Building Together: Our Partnership with Tote
How a chance meeting at EDGE NYFW led to much-needed collaboration in fashion tech.
The best partnerships often start with unexpected conversations. When I met Kathleen, founder of Tote, at EDGE NYFW earlier this year, neither of us anticipated that our casual chat about the fashion tech landscape would evolve into a strategic partnership that would accelerate both of our missions.
Two Platforms, One Vision
At first glance, Future Reference and Tote might seem like they're solving similar problems. We're both building in the digital wardrobe space, both leveraging AI to transform how people interact with their clothing. But our conversation quickly revealed something more interesting: we were approaching the same ecosystem from complementary angles.
Tote has built an incredible AI-powered social wardrobe platform that helps users plan outfits based on their closet, the weather, and their calendar—like having a personal stylist in your pocket. Their focus is on maximizing what you already own through smart styling and outfit coordination.
Future Reference tackles the other side of the wardrobe lifecycle: making it effortless to sell the pieces you no longer wear. Our email digitization technology instantly imports your fashion purchases, tracks resale values, and enables one-click listing across multiple marketplaces.
The synergy was clear. Tote's users were constantly asking for email syncing capabilities to build their digital wardrobes faster. Meanwhile, we saw an opportunity to introduce our resale platform to Tote's engaged community of fashion-conscious users.
The Partnership in Action
Today, we're excited to announce that Tote users can now sync their wardrobes using Future Reference's digitization technology. Here's how it works:
- Instant Wardrobe Creation: Tote users can leverage our email syncing to automatically import their fashion purchases from 20+ major retailers and 2,000+ brands
- Seamless Transition to Resale: When users are ready to sell pieces from their digital wardrobe, they can easily set up their Future Reference account.
- One-Click Selling: With all their item details already captured, listing across marketplaces becomes effortless
For Tote, this partnership delivers a highly-requested feature that would have taken months to develop independently. For Future Reference, it's an opportunity to reach users who are already thinking intentionally about their wardrobes and personal style.
Why This Matters for Fashion Tech
As Kathleen noted in her recent video about the partnership: "We're meeting people who are building in a way that could be a partnership... solving for similar but different problems."
This collaboration represents something bigger than just two companies working together. It's evidence that the fashion tech ecosystem is maturing beyond pure competition toward strategic collaboration. Rather than each company trying to build every feature in-house, we believe in the value of partnerships that accelerate innovation and better serve users.
The fashion tech community may be small, but it's incredibly collaborative. Events like EDGE NYFW create spaces for these organic connections to form, and staying open-minded about potential partnerships has been crucial for both our companies.
Looking Forward
This partnership is just the beginning. As we continue to build Future Reference's platform, we're always looking for opportunities to collaborate with companies that share our vision of making fashion more circular and sustainable.
The integration between Tote and Future Reference creates a powerful full-cycle wardrobe experience: from digitizing your closet, to styling what you own, to seamlessly selling what you've outgrown. It's exactly the kind of holistic approach the fashion industry needs as consumers become more conscious about their consumption and disposal habits.
Try It Yourself
Ready to experience this integration? Try Tote and see how easy it is to build and manage your digital wardrobe with our combined technology.
If you're building in the fashion tech space—particularly around ownership, digitization, or circular fashion—we'd love to connect. The best innovations happen when we build together rather than in isolation.
Interested in partnerships or collaborations? Reach out to us to explore how we might work together.
