Fashion and Function

SLabs is using chips to track its clothing and open up new services

- Jennifer Zabasajja

For Iddris Sandu, clothing is about more than keeping someone warm or making a fashion statement. The entrepreneur wants to build an ecosystem to track the origin, ownership history and real-time value of each piece. His fledgling LNQ brand includes a hoodie, a sweater and clogs embedded with chip technology, which he says could also be used to open up new digital services.

Sandu is the 25-year-old founder of Spatial Labs, a software infrastructure company focused on web3 tools. SLabs, based in Marina del Rey, California, raised $4 million of preseed funding from Jay-Z's Marcy Venture Partners and is working on a Series A funding round.

But it's not clear whether there is consumer demand for the products the company is creating, says Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, given that smartphones and watches already allow people to make purchases and gain admittance to events.

"Everybody wants to use the word 'web3,"" Harvey says. "In terms of my template of a successful business in the area, first I assess if this is a problem. Then, is the best way to solve this problem with blockchain technology?"

In an interview, Sandu discusses his idea. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.