Billie Whitehouse

Why organisations work with Billie Whitehouse

• She has shipped real wearable products at consumer scale, including the Nadi X haptic yoga pant and the Fan Jersey shown around Super Bowl 50, not concept renders or research prototypes.
• She runs a category-defining company on both sides of the Pacific. Wearable X has been one of the longest-surviving independent smart-apparel businesses in the market, giving her a working view of what the category can and cannot support commercially.
• She brings a fashion designer’s instinct to a hardware conversation. Her starting question is not what the sensor can do, but what the wearer will accept on their body, which reframes most internal innovation debates about wearables.
• She has been recognised by Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, giving her credibility in both the technology and the design communities that organisations are trying to bridge.

Biography highlights

• Founder, CEO and Creative Director of Wearable X, headquartered in New York with operations in Sydney.
• Creator of Nadi X, smart yoga apparel with embedded accelerometers and haptic feedback for posture correction.
• Designed the Fan Jersey haptic fan-engagement garment associated with Super Bowl 50, and the Foxtel Alert Shirt.
• Named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech.
• Exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Limits of Humanity exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris (2021).
• Keynote speaker at The New Yorker TechFest, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, Cannes Lions, Wired Retail UK and Wearable Technologies Conference.

Biography

Wearable computing has spent a decade trapped in the wrist. The watch became the default form factor because it was the easiest place to put a screen, not because it was the most useful place to put a sensor. Wearable X was built on the opposite premise: the garment itself is the device, and the body is where the interface actually lives.

That premise has produced shipped products. Nadi X yoga apparel uses accelerometers and haptic modules sewn into the fabric to nudge the hip, knee and ankle into alignment during practice, with no phone in the user’s eyeline. The Fan Jersey, shown around Super Bowl 50, translated live game data into physical sensation on the wearer’s torso. Both products started from the wearer’s experience and worked backwards into the engineering, an order of operations that most hardware companies do not follow.

The professional grounding behind that approach is design, not computer science. Whitehouse trained at the Whitehouse Institute of Design in Australia and studied Fashion as Art at Accademia Italiana in Florence before founding Wearable Experiments in 2013, later renamed Wearable X. She has been named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, and her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

For leadership teams thinking about what comes after the smartphone, the most useful thing she brings is a working answer to a specific question: what does it take to make a piece of technology that a person will actually put on their body every day. That answer involves apparel, hardware, software and behavioural design at the same time, and very few operators have shipped against all four constraints at once.

Key speaking topics

• Wearable technology and smart apparel
• Haptic feedback and ambient computing
• Fashion technology and consumer hardware
• Design-led product development
• Women founders in deep tech
• The future of human computer interaction

Ideal for

• Chief product officers, CTOs and innovation leads at consumer goods, apparel, sportswear and consumer electronics businesses
• Corporate innovation and R&D teams exploring wearable, haptic or sensor-based product categories
• Investors and accelerator audiences focused on hardware, fashion-tech or female-founded deep-tech ventures
• Senior creative and design leadership inside organisations bringing physical and digital products closer together

Audience outcomes

• A clearer picture of where wearable technology has stalled and where it is genuinely advancing beyond the wrist
• A working framework for thinking about the garment, not the device, as the next product surface
• A founder’s honest view of what it takes to commercialise hardware that crosses fashion and technology
• A more concrete sense of where haptics, sensors and ambient computing are likely to land inside the next consumer cycle