill set, and you apply AI technology to whatever they want to do, that combination is so powerful,” says Chris Hedley, who runs Headstart alongside his sister Nicole. Waller’s first-hand experience convinced her first investor, Emir Talu of Pentas Ventures, to get on board.
Now, Waller is announcing her first capital raise, which will kick off this month. The goal is to secure $1 million, and the first action item will be to hire a founding engineer who will lead the development of the platform based on feedback from sourcers and shoppers (those who shop for sourcers’ requested items; Waller calls them her “sourcing assistants”) currently trialling the tech.
The timing is right, experts agree. The personal luxury goods market is set to grow from €540 billion to €580 billion by 2030, per Bain — which would be twice the value of that same market in 2019 (estimated at €281 billion). Fashion sourcing makes up an estimated 5 per cent of the industry, per Pentas Ventures’s estimation. This market size was what sealed the deal for Talu: “The direct market that Sourced By is going to address is a massive market.”
The timing also aligns for the tech. This wouldn’t have been possible two years ago, says Headstart CEO and founder Nicole Hedley, because Sourced By is built on a multimodal functionality (the ability to read images), combined with large language models (LLMs) to structure this data. Sourced By’s capabilities were only brought to market within the last year by the likes of Open AI. It’s an indicator of how AI can impact backend work in fashion.
That said, AI search and labelling has its flaws. Though the tech solves for human error in data entry and logging, it can’t yet match the human eye when it comes to identifying products. That’s why Sourced By has both editing options and a notes section to amend results and add clarity when needed. This will teach the AI so that, by launch, errors should be few and far between.
Solving pain points
Waller’s primary pain point is the sheer volume of manual labour involved in sourcing one item. Not the search itself, but the logistics of documenting, tracking, invoicing and recording payments.
At present, she uses up to six different tech softwares per single item. When Waller receives a request, it must be recorded, or logged (for this, she uses work management platform Asana to manually input each item). This is communicated to staff, who send the request to relevant contacts (freelance shoppers or sales associates, via Whatsapp). Once sourced and sold, staff manually calculate and send an invoice (via payment platform Xero). Active orders are tracked and marked complete on monday.com.
None of these platforms are purpose built for fashion sourcing; they’re not designed for Waller’s business model. She knew this from the get go, and has made do. But now that she rakes in up to 100 requests a day, it’s a bigger issue. Talu saw this grunt work first hand after shadowing Waller. “I was mind blown by how manual and outdated the whole thing was,” he says.
Today, Waller says she is able to fulfil about 30 per cent of the requests she receives. With Sourced By, she believes she can get this number up to 100. Many requests currently slip through the cracks, Waller admits. “Once it’s in the [system], requests from a month ago truly do get forgotten because of the amount of scrolling [in Asana],” Waller says. If she’s with a sales associate, for instance, there’s no way to quickly check if there is an existing request for an item, because Asana doesn’t have the search function for this.
She points to her own Loro Piana ostrich leather L19 handbag. “If I think, ‘Hey, I have a request for that,’ I don’t know how to find it. I don’t know if I called it ‘black L19 bag’ or ‘top handle bag’ [in Asana].”
This is where the AI integration comes in: Sourced By uses image and text recognition to dramatically speed up the logging and searching process. As it stands, logging requests takes operations manager Collin two to three hours a day. Sourced By’s AI will majorly reduce this — each item requires just three clicks to log: select the image, crop it, confirm it. The AI will then pick up the brand name, style name, description, size, as well as matching client requests and sizes. It’ll also solve for smaller hiccups that Waller isn’t able to control for at present, such as tracking request dates to ensure that, if she finds one bag out of 10 requests, the client that entered it first will receive first dibs.
Sourced By has two portals: sourcer and shopper, with the latter being for freelance sourcing assistants. Sourcers upload screenshots of Instagram (or email/Whatsapp/text) conversations with clients, and, when searching keywords, have access to all of the different client requests for these products. On the shopper portal, users can only see item details — client information is hidden.
This reduces the number of lines of communication. On Asana, anyone that logs in can see all requests and client details. So Waller is unable to give freelance shoppers access, and has to reach out to each individually to communicate requests. Now, they see these automatically on their Sourced By feeds, enabling Waller to enlist far more freelance employees. Shoppers can also notify sourcers when they find an item with a single click, and payouts are completed via automated invoicing.
Sourced By will charge sourcers per transaction processed throughout the platform, and they can decide how much they choose to charge clients on top of that for their sourcing fee. “It is important to me to not interfere with how much the sourcers individually make through their sourcing fees,” says Waller, noting that some prefer flat fees, others percentages. Shoppers join for free in the current testing phase, and will later be charged a one-off joining fee to cover the application and onboarding costs.
In solving for these sourcing pain points — not just for Waller, but for her competitors — does she worry about reduced competition? In a word, no. “In the sourcing world, our relationships are very important,” she says. Access to more shoppers doesn’t mean access to other sourcers’ networks. This is the human side of the industry that won’t be touched by the tech.
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Another side that won’t be touched is the frontend. Once Sourced By is fully implemented, clients wouldn’t even know. This is vital, says Waller. Clients are used to writing requests on Instagram, and are unlikely to go out of their way to download a new app, let alone learn it and redirect their usual actions. Shifting consumer behaviour is hard — and there’s no need to do so.
Speeding up the back end with AI will allow for more time spent with clients, Waller hopes. “The whole experience of personal shopping and fashion sourcing is that personalisation factor. [Connection is] often lost now because I’m spending so much time trying to manually log the requests. In some way, I’ve lost sight of what matters: connection to your client.”
Phase two — and beyond
With new money raised, Waller plans to get Sourced By up and running: making hires, fixing imperfections, making adjustments based on sourcer and shopper feedback, and tweaking the AI capabilities.
For Talu, the raise is less about the size of the capital than the strategies that come on board — from fashion execs to sourcers themselves. “In a pre-seed type of round, you want people that have first-degree experience in building,” he says, because these are the people that can offer advice and introductions. “I think Sourced By will be very capital efficient — it’s a SaaS (software-as-a-service) tool, it’s purely digital, it doesn’t hold any inventory. That’s why, at this first stage, it’s about the strategic capital coming in.”
Tech improvements are on the cards, too. Reverse image search is on the horizon, Chris says, so shoppers can take a photo of an item they find to see if there are existing requests for the product without needing a keyword.
Down the line, Waller also hopes to onboard multi-brand boutiques to assist with sourcing for very important clients (VICs), to account for cases where specific items sell out on a retailer’s website. “It would be very frustrating for an in-house personal shopper to advise one of their top VICs that an item is sold out — that VIC will most likely head straight to a competitor to buy it from their website,” Waller says. With Sourced By, boutiques can find more items, and Sourced By captures an additional revenue stream.
It’s smart for brands to embrace the model, says Bernstein luxury goods analyst Luca Solca, who sees fashion sourcers and personal shoppers as one of the avenues the industry has developed to take care of VICs. “Luxury brands have realised the significant spending capacity of VICs and are working to excite them and attract them,” he says.
Waller is bullish on sourcing’s growth potential. “I really believe that [sourcing] is the future of luxury shopping,” Waller says. “It’s not slowing down, it’s just continuing to get bigger and bigger.”
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