Heat and Flannels announce Ignite Prize winners

Mystery box and youth culture specialist Heat has revealed the three winners of its young entrepreneurs-focused Ignite Prize, which is backed by Frasers Group’s upscale Flannels chain.

Launched as part of the Flannels ongoing Youth-Phoria project, it invited digital-first young entrepreneurs from across the UK to apply with either a business idea or an existing business that’s still at an early stage.

Covering Fashion, Innovation and Circularity, each of the winners will be getting a £10,000 grant, a year of mentorship from Heat founders Joe Wilkinson and Mario Maher and other panellists, plus “an opportunity to show up within the Flannels business”.

The Fashion prize went to Systems, a project by Finlay Vincent Roberts that focuses on producing “fully modular clothing collections, designed for ultimate versatility and longevity”. Its first collection — Model A — is formed of “various changeable looks that can be reconfigured based on the wearer’s needs, allowing people to design their own ‘system’ of clothing”.

The designer created the business “after experiencing the lack of sustainability in the second hand market while living in Kenya” and the aim is to “produce each collection as an update on the previous, reducing waste and maximising individual garment usage — and allow customers to construct their own personalised ‘system’ wardrobe”.

Under the Innovation category, Truss, founded by Woody Lello, is a luxury fashion platform that aggregates resale data through connections to e-stores, including marketplaces such as Grailed, Depop, and other smaller boutique resellers. Its app helps buyers find multiple locations where the same garment is available online and compares prices. Its Bridge data processing engine “collects useful information, and informs future buyers about garment details, previous resale prices, and release dates”.

So far it has indexed over 25,000 individual garments with resale data including release date, SKU, price history, tag references and materials. The aim is to "reduce asymmetry in the sale of luxury secondhand goods in a market with rampant counterfeits, lack of trust and no indication of product value”.

Finally, the Circularity award goes to Alice Palace, which was founded by Alice Innes. It’s a contemporary arts business focusing on “simple but innovative lighting designs, usually in the form of graphic floral shapes that can be re-imagined in various scales and materials”. The most recent collection has been made using natural materials and the business hopes to continue experimenting with other sustainable, innovative materials and processes.

Flannels CMO Beckie Stanion said: “It was incredibly inspiring to receive so many unique applications for each of the three categories - every business showed us something different, which made it really tough to judge. However, the winners showed the originality and ambition we were looking for, and we’re so excited to award them this grant, and to watch them thrive in their next chapters.”

Heat and Flannels announce Ignite Prize winners

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