The Drapers Innovation In Fashion Report 2013
The Drapers Innovation in Fashion Report 2013 was published on Saturday. Here’s a little summary.
Merchandising
- Supply chains need to become extremely flexible so that they can deal with fluctuations in demand caused by unforeseeable circumstances (e.g. the weather).
- Companies need to use analytics to gain a holistic view of the company & to start understanding how their different channels affect each other.
- It is important to streamline inventory management.
The MyWardrobe.com loyalty scheme
Data & CRM
- Customer relationship management (CRM) needs to become customer-centric as opposed to campaign-centric.
- Businesses need to unify and analyse their collected customer data correctly, with the aim of finding new ways of engaging customers.
- Loyalty programmes can offer deep insights into customer behaviour and allow for better personalization
- e.g. through customer segmentation – provides customers with different information & offers depending on which segment they are in
- Marketers should merge social networking data and CRM data (i.e. through allowing customers to sign in to the e-commerce website with their Facebook account).
- The main point here is that personalization is of the essence!
Marks and Spencers multichannel integration.
Source: retail-week.com
In-Store Innovation
This is a topic I find particularly interesting – especially the ‘augmented retail‘ aspect of it – read more about it here.
- Augmented reality was also mentioned here as an effective way of getting people ‘talking’.
- Click-and-collect: Apparently retailers are looking for ways to streamline this system (this comes to no surprise to me – when I used the John Lewis click-and-collect, I had to queue for ages and then wait for ages for them to bring out the item – b.o.r.i.n.g.).
- Retailers need to offer innovative payment methods – e.g. through phone apps such as Paddle – which eliminate the need for queueing to pay.
- Then there’s also the matter of multichannel integration. e.g. here‘s an article about how M&S are planning on doing it.
The ASOS fit visualiser.
Source: asos.com
E-Commerce
Another favourite topic of mine!
This focused a lot on virtual fitting solutions. None of the ones mentioned sounded that great to me though. I don’t think I would ever waste my time measuring myself and entering that data into the computer – how tedious and weird. No-one is happy with their body these days, so why make customers measure themselves? One ‘fitting solution’ even asks customers to enter their weight… ew! I think these kinds of ‘solutions’ could end up creating negative associations in people’s minds and consequently act as deterrents. I don’t want to think about weighing myself when I go shopping! I’d rather shop somewhere that makes me think about how pretty I will look in something, not about my weight. I think the solution that ASOS has started providing – where you can indicate which clothes that are already on the site fit you – is much (user-)friendlier.
Anna's Thought Bubbles 