The Future of Fashion and Retail
On November 20th, at Catolica Lisbon, the CTIE (Center for Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship) organised a conference on “The Future of Fashion and Retail”. Fashion and retail are going through deep changes coming from globalisation, new technologies and new players. We had an amazing panel (see below) as well as a full room.
Technology has always existed in fashion and the Jacquard weaving machine of the industrial revolution is considered as the first computer. Later, fast fashion (particularly known as Zara model) revolutionised retail and then the whole manufacturing and supply chain process. Today, fashion is seeing its whole value chain modified, from creation, to manufacturing, to retail including business models. This is visible in the use of technology for creation (Computer-Aided Design), for manufacturing (3D printing or digital printers of fabrics) and for retail, where Amazon has become the number one seller of clothing (with eight own brands) in 2016–2017 ahead of traditional players. Additionally, e-commerce is opening the door to new players such as the platform Farfetch. The traditional fashion business model is also being disturbed by new players such as the influencers that are substituting the fashion magazines in a much more segmented and efficient way. Fashion, through wearables is also entering other industries such as healthcare.
Traditional retail is going through the “retail apocalypse” and omnichannel seems to be the only option as the frontiers between online and offline are blurring. Amazon is offering the Amazon Go solution that makes cashiers obsolete. At the same time some digital born players such as Farfetch are investing in traditional retail (through the acquisition of Brown’s in 2015 and in the store of the future project).
“Farfetch exists for the love of fashion. We believe in empowering individuality. Our mission is to be the global technology platform for luxury fashion, connecting creators, curators and consumers.”
Farfetch started with the vision José Neves, founder and CEO of Farfetch. José was a shoe designer who was selling his shoes in multibrand luxury boutiques… but they were disappearing. In 2007, while at Paris Fashion Week he had a series of insights: 1) ecommerce was a booming business; 2) many boutiques did not have the financial capacity, nor the know-how to have online presence; 3) mass market players like eBay or Amazon were not compatible with the luxury fashion business. So he decided to create a platform of small boutiques.
Today Farfetch partners with more than 1000 designers and fashion boutiques in48 countries and sells to 2.6 million customers around 3,200 brands, distributed in 190 countries. In 2015, Farfetch acquired Browns, the iconic London retailer with over 45 years of history, to have closer contacts with brands and suppliers, and actually having a physical space to test ideas for the Store of the Future project.
“Sensei is a scalable, seamless sensing solution, to empower all stores of the future to be autonomous and check-out free”. The aim of Sensei is to digitize physical stores as if they were digital stores. It uses many technologies but the most important one is computer vision. It allows to follow the customers in the store and to collect data to optimize the store layout
Sabine shared some of prior projects in the fascinating world of fashiontech! She connected clothes with technology. Her current project, Supa, is about tokenizing the body, to collect data. For instance in a project with the sportswear brand FILA.
Amazon planted the seed of fashion (or should we say clothing?) in 2006 when it acquired Shopbop, since then it acquired Zappos (2009) and East Dane (in 2013), then in 2017 it launched Amazon Fashion. It started with Amazon Fashion Wardrobe (based on the box system: you receive a box at home, and you can keep what you like and return the rest… at each iteration, the algorithm understands better what you like…). Then Amazon opened a popup store in London this month. Amazon now uses AI through Amazon Echo Look and Echo View for counselling, it helps the buying process that is quite unique for fashion compared to other products.
Discussion and take aways
The discussion was fascinating! Each panellist shared his view on how the future will look like and for sure, there is no “One Size Fits All”. In fact, retail and fashion/luxury will go different routes to enhance the shopping experience and therefore different technologies will pave the way. Nevertheless, one common conclusion is about data and how it will cement two different realities (for now) being the physical (store) and the digital (online) world into a new customer experience! Get ready for a seamless interaction in a store+website near you. Phygital is coming!
When asked if the future of fashion and retail included stores and people, the answers were that the cashiers released by technology would be able to provide a better quality service to customers (Joana Rafael) and that there will still be stores!
Article by Celine Abecassis Moedas originally published here!
