How retailers are taking on a digitised world
According to the Business of Fashion, retailers are at a time where e-commerce and digital marketing are mere table stakes, and fashion companies are locked in a race for innovation. Recruiting tech talent within fashion houses is the first challenge that retailers now face in order to remain competitive.
In recent years, technology has casually been tried and tested in the fashion world. But with potential demise from brick-and-mortar retail shopping, the impact of technology has been difficult to overlook — especially with e-commerce in full force.
Today, we saw the iconic Sears outlet chain close its doors despite once being the forefront of American retail and holds a history of 132 years. The NY Times described Sear’s success as “its early mail-order and distribution innovations made it the Amazon of the Gilded Age”. It became America’s largest retailer before being overtaken by Walmart in the 1980s.
The company has suffered, along with many other traditional retailers, from rising online competition from firms such as Amazon and has recently found itself in a crisis as it struggles to turn a profit, since Americans increasingly shop online rather than in shopping centres.
If we look at the way consumers shop today, the demise of Sears comes at no surprise. Retailers across the board are faced with unprecedented competition from online shopping giants, and it is expected that other retailers will soon follow suit.
Consumer behaviour is also drastically changing and ever-demanding from both a digital and physical perspective.
The revolution of big data analytics and artificial intelligence is changing the future
As in all sectors, tech is revolutionising how businesses operate, with the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence leading to streamlined and efficient processes. In light of these technologies, the retail sector is growing as well as the need for retailers to adapt to the new landscape and embrace the turning point of the fashion world.
The world we live in now is driven by technology at every corner and affects how we live day-to-day, from dating and fitness apps to online shopping to the block chain. Statista predicted that the global block chain technology market is to reach $339.5 million in size, and is forecasted to grow to $2.3 billion by 2021. From a retail perspective,
Today, Populous World announced the open build beta launch of its PXP platform, a business intelligence model serving to help corporate executives, business managers and other operational workers make better and more informed business decisions.
The term big data, a form of business intelligence technologies, is catching up to most industries in the business world — and the fashion industry is progressively adapting to this. In fact, retailers have started jumping onto the digitalisation bandwagon and are using these machines to their advantage.
Business intelligence is serving as a technology that helps businesses such as retailers to stay competitive. A business which relies on quick and agile decisions mostly use big data analytics. Rather than manually gathering data, retailers can use Populous World’s PXP platform to organise, analyse, and sort data into relevant categories, that can then be used to predict and understand what their customers are looking for and execute results based on that.
Lou Chan, Populous World
