Administrators appointed for Smartlife smart clothes business

A wearable tech company established in 2010, with the desire to revolutionise the market, has fallen into administration after its investors refused to financially back the business any further.

Smartlifeinc, which trades as Smartlife, was forced to call in London-based professional services firm ReSolve Advisory to handle the administration process, with partners Simon Jagger and Ben Woodthorpe appointed as joint administrators on 2 April 2019.

The original investors, brothers Richard and David Gazal who have since become the company’s main shareholders and directors since July 2016, initially made an investment of approximately £2.4 million. However, they have decided against investing any more into Smartlife, causing the company to collapse into administration.

CEO of Smartlife, Martin Ashby, commented: “Many of the employees had been shareholders so the decision to go into administration meant all their efforts over the years have gone unrewarded.

“We really felt this was the year when we would launch the technology and start to deliver a return to the investors. We’d planned to unveil it at CES in Las Vegas at the start of 2019 and launch a Kickstarter campaign but the investors decided against it.”

The company was designing and engineering clothes with inbuilt textile sensors, particularly in sportswear, which could pick up and read biometric signals. The aim was to make clothing as streamlined as possible – in comparison to wearable technology which is often bulky – without wires or metal attachments to transmit signals via Bluetooth to be read on smartphones and smartwatches.

Ashby noted that he had hoped the wearable technology business would become “the beating heart of the next textile revolution” and claimed that he knew “other companies were interested” in the purchase of the company going forward.

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