The technology developed by Outward Inc. is now powering Pottery Barn’s new Augmented Reality App & 3D Design experiences. In addition, the company serves a portfolio of customers that includes some of today’s highest profile lifestyle and specialty brands in the home furnishing and decorative accessory space.
Outward is an enterprise technology company focused on serving the home furnishing and decorative accessories industry. From front-end imaging and asset capture to a back-end, analytics-driven management platform, Outward is the only visual merchandising platform today that supports the scale and diversity of millions of sku’s offered by customer brands, as well as flexibility in enabling a breadth of digital “experiences” tailored to support all stages of a brand’s merchandising throughout its sales chain. To date, the company has raised over $8M in equity financing from Merus Capital.
With nearly twenty years of technology industry experience, Clarence has truly revolutionized visual merchandising for online retail. He is deeply focused on creating an adaptive and risk taking organizational culture at Outward, which is what has led to the team’s success to date. He is a named inventor on over 140 issued US utility patents (with more than an additional 25 pending) in various areas including MEMS, displays, image processing, color science, display system architectures, packaging, manufacturing methods, materials, and test and characterization techniques.
Prior to Co-founding Outward, Clarence was Senior Vice President and General Manager at the MEMS Technologies division of Qualcomm, Inc. (QMT), where he led where he led the technology, engineering, and product development activities. Clarence helped grow the team at Qualcomm from 35 to over a 1500 person operation spanning multiple sites in the US and Asia. During his time at Iridigm Display Corporation (acquired by Qualcomm in 2004), Clarence was Director of Technology Development, here he led the development of their MEMS-based direct view flat panel display technology.
Clarence holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Applied Math.