Kingpin behind AI platform: "We see in-person trade shows as irreplaceable for relationship-building."

This season marked Kingpin’s first partnership with CIFF, introducing its AI-powered buyer matchmaking platform to the fair. Designed to help brands identify and connect with the right retailers, Kingpin sees trade shows as the moment where digital preparation meets real-world relationship building. From researching buyers and booking meetings ahead of the fair to continuing conversations long after it closes, the platform aims to help brands turn trade show moments into lasting commercial outcomes. Read the full feature on their first CIFF experience.

What made the fair the right platform for you to introduce your AI-powered buyer matchmaking solution?

CIFF brings together the exact mix we build for: established brands, emerging labels, and serious retailers actively looking for what's next. It's also a fair that has stayed deliberately ahead of the curve not just in product curation, but in how it thinks about the industry's evolution. We see in-person trade shows as irreplaceable for relationship-building. Our goal with Kingpin isn't to replace that energy but to extend it. CIFF was the right place to show how brands can make better, more intentional connections during the fair, and continue building value long after the doors close.

Tradeshows are an obvious moment for Kingpin but you've talked about it being a scalable revenue engine. What does that actually look like in practice?

The fair is the most visible moment, but it's rarely where the best outcomes are decided. The brands consistently walking away with the right buyers — the ones that feel like the show worked have almost always done the real work before they arrived. They know who they want in the room. They've already started the conversation. The meeting at the stand is a confirmation, not a cold introduction.

What makes that possible is control, something most brand teams haven't had in the way they deserve. With Kingpin's live search, brands can actively search for the right buyers at any point in the year. By market, by category, by retailer profile — and connect with them ahead of the tradeshows, booking appointments beforehand and start building toward those relationships on their own timeline. That changes the dynamic entirely. The outreach becomes intentional. The conversations arrive with context. The brand shows up to every touchpoint, on or off the show floor, already knowing why this buyer matters and what to say.

Between every trade show there are months where that groundwork can be laid properly. Most brands leave that time largely untouched not because they don't see the value, but because they've never had a tool that made it actionable. The ones that do are pulling further ahead with each season, quietly and consistently.

Kingpin is built for all of it. The brands using it only around show season are getting a fraction of what it's designed to do and leaving the most valuable part of the tool dormant for most of the year.

AI still divides opinion in the fashion industry. But you're seeing it play out in real time across the major shows — what's the honest picture?

The skepticism is understandable. A lot of what's been marketed as AI to the fashion industry has overpromised and underdelivered in the form of generic output, surface-level research, tools that create more work than they remove. It's made a lot of brand teams cautious, and that caution is reasonable.

But there's a quieter story happening alongside it that's harder to ignore once you've seen it enough times.

The brands with real momentum, aren't the biggest or the most established. They're the ones that have taken a more considered approach to how AI can actually serve a commercial team. Not AI as a novelty, not AI as a cost-cutting exercise, but AI as a way of operating with a level of precision and consistency that simply wasn't possible before.

The pace of international expansion is only accelerating that divide. As more brands chase the same buyers across the same global calendar, the volume of outreach buyers receive has never been higher — which means the bar for what actually gets their attention has never been higher either.

That's where AI changes the equation. By making every touchpoint count. The brands pulling ahead are using it to access context at scale; understanding who a buyer is, what they carry, what they're likely looking for next and translating that into outreach that reads like you actually did your homework, not an automated template. That level of intentionality used to require a team and weeks of research. Now it's available to any brand with the right infrastructure, across every market, every season, without the work compounding beyond what a small commercial team can handle.

And that's what makes this moment genuinely interesting. AI levels a playing field that has historically favoured the brands with the biggest teams and the longest relationships. The emerging label and the established house are now working from the same starting point. What differentiates them isn't scale or legacy; it's who shows up with the most context, the most precision, and the most intentional approach to every conversation. Kingpin makes that possible for any brand willing to move.

Looking back at your first experience at CIFF, what did you gain from being on the ground with brands and retailers?

Confirmation that the problem we're solving is bigger than most people are willing to say out loud.

The tradeshow model brings the right people into the same room — and that proximity is genuinely irreplaceable especially in an industry built on relationships. But everything built around it hasn't kept pace. The way brands research buyers, approach them, follow up with them — it's largely the same as it was twenty years ago, running on spreadsheets, manual outreach, and institutional memory. For brands with serious international ambitions, that doesn't scale. The fair gets bigger, the buyer list gets longer, the calendar gets more compressed, and the commercial team is still the same size trying to cover all of it.

What CIFF made clear is that the people on the floor aren't looking for technology. They're looking for commercial outcomes. The founders, the sales directors, the brand managers — their entire reason for being there is to find the right buyers, open the right conversations, and convert them into real partnerships. That's the brief. Everything else is in service of that.

Kingpin was built for exactly that person and exactly that problem; a commercial solution for commercial teams, sitting at the centre of every brand's reason for being at the fair in the first place. The brands that understood that didn't need a long explanation. They recognised it immediately, because they'd been feeling the gap for years.

That's what being on the ground gave us. Clarity on exactly where Kingpin belongs, and how much room there is to redefine how business is done — in a relationship-based industry, at tradeshows, in the AI era.

Ready to change how your brand finds and converts buyers? Learn more about Kingpin