It Has to Work. It Can't Break IRL.

The problem

You can't run Fashion Week out of a group chat.

Ask anyone who's coordinated a live international event, and they'll tell you the same thing: the schedule doesn't stop moving. Talent needs to know where to be. Coordinators need to know who's where. Everything runs on visibility, and when visibility lives across a dozen messaging threads and a spreadsheet, things start to break.

That's the challenge JENDAYA, a London-based creative agency, brought to TechAviatorLabs ahead of Paris Fashion Week Menswear SS27. They needed one integrated system that talent could rely on to inform them of their schedule, and also one that provided the operational structure for their internal team to run events. They needed both, connected and operational, before Fashion Week started.

A good live event platform should meet talent where they are and give the team behind them a single view of what's actually happening. That's what we built.

What we built

Two connected experiences, one shared view.

We built the JENDAYA platform as two connected experiences, kept in sync in real time so any operational change on one side showed up instantly on the other.

The Talent Experience is a native iOS app that gives talent their personalized schedule, event navigation, QR check-in, content upload, Plus One requests, and role-specific access. This experience provides each user everything they needed to navigate a week where schedules changed hourly and timing mattered.

The Operations Console is the platform's “behind the scenes”, where coordinators assign talent to events, manage teams, approve requests, moderate content, and coordinate the logistics of a live international event in real time.

How we approached it

Fashion Week doesn't do “we'll fix it next sprint.”

In building the app, we understood that the launch date couldn't move, so every decision we made, such as what to build, key components of the app for the user experience, and how to manage user data, was considered so it didn't break IRL.

Here's how we thought about it.

Reliability beats feature count. The workflows that mattered most (schedules, check-ins, and assignments) needed to be rock-solid before anything else. Nice-to-have features waited. A good live event platform doesn't try to do everything on day one, it tries to do the critical few things flawlessly.

Designed for the moment, not the demo. People using the app during Fashion Week weren't sitting at a desk. They were between venues, in cars, in crowds, on shaky connections. Every screen had to answer the question they were already asking: where do I need to be next, what changed, who's meeting me there. A good live event app should get out of the way, then be exactly where you need it, when you need it.

Launch is the start of the job, not the end. From the moment the app went live, our team stayed on to support JENDAYA through Fashion Week itself. When something needed adjusting mid-event, we adjusted it. A good partner for a live deployment doesn't hand you the keys and walk away, they stay in the room.

The result

One time deployment with 100+ users

The JENDAYA platform launched successfully on the Apple App Store and served over 100 active users during Paris Fashion Week Menswear SS27. Coordinators gained a tech-backed operational view of their week, which was previously managed in spreadsheets and group chats. Talent had a reliable app in their pocket for a week that wouldn't sit still.

More importantly, the platform did exactly what it was built to do. It held up when real people depended on it, in a city they didn't live in, during one of the busiest weeks in fashion.

Check out the app for yourself.