Opening virtual doors with E-commerce
The digital retail experience will continue to evolve and thrive according to Mareile Osthus, former Chief Category Management Officer with THE ICONIC.
We spoke to the digital pioneer ahead of her workshop with up-and-coming fashion designers in her role as ambassador of Creative Enterprise Australia’s Fashion360.
Smaller fashion brands have a greater opportunity to gain greater visibility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape — according to Fashion360 Ambassador Mareile Osthus.
The e-commerce pioneer has been amongst the global vanguard in the digital marketplace and continues to innovate and lead.
Mareile’s customer-centric focus has driven her passion for scaling and enabling fast growing online retail destinations through exceptional brand and product curation.
With over 15 years’ experience in fashion and 10 years in fashion e-commerce, Mareile has a deep understanding of what influences retail buying behaviour. Her data-driven approach to product and brand curation, as well as brand development, ensures her team remains responsive when it comes to closing the gap between supply and demand.
In her previous role at Australia and New Zealand’s leading online fashion and sports destination, THE ICONIC, Mareile led a team of 150 buyers, planners, account managers and strategists, as well as THE ICONIC’s sustainability and ethical sourcing team.
Mareile was also positioned within THE ICONIC’s Executive team whom she worked with closely to ensure that sustainable long-term growth is achieved by balancing business priorities while having THE ICONIC’s customers, employees and partners in focus.
It’s in this space that she helped shape a digital retail experience in one of the most successful websites of its kind. ‘The digital space is evolving so quickly and will continue to offer greater transparency for the fashion world,’ she says.
‘One of the things that we will see develop in this space is more finely crafted algorithms and more tailored content to cater for the specific customer and their tastes. So, the individual user experience will be enhanced.’
Mareile predicts further growth in sustainability values which will take a larger spotlight, in both the broader fashion world and the digital space. ‘Sustainability is not an option but a necessity. But it’s a big word. It can mean many things.’
‘One of the things I’m most proud of having been a part of is the development of the Considered shop in THE ICONIC which offers customers a streamlined search to find sustainable and ethical fashion by choosing the values which matter the most to them. It also gives insights on specific sustainability credentials and hence educates the customers.’
‘Customers are increasingly looking for ways to easily shop by the values that are most important to them,’ says Mareile.
‘Sustainability is a platform that works in tandem with education. Step-by-step the industry will have to become more transparent,’ she predicts. ‘Being more transparent and making progress in this space is inevitable.’
And if she had a crystal ball, to describe the online shopping experience in the future?
‘Gosh, I would never have imagined we would be able to offer the customer experience we can now. If I could imagine the digital retail experience of the future it will be greater efficiency, greater responsiveness to the customer’s appetite for ethical choices as well as much more transparency from the supply side and a tailored shopping experience using data to cater for the individual,’ she says.
‘There will be solutions which fit your exact needs and value, away from the one size fits all approach.’
Fore more information on Fashion360 go to: https://fashion360accelerator.com/
Or to register for Mareile’s upcoming virtual workshop on e-commerce go to https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-business-of-fashion-opening-doors-with-e-commerce-tickets-104374876064?aff=med
