Kuo ShihYun | Co-CEO & Founder, lablaco (she/her)

For making fashion more circular, through her pioneering work in the digitalisation space

Kuo ShihYun is a pioneer in the fashion digitalisation and blockchain technology space. A data and digital innovation entrepreneur with over eight years of experience in luxury retail buying and merchandising management, data systems and digital media, she now lives between the fashion capitals of Paris and Milan, but works in the realm of the digital. 

Yun began her career in fashion in the luxury industry, and was even, at one point, appointed directly by the General Manager of Giorgio Armani HQ to create new technology ventures for the Maison. During her time in the traditional fashion space, she brought to life a few startups, with a clientele base of names you’ve definitely heard of, including Vogue, Officiel, Dolce&Gabbana, and Vionnet, throughout Europe and Asia.

In 2016, Yun co-founded lablaco: the first Circular Fashion Network, with a mission to speed up the digitalisation and transformation of the fashion industry towards a circular economy. Now we all know that the traditional fashion industry is incredibly unsustainable: from the massive resource and energy use from the start to the end of a garment life-cycle, to the overconsumption and monumental waste. With lablaco, Yun is bringing together technology, and sustainability to make a difference. lablaco is redesigning a new ecosystem for the fashion industry by implementing new sustainable business models and redefining relationships among retailers, brands, designers, influencers, content creators, and consumers in a single framework by leveraging blockchain within an open-source platform. 

lablaco’s current projects include SPIN (through which users can list and tokenise pre-owned items with traceable digital ownership across circular models: swapping, sharing, borrowing and trading), LPLUS (which enables data traceability of product origin, authenticity, environmental impact, and customer ownership over the whole product journey) and the Circular Fashion Summit. The Summit is a Global Collective Action Summit that supports the UN SDGs, through gathering changemakers and leaders in the spaces of design, technology and sustainability, towards accelerating circular fashion. 

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