Karen Harvey.

is the Founder & CEO of Fashion Tech Forum .

Karen Harvey is the CEO and Founder of Karen Harvey Consulting, Fashion Tech Forum and INDX, a digital marketplace between creative talent and brands. Karen has spent her career working with global brands across luxury, retail, fashion and innovation. Her ability to work in both traditional and non-traditional ways has earned her firm international recognition for bringing some of the industry’s most successful CEOs and creative leaders to the most powerful global brands in Fashion and Retail. In 2013, Karen was one of the first to identify a global and seismic shift, where she could see that technology companies would be revolutionizing fashion and retail, and she felt that a forum was needed, where leaders from both technology and fashion could work through their differences and find common ground to form the companies and partnerships of the future. She felt that the void created by the disparity between these two sectors created the need for a new conversation, so that these leaders could find new ways to work together, in order to create partnerships and new companies that would serve the consumers of the future. 

In this spirit, Karen founded Fashion Tech Forum for these leaders to both share their vision and the challenges created by this new reality. From a talent perspective, as Karen considered these dynamics, she realized that the traditional skill sets required for leaders to compete would change radically, creating an identity crisis for fashion and retail. Inspired by these major shifts and the broad need to discover new talent and emerging technologies, Karen has pivoted her companies and devoted her consulting and advisory services to identifying the next generation of leaders, while supporting the most powerful brands in bridging the gap between luxury and emerging technologies. Fashion Tech Forum will go to the next level in 2019, by creating further programs and platforms to help sector specific leaders develop new skills to build the companies of the future. 

Some of the company’s clients include: Tapestry, lululemon, Tory Burch, Techstyle, Versace, FarFetch, Everlane, Tommy Hilfiger, Olivela, and Ralph Lauren. The firm’s other division, Advisory Services, engages with entrepreneurial ventures in technology, investors, and other companies looking to transition to direct-to-consumer models. Karen is a graduate of the OPM program of Harvard Business School. She is also the Founder of The Blue Project, a mentorship program for disadvantaged women.