5 Questions with Bogdan Lucaciu (Adore Me): team management, growth and technology in the fashion industry

Bogdan Lucaciu has been an entrepreneur for his entire adult life, a journey that started back in 2003 at System & Network Solutions (SNS), a company specialized in programming and network administration.

Five years later, Bogdan started a software development company, Sinapticode, as an SNS spin-off. In 2013, he merged Sinapticode into Adore Me, a company that challenges the status-quo of the lingerie market. He initially acted as a technology advisor for it, but things evolved and he merged his engineering team and joined as Adore Me’s CTO.

Bogdan is currently in charge of a tech team of 50+ people, striving to achieve a democratic way of working. He’s “into org design, engagement, open-source, building disruptive products, and shipping awesome software”.

Lingerie, as an industry, is really difficult (long lead time, complicated manufacturing etc, inventory risks, hard to sell online), so the market was really underserved.

We are obsessed about facts and data, run tons of experiments, measure everything, and decisions are performance driven. We don’t conform to recipes and tend to reinvent a lot of traditional operations (from fashion design to distribution and technology). We are a bit insane in our goals and rarely trust someone that claims something is impossible. And we have each other’s back which gives us courage to go big.

We’re supposed to learn from failures, right? Post-mortems, lessons learned, the works. I have to admit, it’s hard to accept failure, especially when people suffer. To move to a growth, learning mindset you need a lot of emotional support from your peers. Trust, psychological safety, lack of blaming and judging will focus people on learning instead of defending their actions or avoiding accountability. This is not easy. As a leader, I always try to be vulnerable and open up about my failures, mistakes, shortcomings, so others can feel safe to do the same.

Q4: What`s next for Adore Me?

Fashion is the second most polluting industry after oil. Fast fashion invites consumers to buy lots of things they don’t need that will end up on a landfill somewhere after being worn once or twice. This is a tough reality to accept. Why do we walk in the office every morning? What’s the purpose of it all? Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution? We have a strong intention to disrupt the fashion industry, make it more sustainable and inclusive, and play a meaningful role for the future generations.

Q5: Name one technology trend within your industry that cannot be ignored.

AI as commodity. Moving from data scientists doing complex modelling on complicated tech stacks to doing a prediction in a few minutes. We already see more and more specialised tools (marketing mostly) embedding a lot of ML in core features. I imagine we’ll see a lot of trends in operationalising machine learning in day-to-day tools and decisions (demand forecast, funnel optimisation, anomaly detection, etc).

Want to learn more about team management? Meet him at the How to Web Conference 2019 on the 30th & 31st of October! Get your ticket here: https://www.howtoweb.co/buy-tickets/.