Fashion has always lived on speed. Trends shift overnight, campaigns land with a single tap, and entire aesthetics can dominate social feeds for a week before vanishing. But behind the glamour and the glossy visuals is a convenient truth: none of this lands unless the technology behind it works instantly. A slow-loading video or delayed product page can break the spell. That seamless experience we all expect depends on people who usually stay offstage. One of those people is Vlad Malanin, a Ukrainian innovator, former military surgeon, M.D., PhD in Computer Science, member of the Forbes Technology Council, and the co-founder and CTO of SpeedSize.
Malanin’s path into fashion tech is anything but typical. Before writing a single line of code, he served as a military surgeon. The environment demanded calm thinking and precise action in moments where hesitation was dangerous. Those early years shaped the way he approaches every problem today. Later, driven by curiosity and a desire to work with complex systems, he shifted toward engineering and completed a PhD focused on large-scale computation and artificial intelligence. It’s an unusual combination at first glance, but the connection becomes clear as soon as you hear him talk about perception, decision-making and efficiency.
Those two worlds eventually blended into SpeedSize, the platform he co-founded in 2019 to solve a problem nearly every modern brand faces. Fashion relies heavily on visual storytelling. High-resolution campaign shots, dramatic videos and crisp product photography form the backbone of online presence. But the same elements that make a brand look premium can also slow down a site. As digital expectations grow, brands have had to choose between fast performance and high-quality visuals. Malanin believed they shouldn’t have to.
Today, SpeedSize is a mature platform used by more than 200 brands. Luxury designers, streetwear labels, beauty houses, and global retailers rely on it to keep their sites fast without sacrificing the aesthetic quality that defines their identity. The technology quietly reshapes how the visual internet loads, pixel by pixel, with no work needed from the brand after integration.
Represent is one of the clearest examples of this shift. The street-luxury brand is known for its rich textures, dark cinematic mood and intense attention to detail. Its online shop hosted more than 5,000 images and over 50 videos, attracting more than 2 million visitors per month. With that amount of content, even a strong website can become heavy. The challenge is familiar across the fashion world: visuals are essential, but they come at a cost.
SpeedSize offered a way out of this trade-off. After a simple integration into Represent’s Shopify store, the platform analyzed every image and video and reduced their file sizes dramatically—images by 74 percent and videos by 86 percent. The website became more than three times faster, and customers collectively saved nearly 1,000 hours of loading time each month. Represent also cut monthly bandwidth usage by more than 13 terabytes. Despite the dramatic gains, the visual quality stayed as sharp as before.
The way SpeedSize achieves this reflects Malanin’s unique background. The system studies media much like a specialist studies how the human eye and brain process imagery. It keeps the elements that actually shape what people see and removes only the information that adds weight but not value. The result looks identical to the original, but takes a fraction of the digital space. It’s a practical, almost surgical approach to digital performance.
For fashion brands, this kind of invisible improvement can be transformative. A fast site makes a collection feel more premium. It keeps customers engaged longer. It makes product pages more responsive and storytelling smoother. It also frees creative teams from the worry that their most ambitious visuals might slow down the user experience.
Even as SpeedSize grows and becomes a standard across the industry, Malanin himself keeps a relatively low profile. His role is more engineering than self-promotion. The recognition he receives, including membership in the Forbes Technology Council, reflects his influence in the tech world, but he remains focused on building rather than spotlight moments. His work shows up quietly in the everyday experience of millions of shoppers who never notice the technology working behind the scenes.
Fashion and technology are becoming increasingly connected, and digital performance is now part of the definition of luxury. Vlad Malanin stands at that intersection. His work is helping shape what fashion looks like online, not through headlines, but through the instant clarity of a campaign image and the effortless feel of a site that loads without making you wait.
