Fast-er Fashion: Visual Recognition on the Runway
How AI is changing Fashion Week by making shows immediately shoppable
I’ll be the first to tell you, I LOVE Amazon Prime (although probably not as much as Oprah loves her bread). The reduction in friction across the need realization ➝ solution ➝ resolution pathway is astonishing — so much so that I’m a little less likely to buy something that isn’t available through Prime (which I assume is Amazon’s end goal: to become the distributor of the world’s goods, bread included).
With New York Fashion Week 2017 upon us, I’d like to discuss how consumer demand for immediate need-fulfillment is impacting the fashion industry.
Slow Fashion
Conventionally, the fashion industry’s cycle has been to showcase clothing a season before it is made available for purchase. So, your Spring/Summer show is for items that will be released in Fall/Winter.
Understandable, as it takes time to set up production lines, purchase the necessary raw material (fabric, buttons, embellishments, etc) and produce an initial run of the garments before they are stocked and ready for purchase.
What designers have found, however, is that this delay between the designs being shown and the goods coming out leaves enough room for “fast fashion” companies to create extremely similar patterns, and effectively steal market share with items a fraction of the price. It’s a lot cheaper to hire people to “adjust” someone else’s work than it is to hire those with the original thought.
The Veruca Salt Generation
As we discussed a few weeks back, Millennials don’t much care for the trappings of prior generations. They are more individualistic. They know their personal brand and are less concerned with what the label on their clothing says than if the clothing matches their own self image.
Secondly, they have grown up with speed. They can message a friend on the other side of the world with zero delay. They can, with two clicks “go live” on whatever platform they want and just as quickly watch someone else’s live broadcast. And just as quickly switch to some entirely different engagement on an entirely different platform. They have the world in their pocket and they expect it to meet their every whim. Right now.
What does this mean for fashion? Well, it means that having a 6-month lead time between showing a product and releasing it isn’t going to cut it anymore. Their customers will have forgotten about it and moved on to the next pop-up shop that exists in the here and now.
Fast-er Fashion
Realizing this, many designers have moved to making their collections nearly immediately available in the days and weeks after it is shown. Fall 2016 saw 10% of the industry making this switch; some partially, some fully. The results are still out on if this has affected sales for these brands, but I’d say it probably has.
This has been made possible by technological developments in garment manufacture: namely, better demand planning through online marketing, the adoption of just-in-time supply chain management, and, recently, increased automation in the actual construction of garments.
But is this the final resting place of the fashion cycle, or can it go even faster? (Of course it can. I’m a fan of rhetorical questions).
See Now. Buy Now.
Take a look at this photo. What do you see all of the people in the audience doing?
If you answered, “Not actually watching the show and just goofing off on their phones,” you’re an old fuddy-duddy, but you’re also half-right. You see, this is how millennials experience things — by sharing it with others.
What else do they do on their phones? Buy stuff.
30% of e-commerce is done on mobile. Now, how do we make sharing and buying meet? With the Lens, of course.
You see, everywhere that the Lens API is running becomes a fully shoppable site. Say it’s running on whatever social network springs up next week — every photo of each of those dresses becomes a direct “buy” link to the dress (which is immediately available because the designer has switched to “See Now, Buy Now”). Buying from the photo will be as frictionless as “liking” it.
That knocks out the “solution” step from the need-fulfillment cycle — a 33% reduction in the need pathway to just realization ➝ resolution. From our own research, 50% of people spend less than 10 minutes looking for something they want to buy, and they give up if they don’t find it. What happens when the search time is less than a minute? I’d bet on a lot more conversions.
We have 10 slots left in the first Beta group for Lens, so get on board at markable.ai/signup.
