Speaker Biography
After studying Visual Communications at UTS, Zoltan became an advertising creative despite his father’s best efforts to have an accountant in the family. For the next 7 years he worked for the world’s biggest agencies and brands suckling the corporate teat between Sydney, Barcelona, London and Amsterdam. Tired of much talk within Adland about proprietary IP but precious little action, he quit his comfortable salary in 2009 to make a collaborative SaaS tool called MoodShare. After launching at SXSW, and interviewing at YCombinator but gaining only modest traction, it turns out it’s damn hard to making digital product is not at all like making advertising. But since diving into something new with zero experience worked so well the first time, Zoltan pivoted from software to menswear. His second startup The Affair created wearable stories inspired by books. His ‘1984’ Stealth Fashion collection successfully raised over $120k via Kickstarter in October 2014 and was featured in top tier press around the world including WIRED, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, BBC Radio, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Engadget, Voyeur (Virgin Australia) and The Creator’s Project among many others. Zoltan is a self-taught fashion designer on a mission to redefine how clothes are made at scale in the 21st century. His third startup Citizen Wolf combines algorithms and on-demand manufacturing to create the sustainable future that fashion needs: carbon positive clothes ethically custom-made to fit your body. Zoltan was recently named one of Vogue’s ‘Future Sixty’ agitators “set to define the coming years” (2019) as well as placing #7 on RagTrader’s Tech 20 top digital influencers in Australian fashion (2020). Citizen Wolf also won a Good Design Award Gold in the Fashion Impact category (2019) as well as ‘Innovation Champion of the Year 2019’ at the National Retail Association Awards. Citizen Wolf has been featured on national TV via SBS World News (twice) and Shark Tank as well as top tier press such as Vogue, InStyle, Men’s Health, The AFR’s ‘Luxury’ magazine, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald to name but a few. Zoltan speaks regularly about the intersection of fashion and technology as well as sustainability and ethical supply chains and has also been featured on the prestigious ‘Wardrobe Crisis’ podcast by Clare Press (Vogue Australia’s Sustainability Editor).