Parade in New York, anticipate Alzheimer's

This Saturday, the fashion firm Another Archive, by Catalan Cristina Fernández, was one of those chosen to parade with a group of emerging designers at New York Fashion Week. In the same Meatpacking space where Custo and Agatha Ruiz de la Prada drew the cameras. Cristina is absolutely killing it, although the news has not appeared in the newspapers or in the Catalan media as it should; we already know how hard it is for us to trust and feel proud of local talent.

The company, Little Creative Factory, now has two brands: it started with Little Creative Factory, for children and women, and since 2020 Another Archive, more sophisticated, with which it has now paraded in NY and, this year, has created the new Muse, the version of Another Archive with more wearable garments. The headquarters and the team are in Barcelona and all production is carried out locally, in Catalonia. 95% of sales are made abroad, including top stores in New York (such as If Soho, Dover Street Market, Atelier NY, Oroboro), London (Olivia May), Seoul or Hong Kong.

Behind the Little group is Cristina's personal story ("I don't know why she named the brand Little, if she always thinks big," her daughter Ona wrote in a school assignment). Cris Fernández was an architect who, affected and bored by the crisis, around 2011 designed a hat for her daughter Ona, then a baby. She didn't even know how to sew a button, but the hat was so successful that she decided to produce 400 and started going around the best children's clothing stores in Spain to sell them. In no time, she made an entire collection and took Little Creative Factory to children's clothing fairs in Paris, Tokyo and New York. There, in 2016, she was discovered by a photographer (she was not just any photographer, but Michelle Obama's), and she opened the doors for her to parade, two weeks later, on the NY runway.

With Little, she participated in several editions of 080 in Barcelona. But we are always more impressed when success is recognized from outside: it was one day in 2015 when they received an online order from the US worth 2,000 euros; the sender seemed curious to them, but they didn't discover who it was until they saw a photo in a magazine of Kardashian's daughter wearing a bikini from their collection.

Since 2019, just before the pandemic, Cristina and Jordi, along with their children, Ona and Roc, live in Brooklyn. There they have fallen in love with their American dream (and have made the neighborhood fall in love: entire families from Jewish Williamsburg dress in the Little universe). "Now, with the distance, we have realized that in Barcelona everyone complains about everything. In New York, people get by, they help you if you are creative and an entrepreneur. For example: the terraces that were set up during the pandemic were a success, and now they have started to regulate them," explains Jordi, who was CEO of a technology company. "Poor thing, so many years studying architecture to end up making hats, what a failure, they had told me when I was starting in fashion," explains Cristina. "On the other hand, here in New York, every new story is: wow, how many things you have learned!" adds the entrepreneur.

At Fashion Week, Cristina has gone with the resources of her size, little, but with all the ambition or more than that displayed by the big brands of the fashion universe (among others, Carolina Herrera, which it should be remembered, is owned by the Catalan group Puig).

Speaking of global vision and ambition, that of Carla Zaldúa. This Thursday she will present (at Pier07 of Tech Barcelona) the campaign that her company, Accexible, has prepared for World Alzheimer's Day. The company identifies biomarkers in speech and the algorithm it has developed allows, by analyzing a 60-second voice recording, to detect symptoms of mental illnesses, depression or Alzheimer's: it is a screening tool that can be a great help to healthcare professionals and the health system. Digital health is a new global opportunity that allows moving from reactive health to preventive health, which implies a better quality of life for patients and their environment, as well as generating savings in healthcare spending. Accexible is conducting clinical studies in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Mexico and Colombia.

Carla, who is from Bilbao and lives in Barcelona, studied Political Science and Sociology and a master's degree at the London School of Economics, and, since she was 17, has set up several companies. It was when she was working for a Swiss firm that channels the arrival of R&D projects to the market, "I read many scientific articles, and one caught my attention that claimed that in language analysis it was possible to detect if a person suffered from Alzheimer's." Based on this hypothesis, she set up a proof of concept and with some initial public aid, five years ago she founded Accexible. Now she has a very powerful team of data scientists, distributed between Bilbao, Madrid and Barcelona. And a project at the crossroads of mathematics, linguistics and neuroscience, which we will hear about.

Thus, two news items this week: entrepreneurship stories with global ambition and led by women. It will be a coincidence, if they say that it is so difficult to find female role models in certain areas such as technology and entrepreneurship. Those who say they don't find them, it must be that they don't look hard enough.