March 7, 2013
Does Tech Have a Fashion Disconnect?
On the last day of New York Fashion Week in mid-February, Decoded Fashion held a four-hour Fashion Forum programmed to help designers catch up with the latest technological advances. But, with digital content driving engagement these days, the event had an equally important mission of helping tech developers understand fashion.
"I think that everyone in fashion is used to hearing the statement that they need to play catch-up, and they need to innovate," Decoded Fashion founder Liz Bacelar told The New York Times. "But let me tell you that from the tech side, and I work with the tech guys all the time; they are building products to pitch to the fashion vertical and they are getting it wrong all the time."
Decoded Fashion, founded in 2011, supports such education by introducing tech startups and emerging technologies to leaders in fashion and retail through events and discussions. Beyond designer stars such as Zac Posen, the Fashion Week event included a hackathon, challenging programmers to come up with fashion-related apps for a chance to win $10,000. The overall emphasis was to make the two sides more comfortable with each other.
"People on the tech side think very differently about fashion," Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former Vogue editor and co-executive producer of Decoded Fashion, told the Times. "It’s not just about brands, it’s about publishing and distribution and manufacturing. And when you say fashion people think clothing, but it’s more than that. It’s the business of clothing."
Such events appear to be increasingly common. A bit earlier in February, Hearst Magazines held a 24-hour "Fashion Hack" that brought out 150 programmers to create fashion-focused apps and programs drawing on Hearst content for a similar prize.
In mid-February, SF Fashtech, which works with startups at the intersection of fashion and technology, held a 54-hour event joining tech and fashion that also included a hackathon.
Echoing the New York City theme, SF FashTech co-founder Charles Belle told the San Francisco Chronicle the idea for his firm came after he struggled to develop a fashion app. He said, "The fashion side might not know how to code, so that’s a black box for them. And the tech side might look at fashion and say, ‘I don’t understand this industry at all.’"
- Fashion and Tech Merge For The First Time On The Runway At Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week – Decoded Fashion
- Decoded Fashion and CFDA Host Fashion Hackathon – The New York Times (Tiered sub. model)
- Why Emerging Technologies May Hold the Future of Fashion – Entrepreneur
- Hearst Hosts Its First Fashion Hackathon – Mashable
- Technology, fashion paired at S.F. event – San Francisco Chronicle
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
What will it take to bridge the divide between fashion and technology? What aspects of the fashion industry does the tech side need to learn about most? Do retail IT departments have an adequate skill range to support digital content strategies?
Poll
The most important thing for technology to understand—and this is true of any industry, fashion included—is to understand how people consume. To quote Diana Vreeland, “Fashion is a feast for the eyes.” So IT developers need to develop a platform that feeds the eyes, and allows people to consume digitally what they are not able to see in person. The strategies should connect content in such a way that it’s natural and unfussy.
Without knowing the depth of retail IT departments’ abilities, I think they have a more than adequate audience to help develop digital content strategies: customer service.
Two things. 1. Open minds. 2. The chance to make more money.
See how Zac Posen is clutching his heart and has a collar tightly griping his throat? Like many creatives he sees creativity coming entirely from within himself. No way he’s going to give up control or anything else for that matter.
Dennis Crowley slept in his sweatshirt and didn’t bother combing his hair. And that was for a photo shoot. It’s that ‘bring it on’ or ‘whatever’ approach to technological creativity.
What these two representatives should do is barter their respective services.
Tech B2B innovation is a lot easier to navigate than the B2C in the fashion world. Consumers don’t know that they want something if they haven’t experienced it and it’s a costly endeavor for retailers to find out.
Retailers and Techies need to keep in mind the fashion customer’s buying habits and process. Online is easy from a tech point of view, because that’s what it is. It’s the brick and mortar buying process that seems to be challenging from a tech perspective.
No buying decision is final until the try-on has been completed. Smart mirrors and other augmented reality apps that facilitate the try-on are terrific and drive traffic to the fitting room. The trouble is inside the fitting room where the buying decision is being made and the customer is often left alone to make their decision.
The fitting room customer is going to make a buying decision; yes or no. Fitting rooms should bristle with technology that gives the customer access to service on demand, provides the associates with technology to control and manage the fitting room area, and actionable data that in-store and corporate management can use to monitor fitting room strategies and performance.
Equipping fitting rooms with technology and associates with the behaviors necessary to drive to the fitting room and sell more will ultimately result in more yes’s than no’s.
Ms. Wolkoff hit the nail on the head when she said that fashion isn’t just clothing, it is the business of clothing. The “business of clothing” has always presented unique challenges and has influenced other categories for that reason. Constant newness, opportunistic sourcing, shrinking production lead times, do-or-die deliveries…all are inherent with the business. Solutions built for other categories simply won’t apply.
In my experience, solution providers, tech and otherwise, also tend to treat fashion brands as discrete start-up-like entities, even though many (most?) are now part of larger corporate portfolios owned by conglomerates or retailers. Despite the challenges, tech companies are right to go after fashion and I’m grateful to have started my career in the “schmatta” business. Once you’ve built for fashion, you’re ready for everything else.
Fashion/tech is a tale of two cities. On the one side it’s about service and on the other it’s about marketing. Tech gets the service part pretty well. They can create service oriented apps that bring the consumer to fashion. Just look at some of the designers during Fashion Week who put up live runway shows with the option to buy right off the runway. Cool. But bringing pure fashion to a consumer, that’s a bit trickier. Consumers are visual, yes, but they still need to confirm that their concept of fashion is right for them. Tech people with an eye for fashion can pull this off, others not so much. Decoded Fashion and SF Fashtech have both found a good niche.
Technology should be seen by fashion not as a usurper but as an enhancer to their merchandising decisions; conversely, techies need to understand the gut n’ instinct aesthetic that often drives merchandising decisions and learn how to factor those into their software and platforms. This is especially so when projecting “the buy plan” and the need, given our consumer-centric culture,to assess consumer preferences prior to the buy. Nothing less than robust margins & equally robust consumer loyalty is at stake.
Bravo to Decoded Fashion and the CFDA incubator program in laying a foundation for fashion and technology to collaborate and work in partnership to implement technologies that are relevant and useable to the fashion industry and most importantly, the consumer. While digital content does drive engagement in many new and fascinating ways, the bottom line is that the featured product(s) must meet the customer expectations or the line, and possibly company, will fail. Collaboration, education, transparency, and a good amount of beta testing are essential.
Understanding target segments of retail shoppers is the key to bridge the gap. Techies need to understand how the target shoppers shop in store and a segment’s needs- service , selection and others.
This question is way outside my retail comfort zone but here’s a stab: In a world of fast fashion, short runs, and web selling, I suppose it would be really useful if techies developed tools to help with demand creation. I suppose that means data analytics and visualization (making sense of shares, comments, content engagement)
Make it easy for artists to create, via CAD, short runs – Cultivate domestic manufacturing.
Develop tools to help shoppers collaborate.
This is a perceived bridge; i.e. the gap between fashion and technology. Fashion is so flippant and different, that what this article appears to be talking about is how can technology better help fashion business, rather than just fashion. In this case, fashion business, is really no different than any other business that is a fast turning, model sensitive, and subjective based business. The better questions might focus on why there aren’t more high-power business people driving and focusing the business efforts of fashion.
I think we need to ground ourselves a bit here. Although there is definitely room for improvement, I would challenge the premise of this article on the basis of the Fashion Industry having evolved by the leveraging of technology better than some other retail-facing industries, as a whole.
There are great fashion brands and retails that are at the forefront of technological innovation, and I’m sure we can all think of some great examples.
The challenge is that a product strategy rarely exists. Once that strategy is in place, the execution of it can be enabled with technology. However, implementation of technology for technology’s sake alone, has proven to be an expensive approach with very limited results.
I think it’s brilliant to merge these two, at first viewing, diverse but realistically sympathetic industries Tech needs to learn the business and fashion needs to learn the competitive advantages a tech platform can offer.
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The most important thing for technology to understand—and this is true of any industry, fashion included—is to understand how people consume. To quote Diana Vreeland, “Fashion is a feast for the eyes.” So IT developers need to develop a platform that feeds the eyes, and allows people to consume digitally what they are not able to see in person. The strategies should connect content in such a way that it’s natural and unfussy.
Without knowing the depth of retail IT departments’ abilities, I think they have a more than adequate audience to help develop digital content strategies: customer service.
Two things. 1. Open minds. 2. The chance to make more money.
See how Zac Posen is clutching his heart and has a collar tightly griping his throat? Like many creatives he sees creativity coming entirely from within himself. No way he’s going to give up control or anything else for that matter.
Dennis Crowley slept in his sweatshirt and didn’t bother combing his hair. And that was for a photo shoot. It’s that ‘bring it on’ or ‘whatever’ approach to technological creativity.
What these two representatives should do is barter their respective services.
Tech B2B innovation is a lot easier to navigate than the B2C in the fashion world. Consumers don’t know that they want something if they haven’t experienced it and it’s a costly endeavor for retailers to find out.
Retailers and Techies need to keep in mind the fashion customer’s buying habits and process. Online is easy from a tech point of view, because that’s what it is. It’s the brick and mortar buying process that seems to be challenging from a tech perspective.
No buying decision is final until the try-on has been completed. Smart mirrors and other augmented reality apps that facilitate the try-on are terrific and drive traffic to the fitting room. The trouble is inside the fitting room where the buying decision is being made and the customer is often left alone to make their decision.
The fitting room customer is going to make a buying decision; yes or no. Fitting rooms should bristle with technology that gives the customer access to service on demand, provides the associates with technology to control and manage the fitting room area, and actionable data that in-store and corporate management can use to monitor fitting room strategies and performance.
Equipping fitting rooms with technology and associates with the behaviors necessary to drive to the fitting room and sell more will ultimately result in more yes’s than no’s.
Ms. Wolkoff hit the nail on the head when she said that fashion isn’t just clothing, it is the business of clothing. The “business of clothing” has always presented unique challenges and has influenced other categories for that reason. Constant newness, opportunistic sourcing, shrinking production lead times, do-or-die deliveries…all are inherent with the business. Solutions built for other categories simply won’t apply.
In my experience, solution providers, tech and otherwise, also tend to treat fashion brands as discrete start-up-like entities, even though many (most?) are now part of larger corporate portfolios owned by conglomerates or retailers. Despite the challenges, tech companies are right to go after fashion and I’m grateful to have started my career in the “schmatta” business. Once you’ve built for fashion, you’re ready for everything else.
Fashion/tech is a tale of two cities. On the one side it’s about service and on the other it’s about marketing. Tech gets the service part pretty well. They can create service oriented apps that bring the consumer to fashion. Just look at some of the designers during Fashion Week who put up live runway shows with the option to buy right off the runway. Cool. But bringing pure fashion to a consumer, that’s a bit trickier. Consumers are visual, yes, but they still need to confirm that their concept of fashion is right for them. Tech people with an eye for fashion can pull this off, others not so much. Decoded Fashion and SF Fashtech have both found a good niche.
Technology should be seen by fashion not as a usurper but as an enhancer to their merchandising decisions; conversely, techies need to understand the gut n’ instinct aesthetic that often drives merchandising decisions and learn how to factor those into their software and platforms. This is especially so when projecting “the buy plan” and the need, given our consumer-centric culture,to assess consumer preferences prior to the buy. Nothing less than robust margins & equally robust consumer loyalty is at stake.
Bravo to Decoded Fashion and the CFDA incubator program in laying a foundation for fashion and technology to collaborate and work in partnership to implement technologies that are relevant and useable to the fashion industry and most importantly, the consumer. While digital content does drive engagement in many new and fascinating ways, the bottom line is that the featured product(s) must meet the customer expectations or the line, and possibly company, will fail. Collaboration, education, transparency, and a good amount of beta testing are essential.
Understanding target segments of retail shoppers is the key to bridge the gap. Techies need to understand how the target shoppers shop in store and a segment’s needs- service , selection and others.
This question is way outside my retail comfort zone but here’s a stab: In a world of fast fashion, short runs, and web selling, I suppose it would be really useful if techies developed tools to help with demand creation. I suppose that means data analytics and visualization (making sense of shares, comments, content engagement)
Make it easy for artists to create, via CAD, short runs – Cultivate domestic manufacturing.
Develop tools to help shoppers collaborate.
This is a perceived bridge; i.e. the gap between fashion and technology. Fashion is so flippant and different, that what this article appears to be talking about is how can technology better help fashion business, rather than just fashion. In this case, fashion business, is really no different than any other business that is a fast turning, model sensitive, and subjective based business. The better questions might focus on why there aren’t more high-power business people driving and focusing the business efforts of fashion.
I think we need to ground ourselves a bit here. Although there is definitely room for improvement, I would challenge the premise of this article on the basis of the Fashion Industry having evolved by the leveraging of technology better than some other retail-facing industries, as a whole.
There are great fashion brands and retails that are at the forefront of technological innovation, and I’m sure we can all think of some great examples.
The challenge is that a product strategy rarely exists. Once that strategy is in place, the execution of it can be enabled with technology. However, implementation of technology for technology’s sake alone, has proven to be an expensive approach with very limited results.
I think it’s brilliant to merge these two, at first viewing, diverse but realistically sympathetic industries Tech needs to learn the business and fashion needs to learn the competitive advantages a tech platform can offer.