Hot chicks, of course! What else can I say, as a guy? And really, I always wanted to start a blogpost with “Hot chicks!” No, truth be told, I’ve been looking at fashion for some time, during the writing of my, now retired, food and retail blog, and a little afterwards too. As I mentioned before, industry-research is an important part of my job-application process, online, preferably on location at similar businesses, and through my conversations with the management. I’ve visited a number of fashion-retailers also, Zara and a more very upper-class fashion-retailer, and had some thoughts about it, which I’ll share here.

Zara & H&M

Two of my “business-heroes” in this industry are Zara and H&M, who have dramatically different organisational structures, but similar objectives, and a very strong technological foundation for managing their logistical complexities, which also helped them in their online strategy, I imagine.

If fashion can be characterised by anything, it’s that intellectual property doesn’t matter. Rather it’s the company that combines creative (or creatively copied) designs together with a strong execution (across the value chain) that wins the game. Zara, a vertically and horizontally integrated fortress, is strong in constantly renewing its collections (and hardly does any marketing), while H&M, a company that’s similar to Nike or Apple, only really does the designing and the marketing, while outsourcing pretty much everything else.

You can read a few more thoughts about these two on my retail-blog.

The online fashion-game

When you think about it, a store doesn’t have to be that different from a commerce-website; you have the enticing outside part of things, which can be marketing and the shopping window, and you have the interactive inside part, which encourages you to mix and match, try and (impulse) buy. A good website will understand (or learn) the way customers think and appeal to the right drivers from the marketing and the interactive part of things.

Fashion is however a somewhat complex consumer-good. The way a piece of clothing is judged (based on my opinion) is on three levels:

• The visual: how does it look?
• The sensory: how does it feel?
• and The social: what reaction do I get?

The web is getting more creative every day about the visual, e.g. you have sites like Etsy that use elaborate colour-matching techniques, of which there are several different versions elsewhere.

On the sensory-side, this should kind of be approached like you’re convincing a very sceptical person of a risky project. Everybody has been burned by some bad-fitting clothes before! On the one hand, extensive information matters, e.g. Styleshake’s size guide. On the other hand, support matters very much, e.g. Zappos‘ customer service approach, which Fidji wrote about before.

The social dimension should be something that the web is good for. On the one hand, celebrity-marketing like H&M and many other stores do, is a good enticement to get people to buy your clothes. On the other hand, what matters more to people like me is what clothes will look like in my social circle, and not everybody has Tom Cruise’s body-type (I’m twice as tall ). But you can definitely imagine a Hotornot- or Facebook-styled fashion-store, with some creative techniques.

To summarise

The attraction of fashion is still the hot models for me, but really, in the online domain it’s much more.

• Fashion is a global and dynamic industry, and technology is definitely an enabler in that business.
• The lack of IP makes the industry a somewhat easy one to enter, but also requires very strong executive skills.
• There is still plenty of smart innovation left in addressing the right visual, sensory, and social needs of customers.

From a job-perspective, I found out that the fashion-business is not that easy to get into. You need either a related degree and/or (preferably together) relevant experience. That said, if you got a fashion-business or are thinking of starting one, preferably online, and are in need of a creative business-guy, give me a buzz! I’m always up for some brainstorming!

For the commentators:

• what do you think are the drivers for fashion shopping?
• What innovative e-commerce sites have you come across?
• Where do you see fashion going, hybrid, more off-line, or more online?

Vincent

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Premise: A while ago, Fred Wilson, a (possibly biased) tech-investor, wrote that he was bullish on the tech-industry. Recently, the New York Times reports that e-commerce is up because people want to travel less (fuel costs). And previous stories reported on the migration of advertising revenues from traditional media to online media.

A note: I don’t know that there will be a recession. I know that the real-estate bust in the US is a pretty big deal, and that banks from Europe and Asia have been pretty heavily invested in that supposed goldmine. And any fall-out in the US, i.e. banks shutting down or otherwise, will likely have global repercussions on the banking-sector, and affect other industries also.

With that out of the way, three problems/phenomena I associate with these times are:

• A lack of accountability in investments (e.g. currently real estate and previously startups & Enron), also accompanied by emotions like fear & greed.
• Rising input-costs (the market should normally adjust for that, but the explosive growth in demand from emerging countries + the lack of an alternative for, in this case, fuel, make this a pretty big uncertainty)
• Changing paradigms, such as the rise of webware, the (expected) fall of hardware-prices, the possible fall of software-sales, the continuing displacement of brick & mortar business models, businesses being forced to go & think green, and much, much more.

So, there’s probably a few more symptoms (throw them out in the comments!), but it seems to me that the internet is pretty well placed to deal with some of these problems.

Let’s start with accountability. The strength of the web is that everything on it is digital and, in theory, nearly (*) everything can be measured (*: I am quite sceptical about the measurability of video & audio, though arguable the serious data is still in text). Added to this, there are technology-shifts, like digital television, mobile computing, and E-Ink, which make it easier to have a wider reach as a data-gatherer, not to mention that business are increasingly placing their data online, again facilitating data-exchange in partnerships. This should make it easier for businesses to base their expense on actual data, the same for investors and advertisers. Together with the consequences of the last internet-bust, I think that everyone is pretty careful to base their decisions on information, not hopes and dreams (well, I’m still sceptical about Twitter).

Next, rising input prices. Having blogged on the topic of food and retail for about a year, I’ve obviously had to follow this trend/reality quite a bit. The NYTimes heading I linked to above summarises my feelings quite well, customers are looking at the opportunity cost of fuel (as well as the cost of being green) and alternatives like e-commerce may seem much more attractive. In the long-term, people like James Howard Kunstler are calling for more and more “locality,” i.e. that people will be willing to migrate less for work and, I guess, shopping, which opens up opportunities for e-commerce and ways of working across a distance.

Finally (?), changing paradigms. Well, whatever the new world looks like, a pretty warm place is reserved for the web. Web-apps and -services are maturing, offering more and better features, and providing individuals and businesses with a comfortable ecosystem to operate in. The OLPC, the Asus EEE, and other cheaper systems (when Dell comes in, it will be mass), may be less powerful, but they will be optimised to use the web most of all. Societally, it may eventually become the logical choice for the mainstream to spend less than $500 for a laptop, in which case hardware-makers and, possibly, software-makers will suffer. But the web won’t. Similarly, while I don’t yet see brick & mortar disappearing, it is clear that eventually 99% of B&M businesses will have to have an online presence. About the world going green, I can’t sell everything, perhaps someone else can give the answer to that.

Is the internet recession-proof? My guess is as good as the next guy. But, more efficient use of computing, datamining, search, advertising, e-commerce, and logistics are all technologies I am extremely bullish on these coming years.

What do you think?

Vincent

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