Solving Fashion Retail Problems with AI: What Are Some Tips to Consider?
From automated product tagging to automatic inventory management systems, learn how AI can solve your top retail pain points
Creating a business strategy for your fashion retail store is not an easy feat. There are many factors you must contend with that can drastically affect future sales. Establishing a long term (and additionally a short-term) plan will let you track your sales more effectively, among other crucial variables.
Simply put, knowing your inventory levels as well as understanding the overall demand for your products is a prerequisite for success.
The technologically automated business model has already begun to change the way we shop. Companies like Stitch Fix, True Fit, and Threadflip are making significant changes in retail by using modern technology to address customer needs. From verification, to automation, to online integration, there is one innovation that has continued to change all faces of fashion retail.
The most transformative technology in the fashion retail industry is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
While AI is primarily known for performing complex calculations, it can also help retailers predict consumer demand by identifying patterns and making comparisons between products, and much more.
Let me walk you through some of the main issues in fashion retail, and how AI is providing solutions and tips to solve them.
How can AI Help You Address Inventory Issues?
AI can support your business by identifying trends and providing insight to help you sell more of your products.
This technology matches products based on the consumer’s preferences, as opposed to the price or brand. Retailers can therefore predict supply and demand changes in real-time, effectively addressing inventory issues.
Customers frustrated by out of stock items? If there are too many items sold out in your inventory, AI systems can recognize this in advance, notifying you to purchase more of such product(s) before they run out.
Find out which products you need to stock or drop from your store. This technology identifies the most popular items on your site, allowing you to know exactly what is selling well and, well, what simply isn’t selling.
Making Rich and Consistent Product Attributes
When listing product attributes, fashion retailers must be as descriptive as possible to ensure consumers know exactly what they’re buying. The information provided needs to be consistent and rich. Inconsistent data can cause a multitude of problems for brands (especially smaller ones).
Let AI do all the work for you. AI can visually scan product images, tagging apparel attributes automatically. Not only does this save your employees time manually labeling clothing items, but it can also open up the door to global consumer bases.
Emerging fashion tagging technologies even have the capability to label items in languages outside of English. With at least 350 languages spoken in the United States alone, multilingual product tags are vital in getting an edge against your competitors.
For example, the OMNIOUS TAGGER (pictured above) can automatically label clothing attributes in four languages, enabling our clients to create a personalized product discovery process for both English and Chinese speakers in the United States.
Intuitive Visual Discovery
To truly captivate your e-commerce site visitors, you need to inspire your users with visual queues in their shopping journey. Similar item recommendations to product placement, visual discovery is one of the most important parts of digital marketing. 68 percent of shoppers would rather learn about a product through images and visuals than reading descriptions.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your brand’s visual merchandising with the help of AI. For example, this technology could help you build a catalogue for each season by analyzing what colors are trending at that moment.
By doing so, AI could suggest certain combinations for your business while also saving time on managing inventory and improving efficiency overall. Let’s not forget about how AI could optimize your website by suggesting the best placement for each item you have for sale.
AI can help your business from being a seasonal retailer whose clothing is only appealing to customers during one season of the year. The technology could improve your brand’s visual merchandising by helping you build consistent strategies based on current trends and previous seasons’ data.
Market Proven Trend-Analysis and Forecasting
Besides analyzing your current inventory, AI can also forecast upcoming trends for the fashion retail industry.
The key is to ensure the technology you are working with actually makes accurate predictions. Incorrect information can lead brands stuck with products that are no longer appealing to consumers. AI can tackle these problems as long as there is enough data collected before each season.
For example, AI can be able to forecast your inventory needs based on both your individual store’s previous sales records and industry trends before a new season begins. More accurate information can be generated in seconds compared to weeks spent by analysts manually monitoring trends.
Smaller brands implementing this retail tech will see an advantage as they will be able to carry out this type of forecasting research with limited employees needed.
Key Takeaways for Fashion Retailers
If you want to implement AI into your business, it’s vital that you have a good strategy in place. Companies need to think about how they will actually use this technology, what resources need to be allocated for implementation, and how they will keep data updated throughout the entire process.
Larger businesses can also benefit from using more than one type of AI tech. Instead of working against each other, these algorithms can work together in order to provide a better experience to consumers.
Fashion retail is an industry where most sales are generated by selling apparel based on customer trends. It is also an industry in which almost half of customers are influenced by advertisements before making a purchase decision.
So who is really in control of fashion trends? While there are many different answers, one thing is clear: AI makes it easier to figure out.
Read more about how AI can help increase shopper retention rates for retailers.
References:
CB Insights. “The Future of Fashion: Technology & the Industry.” CB Insights Research. CB Insights, May 11, 2021. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/fashion-tech-future-trends/.
“3 Ways AI Can Help Solve Inventory Management Challenges — IBM Supply Chain.” IBM Supply Chain Blog, March 4, 2020. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/supply-chain/3-ways-ai-solves-inventory-management-challenges/.
Jun, Jaeyoung. “Why Automated Product Tagging Is a ‘Must-Have’ in Online Fashion Businesses?” Medium. OMNIOUS.AI Blog, April 29, 2020. https://medium.com/omnious/why-automated-product-tagging-is-a-must-have-in-online-fashion-businesses-720d6f37b668.
