A sale rail is an awkward place to discover that your first idea was wrong. By then, someone has designed the garment, ordered the fabric, arranged the shipping and given it a hopeful price. Geoff Watts built much of his working life around getting useful information into the room before that sequence becomes expensive. His subject happened to be fashion. His preoccupation was the decision.
Watts co-founded EDITED with Julia Fowler in London in 2009. She brought the experience of a fashion designer who wanted firmer evidence for commercial choices. He brought software development and an appetite for making large quantities of information useful. Between them sat a problem familiar to anyone who has ever bought too much of the wrong thing. Retailers faced it with rather larger invoices.
The partnership would take Watts from writing code around consulting work to running a retail intelligence company, then to a board role when a new chief executive arrived. Along the way, he became an unusually pointed critic of perpetual markdowns. For someone selling access to numbers, he had quite a lot to say about trust.
A racing connection, then a working partnership
Watts and Fowler met through car racing in Western Australia. The association is a pleasing detail in a business concerned with timing, though their company took years of preparation rather than one flying start. They relocated from Australia to London and developed an idea that had been taking shape before the formal founding.
Fowler's complaint was specific. Fashion had inspiration, forecasts and reports, but too little timely evidence to support the decisions she needed to make. A designer could see last season's results inside her own business. Seeing the wider commercial market as it moved was another matter.
The division of labour was practical. Fowler worked full time on developing the concept. Watts wrote the software during evenings and weekends while earning money through consultancy. They initially paid for the business themselves. This is the part of a technology company's history that tends to vanish behind its later funding announcements: a second working day begins when the first one ends.
The difficult bit was making it readable
The early product gathered information from the web and presented it in a dashboard for fashion professionals. Its users included buyers, merchandisers, designers and suppliers. Price, product availability and the surrounding market could become part of a working conversation, rather than a research expedition undertaken whenever someone had spare time.
Watts described the ambition in 2011 with a compact comparison: “Bloomberg for the fashion industry.” The analogy placed fashion alongside businesses in which people expect to consult live information before committing money. It also made clear that the customer was a professional with a decision to make.
He acknowledged that expressing the data in terms fashion people understood had consumed thousands of hours. That admission deserves room beside the financing milestones. Collecting information and making someone want to use it are separate jobs. A dashboard can contain everything and still leave its customer none the wiser.
Fowler's domain knowledge mattered to that translation. Watts's contribution depended on it reaching the people doing the buying and trading. The company they built placed engineering in conversation with retail practice. A useful screen had to make sense during an ordinary working day, when nobody was inclined to admire the database for its own sake.
“If you think about that knowledge Julia wanted, that's really what we've built.”Geoff Watts, 2011
A place among the 2010 Seedcamp winners
EDITD, as the company was then called, became one of the winners of Seedcamp in 2010. The programme brought investment and mentoring, along with access to other founders and potential backers. For a young company selling an unfamiliar service to an established industry, being in those rooms had an obvious practical value.
By 2011, a $1.6 million seed round led by Index Ventures gave the founders money to expand the product and team. Their earlier personal funding had got them to a point where outside investment could speed up the work. The product was already a business proposition, with subscriptions tied to customers' data requirements.
The founders subsequently appeared in the Growing Business Young Guns class of 2012. Their customers reached across Europe, the Americas, South Africa, Australia and Asia. That geographical spread suited the question they were asking: a retailer's own results could explain part of its performance, while the market beyond its walls supplied another part.
The price tag is a promise
Watts's writing offers a more particular view of him than a list of rounds and job titles. In 2016, he argued that fashion retailers should be wary of dynamic pricing. An item of clothing belonged to an assortment, and that assortment had a relationship with its customer. Constantly reacting to a competitor's price could disrupt months of deliberate planning.
His objection was grounded in the work of retailing: the timing of new products, the position of different price points, and the meaning customers attached to a brand. He favoured analytics that informed those choices. Automation, in his account, needed a purpose beyond producing another lower number.
It is an interesting position for a technology founder. The appeal of a system that changes everything automatically is easy to sell. Watts was making a more demanding argument for judgment supported by information. A buyer still needed to understand what the collection was meant to do.
He returned to pricing in 2017, arguing that American retail had made discounts into a standing operating habit. Customers learned to wait. Retailers then faced the task of persuading them that an initial price meant something. His proposed response included greater transparency about value and products with a story people could understand.
There is a dry wit in his discussion of commercial habits, including a comparison between abandoning discounts and owning a waffle iron: appealing in theory, troublesome in use. He recognised how difficult change becomes once customers and companies have trained each other to behave a certain way. Better information had to work inside that relationship.
A conceptual view of the information EDITED brought together through its 2021 acquisition.
When the outside market came inside
In April 2020, EDITED announced a $29 million funding round backed by Beringea, Wavecrest Growth Partners and Hermes GPE. The announced uses included technology development and hiring in the UK and United States. The business then employed around 100 people and had an office in New York.
A year later, the acquisition of DynamicAction extended the original proposition. EDITED's view of the external market could sit alongside internal retail analytics. The combined offering connected the question of what competitors were doing with the question of what was happening inside a customer's own operation.
For Watts, then CEO, it was a step towards putting information to work across more of a retailer's business. DynamicAction's co-founder John Squire and his team brought a complementary perspective on operational data. The acquisition made the founding idea broader: evidence about the market could help guide action within the company.
The distinction is easy to miss in the vocabulary of business software. Knowing that another retailer has changed a price is useful. Understanding that change alongside your own inventory and trading performance makes a different discussion possible. The information has a destination: a decision someone can take.
Building a team required another kind of judgment
A company built to help other people choose well must make its own choices about people. In a 2018 conversation with Jonathan Moules, Watts and Fowler discussed the difficulty of hiring someone who did not work as a team player. They identified that experience as their toughest problem.
The anecdote adds a useful complication to a career usually described through data. A hiring decision becomes part of everyone else's working environment. Technical ability and a convincing interview do not settle the question of how someone will behave among colleagues. The founders' willingness to discuss a bad experience gives the company story some texture.
Watts's public professional record also includes an advisory connection with Rainforest QA and an earlier venture, EatInPerth. His career extends beyond the retail company, even though EDITED remains its defining public chapter. Across those roles, he has worked as a builder, executive and adviser.
A different chair at the table
In April 2022, Doug Kofoid became EDITED's chief executive as Watts stepped aside. Watts was identified as co-founder and board member in the announcement. He and Fowler welcomed the incoming leader and expressed confidence that he would develop the team and continue the company's direction.
The change matters when describing Watts today. His years as CEO belong to the building of the business; his board role is a different responsibility. His LinkedIn profile lists Perth, bringing his public career back into geographical contact with the place where the partnership began.
His stated business ambition, expressed with Fowler, was to help retailers make faster commercial decisions using market and enterprise intelligence. The scale of the tools changed over the years. The everyday problem remained recognisable. Someone must decide which products deserve money, space and attention, and which apparent opportunity deserves a second look.
Watts's contribution was to make more of that decision visible before the goods reached the sale rail. The pleasure of finding a bargain belongs to the shopper. The retailer would generally prefer to have understood the price a little earlier.