In 2017, Denise, pictured above, was running her own fashion label, aiming to help women feel stylish and seen. “Up to 40 per cent of our online orders were being returned, and around 28 per cent of those showed clear signs of wear: make-up stains, stretched fabric, missing tags,” she says. As a small business, the impact was immediate. “Every return meant lost revenue, wasted time and often unsellable stock. We’d refund items that were no longer new simply because there was no solution that allowed retailers to prove post-sale wear.” Then came the turning point. “I saw an entire clothing rail of returns that had clearly been worn and realised just how broken the system was. I remember standing in the stockroom, surrounded by garments we couldn’t resell, thinking: this can’t be the future of retail.” That thought became TechTags, a way to give retailers insight into how clothes are really used. TechTags pair a patented smart garment tag with AI-driven software TechTags “When I first started TechTags, I was a retailer moving into …