Alexandra van Houtte: Navigating the Shift from Fashion Shows to Tagwalk’s Data Dominance

Alexandra van Houtte (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1989) never thought of founding a data company: she dreamed of dressing magazine editorials. However, her trajectory led her to decide that the chaos of the catwalk needed a practical search engine and not another magazine of inspiration or a company that prescribes trends. After a journey that took her from British boarding schools to a sabbatical year in Beijing and a master’s degree in styling at the London College of Fashion, she landed in editors such as Vogue, Numéro and Grazia.

She earned her salary by locating looks from the four great fashion capitals. And the first time a fashion director asked her for “a red dress, sixties, mao collar” she understood that the system was not made for searching but for getting lost. “I could spend a whole week tracking down folders,“ she recalls. The solution ended up appearing in his apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, when he turned frustration into code and christened his invention Tagwalk, a search engine that teaches the catwalk as if it were a dictionary.

It all started in 2015 with the routine of downloading thousands of images from fashion weeks and tagging them by hand with 2,000 words. “At the beginning we worked manually to train our Artificial Intelligence,“ assures the entrepreneur, recognizing that “today AI is fundamental, without it we could not exist.“ As soon as the test showed that the search took seconds and not days, Alexandra switched from the stylist’s notebook to a home server.

Financial backing came months after the launch. Venezuelan Carmen Busquets, a Net-a-Porter pioneer, injected seed capital and introduced the project to Hong Kong-based Adrian Cheng, founder of C Ventures, who also participated in the round. The shareholding structure remains small and the founder retains control over the company, which she considers “the great project of her life”.

“Our economic model is based on selling data and information on trends, not advertising,“ says the entrepreneur

Eight years later, Tagwalk’s base exceeds 360,000 professional accounts. “We have thousands of registered users and we know their profession, their country, their gender... that allows us to understand exactly what they are looking for and how they are looking for it,“ she argues. Consultation remains free, but the key is the paywall that releases colors, fabrics or decades for eight euros a month and a dashboard that compares the performance of a detail in seventy markets and anticipates its evolution to one year. Our economic model is based on selling data, not advertising,“ he defends; “we sell information on trends and that makes us much more independent from the brands”.

The company operates with seven permanent employees and does not spend on marketing. “In all this time, we haven’t invested a single euro in marketing and, even so, word of mouth works better than any banner,“ he smiles. The licenses bought by Adidas, Asos or Kering already represent 80% of the turnover. “Every professional who discovers the search engine shares it with his or her team, and growth is multiplied by the network effect,“ he says.

Recent motherhood has led the CEO and founder of Tagwalk to simplify processes and decide quickly. “AI is going to replace tedious and mediocre tasks; good journalists will continue to ask uncomfortable questions,“ she is confident about the future of the industry in which she took her first steps. That’s why he doesn’t give up on human judgment, even though the innovation is proprietary. For three years, a team trained an AI that today identifies everything from a plisé soleil to a romantic sixties wink and crosses that semantics with user navigation.

Although headlines describe it as “the Google of fashion,“ Van Houtte rejects that. “Google is 190,000 employees; we are seven,“ she laughs. His ambition, however, is no less: that every person looking for a color, a silhouette or a diverse casting will open Tagwalk before any other tab. Faced with the noise of fashion, Alexandra van Houtte opts for classification and synthesis. And, for the moment, this trend is gaining traffic.