New Fashion Innovation Hub Unveiled By PDS And Future Fashion Assembly

InnovationSustainabilityNew Fashion Innovation Hub Unveiled By PDS And Future Fashion AssemblyByBrooke Roberts-Islam,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Brooke Roberts-Islam is a London-based writer covering sustainability.Follow AuthorJun 11, 2026, 09:34am EDTFuture Fashion Assembly platform V2.0Future Fashion AssemblyStuck in the back of a car for three hours in Mumbai traffic, Paul Wright and Ankur Agarwal from PDS – one of the world’s largest fashion sourcing businesses – attempted to right some industry wrongs. They eventually arrived at a pervasive bottleneck – low uptake of process and product innovation. For all their speed-to-market and trend obsessions, fashion companies struggle to update the systems and materials that go into their products, meaning churn reigns and improvements are consigned to that oft-uttered utopian destination known as ‘when there’s time’. Fashion innovations exist, they’re just not being adopted.​What if, the duo from PDS pondered, a digital platform could unite brands with vetted, stress-tested solutions and the supply chain partners to implement them? ‘Sofia [Strazzanti] has already built that’ is reportedly what Yael Gairola, non-executive director at PDS, said when Agarwal floated the idea, and so a partnership was forged between her Future Fashion Assembly (FFA) platform and PDS to close fashion’s innovation adoption gap.Why Fashion Innovation Rarely Reaches The Factory Floor​At the time (March last year), Strazzanti, CEO of FFA, was operating version 1 of her digital platform, offering subscribers access to a digital showroom of technology and material solutions that she had vetted as being “scaled, growing, and with proven customer service [success]”. FFA was serving brand clients who had been seeking tech solutions to improve their business outcomes, but had entered the orbit of snake-oil purveyors and overly enthusiastic, but ultimately out-of-depth, startups with buzzy...