Meet Ileana Del Risco | Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ileana Del Risco and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ileana, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
I’m originally from Barranquilla, Colombia, and immigrated to the United States when I was a kid. Being raised in a family of strong female entrepreneurs, my bicultural experiences instilled a sense of resourcefulness, drive, and inclusivity. After seeing the environmental impact caused by apparel waste exported to Latin America, I felt motivated to innovate for a more sustainable future.

My heritage is strongly intertwined in my professional career—this past year, we’ve partnered with Shopify to put on an event that highlights Latinx fashion in New York City, and we’ve participated in industry gatherings like Intermoda in Guadalajara and Colombiamoda in Medellin. As a Latina-founded company, we feel a responsibility to drive positive change in the fashion industry. Through our work in fashion tech with Modi, we’ve been helping international brands to cultivate sustainable, profitable, and inclusive supply chains. I’m immensely proud of being a part of this ecosystem and seeing our technology make a tangible difference for Latinx brands as they grow.

What should our readers know about your business?
Modi helps eCommerce fashion brands reduce return waste and boost international conversions with virtual fitting technology. With sizing standards varying across regions and brands, returns due to poor fit are still a prevalent issue for direct to consumer apparel brands, leading to unnecessary shipping emissions and lost profits.

We’ve been working directly with growing brands like Baobab and True to understand where other solutions fall short and find opportunities to fill in the gaps. With Modi, brands can offer shoppers personalized experiences based on their unique measurements and fit profile. Since Modi virtually and anonymously captures body measurements, the recommendations are more personalized than survey-based solutions. We also provide brands with in-depth data on the measurement distribution of their shoppers that are used to significantly optimize inventory planning and production.

I’m incredibly proud of our role in advancing sustainable, inclusive, and profitable practices within the fashion industry. After implementing Modi, Baobab was able to provide thousands of recommendations, increase their conversion rates by 14%+, and their design team was able to better understand and utilize their shoppers’ unique measurement distributions. We also collaborated with Colombian streetwear brand True to create solutions that provide improved fit guidance for their gender-neutral collections.

And this is just the first step to transforming the way brands connect with customers virtually––we’re partnering with brands to build for the next era of spatial commerce, where shoppers can actually see how different sizes of clothing will look and fit on a 3D avatar of their unique body.

Reaching this point has not been an easy journey. In the startup ecosystem, navigating through failures and rejections is commonplace, especially since fully Latina-led technology companies like ours are often underestimated. The fashion industry is traditionally slow to change, and integrating technology requires disrupting well-established systems. Our experience has taught us that maintaining a laser focus on a niche market to start, can have a significantly greater impact.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Enjoy the water in South Beach or stroll around/have a picnic at South Pointe Park. For lunch nearby, check out Pane & Vino, La Sandwicherie, and Bodega Taqueria. I also recommend exploring the Design District and visiting the Pérez Art Museum!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’d like to give a shoutout to the unwavering support of my family, the resilient and empowering female network spanning across LATAM and the U.S., and the invaluable guidance provided by our incredible advisors and founder friends. I am deeply grateful for the collaborative mentorship, love, and encouragement that have fueled my journey.

Website: https://modifit.io

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/modi_fashiontech/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/modi-fit

Other: https://apps.shopify.com/modi

Image Credits
The second image uploaded (that shows the person on the right holding a mic) is credited to @colorsxj