ProJobless/geleyi

Shop African Fashion. Meet Emerging Designers. Discover Your Style Fashion is an incredible industry. It’s sexy, it’s glamorous, it’s exciting. But it’s also incredibly complicated and the amount of change the Internet and other technology innovations will bring to this industry in the next decade will be mindboggling. As for the ideas themselves, many look great on whiteboards or in business school competitions: virtual closets, flash sale businesses, new designer “discovery” sites, you-be-the-designer sites, social shopping, user-curated boutiques, subscription sites, custom clothing, and so on that seek to use technology in ‘clever’ ways. But, in the end, they often miss the mark by a wide margin. There are many flaws to these businesses. But the biggest flaw I see is that these “Internet entrepreneurs” fail to understand how the Internet will fundamentally transform the fashion industry, not just provide another access point to buy something. In my opinion, the biggest change will be a dramatic shift in the relationships amongst brands, retailers and customers.Going forward, every brand must figure out how to connect directly with its customers and they must structure their business around the relationships they want to have with their customer rather than let their distribution channels define them. The economics are too great not to do so. If all brands must connect directly with their customers, it also means the roles played by retailers must change. Online retailers will not succeed as customer access points for brands anymore, because the brands can now access these customers directly. So, the online retailer must be more. I would argue that Net-a-Porter is as large a threat to Vogue as it is to Bergdorf Goodman, because of the editorial content and contextual placement they provide. In my mind, making a decision to sell on Net-a-Porter is a branding decision, not a revenue decision. The ramifications of this shift will destroy many large incumbents in this industry, as they realise that they must provide a brand mo …