Future of the Cloud: Can you put your clothes in it?

Implications of a culture of non-ownership

Most of us are familiar with our data and media residing in the cloud. Amazon Cloud player lets you save your music online. Google drive saves your documents. We can access these cloud residents from anywhere relatively quickly and save space on our CD racks and hard drives. In this post, I wanted to explore if this cloud concept can reasonably be applied for a significant portion of physical goods.

What does it mean for something to be in the cloud?

In essence, one way to think about placing something on the cloud is giving up physical ownership of something in exchange for easy, on-demand remote access to the same or equivalent good. Based on this definition, the sharing economy has already slowly trained us to put more of our physical goods in the cloud.

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What else in the realm of physical goods can the cloud swallow?

So far, the cloud has encroached on things that are easy to replicate remotely (e.g. digital goods) or things that are very expensive to own (e.g. home, cars). Goods that are readily consumable (e.g. food and toilet paper) and most services (e.g. haircuts, doctors) can’t easily move into the cloud as we are defining it here. To see what else is out there, I laid out household expenditure data from BLS and tried to categorize them based on addressability of the cloud (mobile link for image):

Unfortunately, it looks like there’s very little left that is addressable that is not being targeted already—primarily apparel and furniture. Clothes wear out easily and there’s the “ick” factor and furniture is bulky to ship and has lower turnover.

Verdict

Before you brush off the possibility of everyday clothes and furniture being on the cloud (the likes of Rent the Runway and CORT for special occasions have been around), check out Freshneck. They are putting apparel in the cloud by starting with a clothing item that the consumer does not always need and feels less personal and more replaceable: the tie. The idea might still not work (e.g. not scalable) but it’s an interesting start nevertheless.

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