The Innovation Booster Fashion & Lifestyle is proud to announce the five winners of its first call for challenges: “Beyond Digital: Technology & Sustainability Solutions to Reimagine Fashion & Lifestyle”.
This initiative, led by Dagorà Lifestyle Innovation Hub and powered by Innosuisse, aims to accelerate radical innovation in the Swiss fashion and lifestyle ecosystem by supporting early-stage ideas through co-creation and experimentation.
The first call for challenges was launched on February 12th 2026, inviting innovative concepts addressing sustainability challenges. Participants were encouraged to explore solutions that combine creativity, technology, and sustainable practices to shape the future of fashion.
Following an engaging Pitch Day on June 17th, 2026, twelve innovation teams presented their ideas at the Dagorà LifeStyle Innovation Hub. A jury composed of representatives from academia, industry, associations, and investors selected the five winning projects, which will receive funding and support to develop, test, and scale their concepts.
The awarded Innovation teams will now have the chance to test the potential of their ideas to impact the Fashion & Lifestyle Industry in Switzerland.
The Program Jury composition consisted in:
- Sanja Kordic – Head of Industry Liaison Office, EPFL
- Svenja Reinhard – Founder & Managing Director, Heads for Excellence
- Annamaria Celozzi – Ecommerce Mananger, 7 For All Mankind
- Andrew Reid – Global Partner Solutions Director, Microsoft
- Nina Bachmann – Sustainability, Tech, Member of MB, Swiss Textiles
- Luka Vujic – Corporate Client Advisor – UBS
- Alberto Lampis – Strategic Sourcing Senior Specialist – Hugo Boss
- Marco Vanoni, Finance Director, Alpha Square Invest
- Felicitas Morhart – Professor of Marketing, HEC Lausanne
- And advisory board member Laura Camurri – Senior Innovation and start-up advisor, University of Bern.
We are pleased to announce the awarded innovation teams and their selected projects:
- ARIA – Sustainable Fashion Intelligence Platform: from Design to Inventory
- ARIA proposes an end-to-end AR-powered decision environment connecting three stages: (1) an eco-design cockpit where designers receive real-time LCA and circularity feedback as they specify materials and construction; (2) an AR wholesale showroom that replaces physical samples reducing sample waste, logistics emissions, and lead times while embedding sustainability intelligence into the buying experience; (3) a structured feedback loop capturing buyer behaviour signals to inform the next collection’s design brief. The hypothesis: embedding sustainability as a native decision criterion not a compliance layer at the design and buying stages can measurably reduce overproduction, sample waste, and the structural gap between circular ambition and purchasing reality in the Swiss Fashion industry.
- Implementation Partner: Elio Perra, VF International SAGL
- Research Partner: Marco Pirotta, SUPSI
- Turning POS and Digital Product Passport into Sustainable Choices
- Develop a POS integration for Digital Product Passports (DPP) that allows retailers and customers to access detailed product information directly in-store through the POS system. The POS becomes the interface that connects product traceability data with the customer experience, enabling transparency about the product’s origin, materials, and sustainability footprint.
- Implementation Partner: Massimiliano Monachino, Zucchetti Switzerland SA
- Research Partner: Giuseppe Landolfi and Lorenzo del Bosco, SUPSI – DTI
- AI-TAILS – The First AI-Powered Lifestyle Health Monitor for pets, starting with cats
- Pet ownership is one of today’s most defining lifestyle statements. Cats are present in over 12.7M DACH households – yet the category of connect lifestyle products for cats remains entirely unaddressed by meaningful health technology. AI-Tails is the world’s first AI-powered smart feeding station for cats, transforming a daily lifestyle ritual – the feeding routine – into a continuous, passive health monitoring session. Through computer vision, thermal sensing and proprietary AI (the AI-Tails Feline Health Index patent pending, validated with the University of Zurich). Ai-Tails detects pain and illness early, delivering real-time alerts to owners via a mobile app. For the Fashion & Lifestyle Community, AI-Tails represents a radical innovation at the intersection of connected home design, wellness lifestyle technology and the rapidly growing pet humanization trend. The device is designed as a premium lifestyle object – Swiss Made, aesthetically considered, seamlessly integrated into the modern home.
- Implementation Partner: Angelica De Riggi, AI-Tails AG
- Research Partner: Vanessa Heitzmann, Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Zurich
- SortMate: AI-Robotic Sorting for Circular Textile Accountability
- SortMate is a feasibility study for an agentic AI assisted robotic cell to augment vulnerable workers in garment classification and sorting within circular textile operations. The system combines classical robotics with Vision Language Models (VLMs) to classify garments, detect hard points (zippers, buttons, rivets), and step-by-step guidance for human co-workers. The target deployment environment is Social Circular Enterprises (SCEs) such as Caritas Ticino, which combine social inclusion with textile recycling.
- Implementation Partner: Cristiano Proia, Caritas Ticino
- Research Partner: Elias Montini, Samuele Dell’Oca, Michel Rosselli, Luca Dell’Agostino, ISTePS – SUPSI
- BIO MONO Circular Textile Recycling
- The outdoor and fashion industries rely on waterproof, breathable membranes often made with PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and hazardous solvents. These substances persist in the environment, contaminating water, soil, wildlife, and humans. Most membranes also use mixed, incompatible materials that cannot be recycled, so garments end up in landfills or incineration, increasing chemical pollution. dimpora® BIO MONO offers a new approach. This high-performance membrane eliminates PFAS and harmful solvents through a clean, solvent-free process, avoiding toxic emissions in production and use. Made from compatible polymers, it enables true mono-material garment design, allowing easy recycling without disassembly. With over 60% bio-based content from non-food castor oil, it also reduces fossil dependence while maintaining waterproof, breathable performance.
- Implementation Partner: Lucile Menand, Giorgia Cirelli and Diego Burri, Dimpora
- Research Partner: Silvan Walker, OST – OstSchweizer Fachhochschule
We congratulate the winning teams and thank all participants for their visionary ideas and contributions. Together, we are shaping a more agile, inclusive, and technology-driven future for fashion and lifestyle in Switzerland.
This initiative is proudly supported by: Alpha Square Invest SA, Hugo Boss, Philipp Plein, 7 For All Mankind, Microsoft, UBS, OF Design, Lifestyle Tech Competence Center, Guess and Heads for Excellence.
