Former Liquid Death & Tastemade Marketing Strategist | MBA | Boosting socials, steering through Web3, and befriending AI 🤖

I build brands, grow engaged communities, and drive real impact. With 20+ years in digital marketing, I’ve helped companies scale from zero to millions in reach, leading campaigns that get attention and convert.

At Hexens, I drove marketing for the largest Web3 security competition ever. At BitcoinOS, I built a 30K+ member community in just three months. At Liquid Death, I led viral campaigns, generating 3B+ impressions. I’ve also managed 3,000+ influencer partnerships and scaled Web3 and gaming communities to 500K+ members.

Whether it’s organic growth, paid media, influencer marketing, or community strategy, I create high-impact, data-driven marketing that delivers results. Let’s build something that lasts.

Shahab Shirmohammadi

Optimizing Fashion Industry processes with 3D & AI | Whispering the Secrets of Fashion Tech | Keynote Speaker & Fashion Geek

I started as a seamstress 15 years ago because I couldn't afford fashion school.
Now I'm building AI that makes actual garments, not Instagram content.

Long story short: 
2009: Lost everything in my first fashion business.
2012: Borrowed €5K for Sri Lanka production. Sold 3 garments. Failed miserably.

Rock bottom taught me what success never could.
I begged for work on Alibaba. Got gigs. Saw factory floors worldwide. Learned pattern making doing it 10 hours daily at Max Mara. Then Timberland.

Spent years watching the same stupid inefficiencies:
→ Pattern makers recreating patterns that already exist
→ Designers making pretty pictures nobody can produce
→ Companies spending €450K yearly on patterns, €90K duplicates

2023: Tried GenAI. August: garbage. November: holy sh*t.
The speed of change was insane.
2024: Couldn't find a sketch-to-pattern tool that actually worked.

LinkedIn post appeared - Liquid Factory competition. €200K for 4 founders.
I was 37, steady corporate money.
My dream was stronger than my fear.

Got selected from 181 applications. 
Left Timberland. 
Started fashionINSTA.

What I actually built:
I don't make pretty AI images. I make patterns factories can cut and sew.
My clients discovered they're recreating 20% of patterns they already own.
One was wasting €90K yearly on duplicate work.

The pivot that mattered:
Beta testers: "Cool, but I'd do it differently."
Every pattern maker said this. There's no "right" way.
I threw out our code. Started from scratch.
Built AI that learns YOUR way, not generic templates.
We train on YOUR patterns. Your armholes. Your fit.
750 data points per pattern. Pattern graveyard becomes goldmine.

Results:
Pattern search: 4 hours → 2 seconds
New patterns: 5 days → 15 minutes
Development: 70% faster

Technology should amplify expertise, not replace it.

I'm building the first NO BS fashion AI tool. 
Because fashion needs production, not pixels.

Currently serving enterprise clients tired of AI fantasy clothes.

Mission: Make pattern making fun again.

Want real AI pattern making? Let's talk.

Sylwia Szymczyk

1 year ago today was my last day at Timberland.
 
Leaving was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.
It's cliché to say it was bittersweet. But it really was.

It was a dream job.
 
Well paid. 
Great team. 
Amazing brand.
 
I had room to move, not always granted in corporates.
I was working on the latest technologies.
I was getting into important rooms.
I had respect of my superiors.
 
But the machine was too slow for me.
 
Too many times I heard "we have to wait." 
Too many projects stuck in legal or procurement. 
Too many things happening outside I wanted to be part of.
 
At a certain point, I saw tech moving so fast I realized we'd never catch it.
 
And I WANTED to be part of this. 
Not as an observer. 
As a player.
 
That desire grew too much in my last year at VF. 
I couldn't ignore it anymore.
 
I decided to trade stability and security for uncertainty.
 
But I did it to build something I truly believed in.
 
The journey was much harder than expected. 
Life showed me you cannot plan. 
You have to go with the flow.
 
I lost the life I had. 
I lost a lot of privileges. 
I am no longer a "respected" employee of a big brand.
 
I am a scrappy founder of a startup.
Dealing with admin stuff.
Dealing with sales.
Low to no salary.
 
But seeing teams using the tool we built? 
Seeing it bring real value to their process?
 
Priceless.
 
I probably regretted it one million times. 
But I also never felt this fulfilled from my work.
 
One year in. No looking back.

NO BS fashion AI | Seamstress @Max Mara → Innovation lead @Timberland → fashionINSTA founder

I'll be annoying af. 
But I have to say it.
 
AI won't save your brand. 
AI won't make you sell more. 
AI won't automate your processes.
 
If you don't have clean data. 
Or a way to clean the messy data you have.
 
AI can't compare apples with pears. 
Or better, it can. But it's always garbage in, garbage out.
 
Don't expect technology to save your life.
 
Clean your mess. 
Trust your people. 
Talk with TRUE experts.
 
And don't expect the right tech to be free.
 
If something is free or cheap, your data is the price.
 
Be aware of that.

My number one tip for aspiring women founders?
 
Stop waiting to feel ready.
 
I left my corporate job at 36. 
Mortgage. Stability. Great salary. 
Everyone thought I was crazy.
 
Maybe I was.
 
But if I had to tell you one thing I learned:
There's no perfect moment. 
There's no "ready." 

There's only "now or never."
 
One decision that shaped everything?
Learning to code.
 
Not because I wanted to be a developer. 
But because I was tired of waiting. 
Tired of explaining. Tired of depending.
 
I learned enough to ship features myself. 
To talk to my CTO in his language. 
To move faster than my doubts.
 
You don't need to master everything. 
You need to understand enough to lead.
 
To every woman thinking about starting:
 
The industry won't make space for you. 
You make your own space.
 
And yes, some days you'll regret it. 
And yes, you'll question everything.
 
But fulfilled and scared is way better than comfortable and stuck.

#IWD26 #LinkedInNewsEurope

AI in fashion was 10/10 hype until...

9/10 when PD asked for the pattern file.
8/10 when consistency became a KPI to go after.
7/10 when marketing realized renders ≠ samples.
6/10 when brands asked "can we manufacture this?"
5/10 when factories refused AI images without specs.
4/10 when repeatability beats the element of surprise.
3/10 when brands wanted their fit DNA in every output.
2/10 when production value is more important than likes.

1/10 when we all realized: 
Fashion companies sell garments, not pixels. 
This is how we make money and sustain the whole chain.

Now we're rebuilding AI for what fashion actually needs.
Where are you on this scale?

We can perform complex CAD operations via AI chat.

It is possible to go further than just "make it 2 cm longer"
or "make sleeve short" or "make this tee V-neck"

And it is also possible to preview those complex changes immediately and in photorealistic quality.

What, if it is also possible to change the sketch (like you do in Illustrator) and see the CAD pattern change...?

This request arrived from one of our enterprise customers, and we liked the idea so much that... we are already testing it and will soon release it in production:)

Any design teams that want to work on patterns like they always did on sketches?

Last weeks we deliver 3 to 5 demos a day.
Almost all are coming from:

→ ChatGPT
→ Perplexity
→ Google AI

(Hey, LinkedIn, does it still make sense to work on "personal brand" here?)

The queries they are discovering us from?
→ AI pattern-making tool
→ Is AI replacing fashion designers?
→ Can AI keep brand DNA?

And all of them are telling us a lot about the state of AI in fashion.

We are already taking generic AI images for granted.
Fashion designers are using them widely for discovery.
Marketing teams are using them daily to explore options.

But we want more.

The next big frontier is technical development.

We want to automate boring tasks, not core ones.
We want precise on-brand output, not generic stuff.
We want to generate real garments, not just images.
And we want AI to be our assistant, not a replacement.

Industry already accepted AI.
Fashion companies are actively seeking solutions.

But here's what I'm learning from these demos:
Great results you can't explain are dangerous.
Great results you can't repeat are useless.

The companies reaching out to us aren't chasing magic.
They want to understand what they're getting and why.
They want to get the same result tomorrow.

That's what we're building.

Curious if fashionINSTA fits your workflow?
DM me. Let's find out together.

Final countdown, baby!

fashionINSTA Fashion Nodes are coming this Friday!

And they will come with free access and some credits to start with.

Fashion-focused node-based platform.
An AI-assistant that builds a workflow for you.
Users can share workflows and earn when others run them.

And today, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to present to you one node that is a superstar for our enterprise customers.

Feasibility Analyzer.

AI in fashion is fast, it's cheap, and it leaves us with a lot of content we can't check.                  

Is it useful?
Is it on-brand?
Can we produce it?
Will our customers love it?
Will it stay within margins?

This one AI Agent answers all those questions. At scale.

You connect your AI images.
It connects it to the correct fabric.
It runs it through the market insights.
It runs them through your patterns dataset.
It checks whether garment is feasible and for how much.

Some of our customers completely automated the initial design process.  Their teams are checking only on garments that passed the test. 

They stopped wasting time on AI slop.
They work on images that CAN become garments.

And you?

Our software fixed itself last night. 
I just approved the PR.
  
Last week, I read that Anthropic used Claude Code to optimize training for Opus 4.6.
 
AI improving AI.
 
And I thought: we're already doing something similar.
 
fashionINSTA runs on AI agents. 
They learn from every interaction. 
They improve with every user session. 
They get smarter without us pushing updates.
 
But last week we went further.
 
Our learning system now writes code.
 
It spots a bug. It fixes it. 
It gets user feedback. It implements it. 
It drops a PR to our GitHub. Ready for review.
 
I remember when I learned to code to ship faster. 
To avoid endless back and forth with developers. 
To translate fashion language into tech myself.
 
Now our AI does the same.
 
It sees the problem. 
It understands the context. 
It writes the solution.
 
We still review. We still decide. 
But the heavy lifting? Done.
 
The era of self-building SaaS began. 
The era of self-healing software is here.
The era of extreme personalisation just started.

Last week, we opened free access to fashionINSTA nodes.
 
Not the final version. 
The one that lets you do things, but still WIP.
 
We wanted to understand how people use it. 
We wanted to spot and solve first bugs. 
We wanted to see if it sticks.
 
Here's what surprised us:
 
1. Users came without us saying a word.
 
170+ entries. No communication. 
No ads. 11,000 credits purchased over the weekend. 
All from AI chats and Google searches.
 
Investing in SEO/GEO was the right call.
 
2. A lot of users got lost at the start.
 
Couldn't figure out how to run first workflow. 
We added tutorials. Put the first workflow in canvas. 
Still 50% run it on our demo images without swapping.
 
We have a lot of UX/UI work ahead.
 
3. AI chat is a game changer.
 
90% of users who use AI chat complete their first workflow. 
And it actually builds workflows they ask for.
 
4. The winner node for indie users? PatternSearch.
 
No surprise. 
But also the node that's just a demo in indie version.
 
Without huge investment, we can't offer it at a small price. 
The cost for us is simply too high.
 
But we want fashion AI to be inclusive.
 
So we thought: what if we make it community-driven?
 
You share your patterns. In exchange, you get access to approved patterns from real garments. 

The algorithm learns from everyone. Works for everyone. 
You pay only the cost of AI calls/platform maintenance.
 
Curious?
 
Check the community project here and let me know what you think: 
https://lnkd.in/dXF-rZsd

taplio

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Shahab Shirmohammadi

Sylwia Szymczyk

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The Battle

Shahab Shirmohammadi

Sylwia Szymczyk

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Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sylwia Szymczyk's LinkedIn Performance

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