Rita Sheth - Founder & CEO - Mercury Dasha

Rita Sheth, the Founder of Mercury Dasha, exemplifies entrepreneurial evolution from a successful corporate career to a transformative journey into the world of fashion, and now, at the forefront of AI-driven fashion innovation. An Oxford-educated entrepreneur, she began her career in the corporate world. However, a passion for creative expression and a desire to empower smaller, independent designers led her to start a business in the fashion industry in 2015.

Driven by a belief that smaller designers deserved more visibility, she began building a niche marketplace to give them a platform to showcase their talent. This was at a time when many of these designers lacked access to digital tools and audiences. Her marketplace helped bridge that gap, providing these creators with exposure, while at the same time, giving her the opportunity to explore the world of fashion more deeply.

● From Marketplace to Fashion Brand

Building on the marketplace, she launched her own design brand, combining her love for fashion with a passion for high-quality, small-scale production. However, she quickly learned that small designers faced massive hurdles: high production costs, broken workflows, and, most challenging of all, the asynchronous nature of fashion product development, where you are designing in a vacuum, mostly based on best guesses.

Despite her passion for creativity, she became increasingly aware of how these inefficiencies were preventing brands from reaching their full potential. High costs and wasted products were leading to costly mistakes and environmental waste, a pressing issue in an industry already notorious for its unsustainable practices.

● A Vision for Change: The Birth of Mercury Dasha

After pursuing a design course and diving deeper into emerging technologies, blockchain, and digital fashion concepts, she decided to shift the fashion industry's paradigm by exploring how emerging technologies could address some of the broken parts of the fashion industry. Leveraging AI to address the very pain points she had experienced firsthand, Mercury Dasha evolved into an AI-driven digital-first platform designed to help creators succeed by transforming the fashion development process into something smarter, more efficient, more connected, and more sustainable.

The platform was created to harness data to make better product decisions, considering creative points of view, production feasibility, real-time market signals, and collaborative feedback over the whole design-to-sale workflow. The vision was to empower creators of all sizes, from independent designers to large fashion teams, by providing a seamless connected workflow from design to sales, that integrated intelligence at every point to better enable smart design decisions.

● Future Roadmap: Expanding the Possibilities

While Mercury Dasha is already changing fashion product development, the journey is far from over. Rita sees a future full of even more innovations from full-platform sales integration and live fabric shopping to improved fit and size visualizations to help get these elements right before production. These features will bring designers even closer to the buyer and offer a truly end-to-end solution. Rita considers that there are endless possibilities for even more connectivity and integration using AI and emerging technologies to assist brands with their work.

● Sustainability: Reducing Waste Without Compromising Creativity

One of the most powerful aspects of Mercury Dasha is its ability to combat the environmental waste that plagues the fashion industry. By connecting design with real-time data and buyer signals, designers can create products that meet demand without overproducing or wasting materials. This addresses the global issue of fast fashion waste, as designers can avoid making too much inventory that ultimately ends up in landfills. The ability to better predict demand before production begins is key to reducing unsold stock and ensuring that the right products are created in the right quantities.

Rita believes that by using AI to enhance decision-making without compromising creativity, the fashion industry can have the best of both worlds: fast-paced, responsive design, while also considering the environmental impact of waste. "Many brands want to make fashion fast but without the waste that fast fashion is known for. We can potentially have a new kind of fast fashion, one that provides variety, and is highly responsive to demand, but also one that doesn't mean over-production and inevitable waste."

● A Human-Centred Mission: Empowering Creators with AI

At the heart of Mercury Dasha is a human-centred approach. Rita has always believed in the importance of creative agency, and this belief is core to Mercury Dasha's mission. "AI can never replace creativity," she explains, "but it can empower creators to achieve better commercial outcomes." She believes that AI should act as an assistant, helping designers translate their vision into products that are not only unique but also commercially viable.

Her mission has always been to empower creators to succeed in the industry she loves. Whether it's an independent designer or a large fashion house, the goal remains the same: to help them create products that succeed in the market while retaining their creative vision. "We're not about replacing creativity," she says. "We're building a system that helps enhance and assist but retains the unique creative viewpoint."

Through Mercury Dasha, Rita has built a platform that is not just another generative AI-tool but about using technology to create smarter, more efficient, and more sustainable fashion production. By empowering creators with the right tools, she's transforming the fashion industry into a space where creativity and intelligence go hand in hand.

● Conclusion: A Vision for a Smarter, More Sustainable Fashion Industry

As Mercury Dasha evolves, Rita Sheth remains focused on building a future where fashion can be fast and efficient but also remain creative and inspiring. The journey from launching her first design brand to building a fully AI-powered product development platform has been one of continuous learning and growth, not just in terms of technology but in her commitment to supporting the creators who are driving the future of fashion.

"Mercury Dasha is more than a platform," Rita says. "It's a constant journey of creative exploration in a world of technology. A movement that embraces creativity, intelligence, and technology in equal measure. This is just the beginning, and I'm excited to see how our work continues to evolve."

● About the author

Rita Sheth is Founder and CEO of Mercury Dasha, a company paving the way for the future of fashion where creativity and AI work together to help brands make better product decisions, and which works to optimise the traditional fashion product development process. To find out more, visit www.mercurydasha.com

This release was published on openPR.