[Busan BetaNews = Reporter Lee Jae-seung] Dongseo University (President Jang Je-guk) announced on the 27th that its RISE project team took home both the grand prize and an excellence award at the 2025 Fashion Solve-A-Thon.
Hosted by Busan City and the Busan Textile Fashion Industry Association, with support from Pusan National University’s Startup Support Team, the 2025 Fashion Solve-A-Thon wrapped up at the Busan Fashion Biz Center.
The competition moved through document screening, midterm evaluations, and a final round to uncover cross-disciplinary startup ideas aimed at solving current challenges in the fashion industry while delivering social value. As the first contest focused on addressing Busan’s fashion-industry issues, it drew 45 teams from across the country. After paperwork and preliminaries, eight teams advanced to the final stage to deliver IR pitches.
Judges evaluated entries that tackled ESG (environment, social, governance) concerns, pushed digital transformation (DX) in fashion, and applied AI to boost global competitiveness. From the 45 applicants, 20 teams were picked after the document review; consulting and mentoring during the preliminaries narrowed the field to eight finalists for the IR stage.
Dongseo University had two teams reach the finals — PLSTK and FTS — and both earned top honors. PLSTK (leader Lee Si-eun; members Park Gabin and Jeong Hae-eun) won the grand prize for a stylish, eco-friendly project: 3D‑printed design bags made from hotel waste plastic. FTS (leader Choi Bong-jun; members Jang Mun-su, Lim Jun-o, and Choi Woo-jin) took the excellence award for an AI-powered, hierarchical-detection-model–based system that automatically labels clothing data.
