The TrueStart innovation hub is on a mission to find the next big thing in retail. Retail Week takes a look at its progress.

TrueStart has invested in several start-ups including Styleicona.

Seven months into TrueStart’s campaign to find the biggest disrupters in retail, the innovation hub’s mission is well under way.

The hub is looking for technology start-ups to invest in and eventually make money from, and has so far worked with six start-ups. It hopes to take on another three or four before Christmas and the aim is to find another 12 to 15 within the next year.

That isn’t as easy as it sounds – the hub’s first six months have been full of lessons and challenges for the team behind it. There have been nearly 400 applications so far, with a success rate of just 2%.

“We are seeing a lot of me-toos,” says managing director Baz Saidieh, who runs the hub. “We get a lot of fashion apps, a lot of products, and a lot of ecommerce companies.”

Once a trend takes off, start-ups rush to take advantage and the result is often a glut of companies doing very similar things. But Saidieh says it gets easier to pick the winners.

“We pretty much know there and then that it’s good. It’s not a case of spending weeks deliberating. We have a slim structure so we can move quickly.

“You can quickly work out if they’ve got a competitive proposition. You’ve become a lot harder and more disciplined.” It is often the people, rather than the idea or product itself, that make the difference. “We look at individuals more than the product – 60% of our decision comes down to the individual, while 40% is the product,” Saidieh says.

Matt Truman, founding partner of the True Capital group, which owns TrueStart, says finding people is the main challenge.

“The biggest thing we’ve learnt is the scarcity of quality people.

“That’s something everyone is struggling with. Particularly technology and data science people.”

The hub is looking for businesses that are disruptive, innovative and have the potential to be valued at over £100m. And as the box to the right shows, there are plenty of good ideas around. For retailers, picking up on the best of the new ideas is the trick.

Who has TrueStart invested in so far?

The Unseen: Wearable technology and design company The Unseen creates products that change colour based on changes in pressure, sound, moisture, heat, pollution, and digital signal.

At the beginning of October TrueStart managed a round of fundraising for The Unseen that was oversubscribed in four days. The company already works with Swarovski, Nicole Farhi, Hendricks Gin and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Pollen: Pollen is a social media platform that enables brands to find popular users and pay them to promote their brand. Talented users, meanwhile, can monetise their social reach by partnering with big brands.

Shufflehub: Shufflehub is a platform that lets users browse dozens of online shops in one place. It pulls in products from several retailers, providing a one-stop-shop for shoppers who want an at-a-glance view of what’s available in a product category at any one time.

Styleicona: Styleicona provides a platform for teenagers shopping on the high street to take images of outfits as they try them on and seek social opinion in a safe environment.

TrueStart says it has the potential to provide retailers and buyers real-time analytics of trends and demands at the global and local level.

Price Trakker: Price Trakker provides retailers with a competitor price intelligence service, handling millions of price points on a daily basis.

Presence Orb: This is a bricks-and-mortar analytics platform that allows retailers to understand their customers’ behaviour on site.

The technology uses existing wi-fi networks and consumer wi-fi signals from their devices to better understand how premises and services are used, meaning retailers can measure things such as frequency of visits to a store, peak visiting hours, and route taken to the location.