For those of you that don’t know how the NY Fashion 2.0 Group started, last month I posted on NextNY about how many times I had attended tech events that promised the potential to meet lots of VCs/Angels only to be disappointed by the lack of investor presence.

Charlie O’Donnell, founder of NextNY and CEO of Path101, challenged me to get off my ass and create a fashion meetup:

“In my mind, though, the best way you could ever meet really relevant angels is to run an event yourself. Why not do a “Technology of Fashion” event… there have to be other fashion related startups besides yourself and the Gilt Groupe… or start the fashion entrepreneurs Meetup and start inviting successful people in the fashion industry to come and speak at them. It’s SO EASY to get speakers and if you get to know these folks, they’re much more likely to be angel investors in your company than anyone you meet at one of these big events, where people probably don’t know anything about your particular v-neck of the woods. (ba-dum-bump!)”

Bad puns aside, Charlie was right and Yuli Ziv, CEO of MyItThings took the lead and immediately created a Fashion 2.0 group on meetup. Our first meeting was last week and, like Yuli said, it was a great start. We had over forty people show up all interested in connecting and finding ways to challenge the industry with new ideas and new business models.

At the first meeting alone, I met six other fashion 2.0 startup founders (and know I’m missing a few I didn’t get a chance to meet):
Yuli Ziv – MyItThings
Michael Pratt – Gift Girl
Jane Lu – Dress King
Trish Ginter – Smashing Darling
Tavia Sharp – Ave Swimwear
Seph Skerritt – Archimedes Cloth

How cool! Even if I never meet a single investor through this group (though we’re working on that), the potential to create a platform that promotes the development of the fashion 2.0 ecosystem in NYC is exciting. We all realized after our very first meeting how much we need each other.

Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Yuli. If you are a fashion entrepreneur with a disruptive business model working in NYC, hope to see you at our next event.