Elevating Bridal Fashion with 3D Body Scanning: A Conversation with Manon Martin

Hi, how are you doing?

Yeah, so my name is Manon Martin. I’m the founder and CEO of Les Aimants, which is where we help women get a wedding dress eight times faster and 20% more affordably through the use of 3D fitting technology and an automated supply chain. So I have a background in technical design. I have helped fashion supply chains for the past decade to automate their supply chain and to also make it more sustainable by working in 3D fitting technology. A couple of years ago, about 2015, or 2016, when I reached the age of getting married, I found an industry with a big hole compared to the fashion apparel space where everything is quite streamlined, automated, and fast. And I found out that wedding dresses are extremely expensive. They’re not made to fit.

The industry standard always asks you to shop at least eight months before the wedding date. So I came up with a consumer tech solution that will be beneficial to the consumer to shop much faster, to receive a product that is much more affordable, and that doesn’t need so much alteration when the product is being done. On the other hand, to work sustainably in the supply chain area, the manufacturer struggles to communicate in real-time with the different parties of prediction to be able to deliver a product faster that will give them a better margin.

Yeah, so we are technically a wedding dress company, Beauty of Bridal. We allow the customer, we allow the bride to shop online or shop directly in our store here in New York, where the bride can digitally customize her wedding dress online from different areas of top skirt fabric detail, and can digitally see the customization of our choices directly for the platform. There are over 2,000 ways to customize a wedding dress on our platform to make it very unique to every woman. On the other hand, we build a 3D body scanner where the consumer can get 3D body scans from the comfort of their home with an iPhone or an Android. This data will go directly to our internal platform which we also had built to automate all the communication of production with the different parties of the making.

So the parent maker that designed the wedding dress, the factory that cuts and sews the design of the wedding dress, the FedEx that automates the shipping labels et cetera. So everything is connected within one platform which is the consumer and supply chain area.

So yes, we are a brand focusing on the bridal space because that’s a market in need. But you have to see us as a made-to-order solution. So as we go in scale, we’re going to grow a new expertise and area of garment construction, such as women’s suiting or men’s suiting which is very much needed to get a product more customizable, more affordable, and delivered much faster.

My best-selling dress is the V-neck low back with a trumpet skirt. That has been a killer for us but the beauty again of our concept is to make it the most unique and customizable. So we love to see diversity in our sales because there is not one dress that always looks the same at the end.

We had the e-commerce on for the past three years, but the beauty of it is that we are currently rebranding the whole company. So we’re going to have a brand new website by the end of April where to reach more consumers, to make it much more user-friendly, even though we are extremely user-friendly we wanted to make it even easier. And the next step of the journey for e-commerce is the try-on-at-home experience. So we are following the steps of major consumer retail such as Warby Parker allows you to try on a pair of glasses at home, we want to be able to offer that to our consumers when it comes to shopping for wedding dresses online.

Where are you looking?

So South of Florida, actually there are a ton of bridal shows. I just coming back from there, but yes, I get you.

Yeah. The idea is that as of today, we have 10% of our consumers who are flying out of state because they do not find the option that they are looking for in retail. So like when you shop, when you’re a woman, and that’s one of the main pain points that we’ve been hearing over the years, is that you’re buying a designer vision. You’re going into a bridal shop, the bridal shop represents the brand in general, they are retailers. And you will have like to compile with their sales policy which is buy the girls next door, wedding dresses. This is the 50 option that we have, and this is it. where we want to embrace the consumer perspective. We tell our customers, you’re the designer, we’re the maker, and we brainstorm together. And that’s, that had gone over the borders of New York City since 10% of them, like those consumers, are flying to meet us.

Everything. We are a bridal company thinking at scale to reach an audience that is just not like in our region, if I may say. What we are doing differently is that we are fully customizable from head to toe. We’re eight times faster. We deliver a wedding dress made to fit your body measurements in one shot within eight weeks instead of eight months from the industry standard. We promised the true fit, which means that on average, our consumers are going to save between $800 to $1,000 in bright old dresses and alterations. If for any reason your body changes within eight months, which is completely fine, we are doing small alterations directly in-store, I mean, in New York and even online where we have some partners around you.

So you do not need to spend this money. You can spend this money on a beautiful pair of shoes or your wedding planning. Again, what makes us different as a brand is that for the first time, a brand has put its shoe into the bridal shoe of the consumer. And that was very much needed.

What activity do I do to promote the brand? So much. So we recently finished a major accelerator program last year. And we raised some capital to go to market, to bring our go-to-market strategy. So the new thing that is coming up is a new e-commerce platform, fully brand new. We’re rebranding the new company. We’re making it more energetic.

And we’re shifting gears with that. Pop-up activation across the United States in 2024. We also have our advertising campaign that is coming out, CRM, and building community. I think what is very much needed, and you will see that on social personnel in 2024 around you, women and men, by the way, are keener on gathering and belonging to a community. So we want to build a community of pride. We want to grow our network to feel them included.

Outside of wedding dresses, so we are a brand that’s called L’ésiment and we do wedding dresses, but at scale, we will have new label brands coming out around like the powerhouse of the bridal because it’s just like we are a consumer tech company over being just a brand. So if tomorrow we were just replicating our business model from another perspective, like into men’s suiting or women’s suiting or even hospitality clothing, like that, remain the same thing. You can customize a product, get it fit to your body measurement, and receive it in the shortest time in the industry standard.

I think I said pretty much it. As we are also selling wedding dresses online, the Try-On At Home Experience box will be coming up sometime this fall of 2024. But in the meantime, if you want to visit us in New York, you can book your appointment on www.lesaimond.com and our stylist and I will be here to receive you guys.

We’re spreading on social. We love TikTok, Instagram and everything.

Okay, thank you so much for your time, and let me know if you need anything else. Thank you.