Fashion Tech • New York
Swipecast
The app that turned model casting into a search bar - and handed the talent back their money.
SWIPECAST. A booking marketplace that fits in a pocket. The middleman does not.
The app that turned model casting into a search bar - and handed the talent back their money.
SWIPECAST. A booking marketplace that fits in a pocket. The middleman does not.
A stylist in SoHo needs a model, a photographer, and a makeup artist by Thursday. A decade ago that meant a Rolodex, three agency bookers, a 33% commission, and a check that might land in ninety days. Today she opens an app, filters by hair color and location, swipes through vetted portfolios, messages the people she wants, and pays them through the same screen. The talent sees their money within forty-eight hours. That app is Swipecast - and the quiet part is that it was built by someone who used to run the agencies it routes around.
Peter Fitzpatrick did not arrive in fashion as a disruptor with a pitch deck. He arrived as a hedge-fund manager who bought a modeling agency - Silent Models, later a top-10 ranked women's agency in New York - and got a close look at the plumbing. What he saw was an industry that ran on relationships and paperwork, where the people in front of the camera surrendered roughly a third of their fee and then waited months to be paid.
In 2015 he teamed up with developer Matthias Wickenburg and built Swipecast, a marketplace that let brands, designers, photographers and stylists book creative talent directly. The press reached for the easy label - "Tinder for models," "Uber for models" - and the swipe interface earned it. But the swipe was never the point.
The point was underneath: a payment system that took a 10% cut instead of 33%, and settled in a day or two instead of ninety. Add scheduling, call sheets, group messaging and mood boards, and a booking that used to require a team of agency staff could be produced by one person on a phone.
Fitzpatrick was, in effect, building the tool to disrupt his own business. That is either reckless or clear-eyed, and the cap table suggests the latter. Swipecast's backers were not just venture funds - they were the former CEOs of Hearst Magazines International, Louis Vuitton, and EMI Music. When the people who ran the industry write the checks, the thesis has weight.
Fashion loves to talk about creativity and hates to talk about invoicing. Swipecast's most persuasive feature was the boring one: who keeps the money, and how fast.
Browse vetted portfolios of models, photographers, stylists, makeup artists and video directors. Filter by attributes down to hair color and location.
Confirm a job and talent shares contact details. No booker relay, no gatekeeper, no guessing on availability.
Schedule, send call sheets, share mood boards and coordinate the whole crew through group messaging inside the app.
Pay through the platform and talent is paid within one to two days - or use the trade option and swap clothing for time.
These clients were not chasing a discount. They were chasing speed and a wider pool of talent. Swipecast gave them both.
Former hedge-fund manager who bought and ran Silent Models NY, a top-10 women's modeling agency. He knew exactly where the industry's money leaked - and built the app to plug it.
The developer half of the partnership, who turned an insider's frustration into a working marketplace - swipe, book, produce and pay, all in one product.
The stylist in SoHo never picked up the phone. The model she booked will see 90% of the fee in her account by Saturday, not the fraction that used to survive a booker's cut and a ninety-day wait. The friction everyone in fashion had quietly accepted as normal - the commission, the delay, the gatekeeping - is simply gone from her afternoon. That is the whole trick of Swipecast: it did not add a swipe to fashion. It refused to accept the parts fashion had stopped questioning.
Interviews and demos discussing how Swipecast works and where fashion-tech booking is headed:
▶ Swipecast product demos on YouTube