An exploration of distinct vision angles for Fobou — each treated as if it were the company's whole story. Not all of them will be the answer; several are likely to be features inside another. Each avenue is here to be reacted to, kept, killed, or merged.
Read time: ten minutes for the gist of all eight; an hour if you go in. Click any avenue to open its concept page.
Each avenue page opens with a dark gist block — four bullets covering hero, format, mechanic, and why it works. Read those if you only have a minute.
Below the gist is a concept landing page — what fobou.com (or the relevant surface) might look and feel like if that avenue were the headline. Numbers, names, and tiers are placeholders to make the register concrete; everything is up for revision.
Avenues come in pairs and trios that interlock: 1 + 7 are the two intake doors; 2 / 2bis are alternative club registers; 3 / 5 / 6 are three different consumer-facing surfaces; 4 is the silent infrastructure underneath; 8 is the per-drop transaction layer that runs across all of them.
A residency for new fashion houses.
Six houses in residence at any time, each for ~12 months. Established designers in collaboration; influencers building their own brand. Fobou produces the first capsule end-to-end and stays behind. Quiet atelier register; alumni graduation as recruitment ad.
Membership, by application.
A private fashion club — Soho House logic applied to fashion access. Single annual fee, vetted, capped capacity. Members-only drops, salons, mill visits, annual hand-numbered piece. Confident, dark, secret-feeling. The houses we run are operational fact, not pitch.
Fund what fashion makes next.
An NPR / Patreon reading of the Club. Members-as-supporters. Three donor tiers, monthly dues, transparency on where every euro goes. Annual report: which houses members funded, which makers got paid. Open membership soft-capped — broader funnel, lower barrier, mission-driven brand.
Browsing should be the reason to come.
An experience-led discovery tool, set as a magazine spread. Three primitives: lineages (visual influence chains), curator feeds (followable people), and discoveries (one piece a day). Pieces appear inside stories, never in product grids. Editorial layout, image-first, asymmetric.
The studio behind the houses.
Wholesale + made-to-order infrastructure for creators with audience but no production stack. White-label storefront on the creator's own domain. Fobou is invisible to their customer. Take rate + monthly platform fee, three tiers (Drop / House / Group). The plumbing for everything else.
A daily ritual, not an arcade.
NYT Games × Letterboxd × Endel. One picked piece a day. Swipe-to-taste primitive. Streaks framed as habits (rest, never break). Credits accrue passively (swipes, votes, streak) and spend on AI generations, drop cashback, or in-platform vouchers. Anti-casino ethic baked in.
Your Fobou. No two are the same.
Personalization is the product. Every member's taste graph, ML-tuned, drives every surface — homepage feed, residency roster, register density, even language register. Built from onboarding swipes + behavioural signal. The site adapts; canon view always one click away. Privacy posture explicit.
Design it yourself. Members vote. Experts make it real.
Productized AI design tool (Flora-style) open to members. Free generations, token packs, designer membership tier. Two-gate feasibility: light pre-vote, deep post-vote with a Fobou product developer assigned. Promoted designs ladder up sketch → sample → drop → residency.
Threshold met, it gets made.
Kickstarter mechanics applied to fashion drops. 14–21 day campaigns, threshold + stretch goals, transparent timeline, first-100 numbered slots. Cards charge only on threshold; missed campaigns publicly listed. Pull manufacturing as headline product — zero dead stock as promise, not footnote.
Listed standalone for clarity. In production, several would interlock as a single product. The matrix shows where each avenue plugs in elsewhere.
| 01 Residency | 02 Club | 03 Discovery | 04 Studio | 05 Game | 06 Tailored | 07 Open Call | 08 Campaign | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| As intake → | Established | — | — | — | — | — | Unknowns | — |
| As surface → | — | Members | Editorial | — | Daily app | Per-user | — | Per-drop |
| As infra → | — | — | — | All drops | — | All surfaces | — | All drops |
| As funnel → | — | — | Browsing | — | Daily ritual | — | Submission | — |