Why buying clothes is about to get a lot more interesting
We spend a lot of money on clothes and fashion accessories, and the way we do so has barely changed over the decades. Ecommerce has obviously had an impact, with more of us buying online, thanks to increasingly versatile and multi-channel logistics, but for most of us, buying clothes is still associated in our minds with a store and time spent in the changing rooms, often requiring lengthy consultation with and approval by friends or partners.
This year’s Singles’ Day, invented by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and that is becoming an increasingly global event, along with Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Amazon Prime Day, fashion and accessories contributed significantly to record sales. Among this year’s innovations were the services of virtual assistant FashionAI in thirteen stores where users were given recommendations considering the items available in the store. As sales in stores steadily decline, Alibaba is trying to link the traditional shopping experience to the internet.
Alibaba’s is just one of many fronts open in e-commerce’s conquest of the fashion world. Amid (probably wild) speculation that Amazon is set to buy ailing US department stores such as Nordstrom and do with fashion what it seems willing to do with supermarkets, the company has also developed an algorithmic fashion designer able to adapt catwalk tendencies to the street, as well as buying a company able to calculate our clothes sizes simply by scanning ourselves with a computer or smartphone camera, while at the same time putting the finishing touches to Prime Wardrobe, which allows buyers to purchase a large number of products and quietly return those that we don’t want, for whatever reason.
In short, it looks like our clothes-buying habits will increasingly be shaped by technologies capable of generating a model on screen with a size similar to ours so we can try on clothes virtually, while at the same time receiving recommendations for other items or accessories that match our choices. This may well turn out to be a revolution in a category that until now had largely resisted change. The final phase will be when fashion brands, which are increasingly subject to automation, reduce the supply chain and are able to manufacture in real time and close to home the tailor-made garment we just bought online and get it to us in record time thanks to ever-faster and competitive logistics.
If the efforts of the e-commerce giants are anything to go by, all this is set to happen very soon. The experience of buying clothes and accessories could be about to undergo a radical change and adapt to a different environment, which could put many stores out of business or foster alliances with those able to develop these services as platforms for third parties. Retailers, fasten your safety belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride over the next couple of years.
(En español, aquí)
