About Shenlei Winkler

Shenlei Winkler combines 30 years of couture and mass market fashion design experience with 10 years of technical marketing experience with value added resellers. She successfully secured multi-million dollar funding for several large scale science & technology projects at the astrophysics department at the University of Chicago. As a fashion designer, Winkler designed and sold multiple styles to the #1 global retailer, resulting in more than $30MM in sales per collection, with lifetime sales exceeding $70 million. She created a profitable virtual world fashion. Winkler is the founder and CEO of the Fashion Research Institute, Inc. (www.fashionresearchinstitute.com), which through its subsidiaries, Fashion Research, Inc. and Black Dress Technology, Inc., has an ongoing collaboration with Intel Corporation to continue research into the use of virtual worlds as an accessible 3D medium for the apparel industry. Winkler is the lead inventor on a pending co-patent with IBM, “Method and Apparatus for Virtual World Based Product Design”.