 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're downtown San Francisco, the Hotel Niko. It's International Women's Day, March 8th stuff happening all around the world if you haven't seen it jump on social. I think there's more hashtags than I even know what to do. Thankfully we have 240 characters now. But we're excited to be here at the Accenture event. It's getting to equal. Accenture's made a commitment to get to 50% gender equality by 2025. And this is a terrific event, 400 people, a lot of panels, a lot of real world conversations. So we're excited to be here and our next guest are joining us. It's Lisa Bridget. She's the COO of The Modest. Welcome. Thank you so much. And Amy Fuller, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer from Accenture. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So for folks that aren't familiar with The Modest, give us a little overview. Hi everyone, we are a year old today. We launched a year old on International Women's Day. Thank you so much. And we are a luxury e-commerce platform between Dubai and London that has an assortment and a curation of luxury fashion, 150 brands, but all with the sensibility around modesty. So we think about hemlines, we think about opacity, we think about loose fits, all with luxury fashion on top of it, but making sure that we cater for our customers' needs and mind. How could this not have existed 366 days ago? This is the age old question and our founder, Ghislaine Guinez, has been asked that time and time again. We have numerous places where you can go and find anything that we reveal, but there wasn't a one-stop place that really had curation and styling thought through from a modest perspective. And the customer base spans women who think about modesty from a religious perspective, business women, curvia women, older women, high-fashion nieces that love a layered look. Really, it's a niche, but it's massive. It's a massive global niche. Again, it's just, I mean, we're here, right? Macy's is right across the street. We're right downtown San Francisco, Nordstroms, you know, this is the big retail hub of San Francisco, one of the bigger retail hubs in the United States. It mean, and we know, we were talking before we put on the cameras. I have teenage girls and you go to the store and you're like, oh my gosh, is there nothing else that you can buy besides what's on there? Why is it so underserved or was underserved? I mean, I think that the fashion industry is going through a massive overhaul now as one thinks about whether you're designing for aspiration or whether you're designing and selling for really the reality of what the consumer segment is out there. And that goes for a Western woman. And then when you think about the global fashion industry, are we thinking about fashion that resonates in India or the Middle East or in Asia? Or are you sticking to a more conformed idealized persona of what the customer is? And so this is very much on top of minds of all retail at the moment. And you will have seen shifts into larger sizes, very well-known fashion designers thinking about how do I design and cater for women that don't subscribe to an idealized format. It's part of the, it's quite a reflective thing that the fashion industry is going through at the moment. It's interesting, I mean, a lot of conversations about communications and objectives, not necessarily about what's comfortable and what I want to wear. As you look at this world and how it evolves, what's your kind of take? Because designing for an aspiration, that's a really interesting way, versus just designing practical clothes, we haven't seen the practical side. Well, I think that what Lisa and her company are doing has potential to be quite transformational. And I'll just plug a piece of research that we're publishing in honor of International Women's Day, which looked at how do we get to equality in the workplace. Massive research, analytics, surveyed 22,000 working adults, men and women in 34 countries. And what we were trying to get at and did get at are things about the culture. So what are the cultural factors that actually make a difference? So this is a very long way of getting to the point, but one of the questions we asked was, have you ever been asked to change clothing, hair, tattoos, et cetera, things about personal appearance to fit and conform in the workplace? A lot of people had been asked, sadly, and this was across 34 countries. But what we further found was, if you had not been asked to conform to the workplace, in other words, if you were allowed to dress as you wished to dress, that that was a factor that drove equality in the workplace. So the idea that a woman with fabulous taste who wishes to dress modestly, and Lisa described, there are a lot of people out there with that point of view, have a place to go to get absolutely stunning stuff and dress as they wish to dress and therefore be the persona they wanna be in the workplace is really powerful. And there were a lot of other factors, but that was the one that I found really, really, really interesting. And we found that before we had even invited Lisa to talk to us today, so it was a coming together of things that do matter. It's interesting because dress in the workplace, in the context of the workplace is an interesting topic. If you go to Wall Street, everybody's got to buy the super nice suits and then we got this casual Friday thing a few years ago and people were very confused. How casual do I get on casual Friday? And then you've got the whole joke about the baristas with tats and ripped up t-shirt and then getting that blended into kind of traditional corporate culture is a little bit of a shocker. Well, there are a lot of questions that come into play and I was having a long chat with one of my male colleagues last night about how things have changed and how much trickier it is to navigate. And he described that early on, cut to a couple of decades ago, men had to wear white shirts and ties at Accenture. And there was a young man who came to work in a blue Oxford tie suit perfectly appropriately. But blue, not white. On a Monday, yes, taken to task and drawn aside and said blue shirts are for Fridays. So from there we go and one of the things I really love about Accenture is that you can wear what you want to wear. And it really has such a profound impact on how you feel in the workplace. And if I can pull in a little AI stuff as well, when we look at AI and the impact it will have on the workforce. What really, really matters is the things that humans are uniquely able to do and what AI is uniquely able to deliver. That's the big win for all of us, for business. And when you think about the uniquely human characteristics, creativity, comfort that leads to creativity and being able to freely think is one of the most valuable qualities we have as humans. And oddly or not oddly, what you wear allows you to feel comfortable or not. So coming back to what the modus really provides, women with great taste. That's something that they feel comfortable with and they can be more proactive, more successful. I'll halo just a couple of those points. The first one is about choice. So we were saying earlier on we're in a luxurious environment where we are able to say you can choose because it has not been that way and still continues not to be that way for many people. And that's why we really are for a mission and a purpose because here we provide you with this element of choice and you don't need to be ashamed of it and you need to be proud of it. The second part was that modesty didn't need to equate to frumpiness. Why can't I dress elegantly and magnificently beautifully and there is something about dress and fashion that really provides a sense of identity. It's an age old desire for society and for women a lot. And this is a place where you can be modest but luxuriously and beautifully dressed up and be proud of that and not necessarily conformed into a box of frumpiness or less stylish wear. Right, but the other kind of big interchange I think which drove a lot of the traditional kind of norms around clothing was when you interface with a customer, right? It was how do you represent the customer? I'm sure that was a lot of the story that you said or the investment bankers where we want you to have a certain look because you're representing the company. It's that company's look that you are personifying when you go out and talk to your customer. Well, today a lot of customer interactions, let's take banking for one, is done on a mobile app. People don't go to the bank. I don't expect the guy to come out from the back with a beautiful pinstripe suit who knows me anymore. I wonder, do you think that's part of the impact on this or just more of our acceptance in general of people that don't necessarily look like me whether that be in skin color, dress, the way they speak, et cetera? Yeah, those are great. I don't know where you go and I'm going to wait. Well, I think it's both and I love both of those points. More virtual interaction clearly takes clothing out of the equation as well as a lot of other things and that can be liberating, though I think we have a thirst for the in real life and the person to person, which isn't going away. But I grew up in the advertising business and at ad agencies, they were pretty loose but you always dressed for your client and so that certainly was a dynamic. But of course now dressing for your client doesn't imply a suit and it makes it slightly more work in fact, because you have to do some anthropological study of what is the client environment like and then how would you be most comfortable and appropriate in that environment? So certainly both of those factors come into play. And I feel the hyper-digitalization of the way we interact actually allows for more authenticity because you don't have to dress up in the suit that's the conform, your digital interaction and the work effect is happening. And so people behind that wanting to know who are you really and authenticity is a way in which you get your own identical message through and dressing is one of the elements that comprises that. All right, so before we wrap, Lisa, I want to get your take. So you've been in business for a year. Again, happy birthday. Thank you. If we get together a year from now, so you've got over the hurdle, you're up, you're running, you're shipping, what are some of your objectives for the next year? Yeah. Well, we have an amazing strategic roadmap ahead. We have got a very secret launch around product that will be coming out shortly. And that's something that we've been deep in. We are really developing the personalization and the AI component of our shopping experience. So we're really targeting what works best for this consumer, how and where, and that goes all the way from home marketing through to our experience inside and through to the retention side. And just continuously growing globally, we ship to 120 countries. Our first market is UAE. Our second is America, third is UK, fourth Saudi Arabia, fifth Canada, sixth Hong Kong. So we're global at the get-go and it's just continuing to grow our customer base in these magnificently beautiful parts of the world that love modest fashion. Well, congratulations and what a great story we'll continue to watch it. So Lisa, thank you. Amy, thanks for spending some time with us. Thanks so much. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Ascent, your International Women's Day event in San Francisco, California. Thanks for watching.