The fashion industry lives and dies on the timeliness of information. This is a space where trends can change at a moments notice, and designers and retailers must be prepared to make significant adjustments to keep pace with what’s popular, which can be a challenge if organizations don’t have the information they need at their disposal.
Big data is taking over every aspect of business, and fashion is capitalizing on this trend. An article in Fortune Magazine profiles fashion designer Julia Fowler, who has embraced big data as one of her primary resources. It didn’t always used to be this way. When Fowler was working in Australia in the early 2000s, she would struggle to keep up because she had no way of collecting and viewing the information she needed.
“We had internal data on the performance of previous seasons’ products and access to inspirational trend sites,” she told the news source, “but no way to understand opportunities we’d missed or concrete data on how we could improve our product assortment.”
So, when a particular design flopped, there was no efficient way to evaluate the mistake and learn from it, thus mitigating the risk of future mistakes. This proved to be costly, because mistakes in the fashion industry can be worth millions of dollars. A bad decision can have a tremendous financial impact on a fashion organization. In many cases, those mistakes could have been averted with appropriate data.
“Every time you see a product on discount, it’s because the wrong decisions were made,” Fowler said. “This leads to a lot of wastage in the industry. I wanted to fix that problem.”
Big data can give fashion designers and retailers a full view of the information they need to improve the design and marketing of merchandise. One of the key advantages of big data is that it can provide insights and allow organizations to make proactive decisions to stay ahead of the competition. This is particularly important in fashion, and retailers that identify trends in the industry before they come to pass can plan ahead to ensure they are prepared to capitalize on those trends.
The key is finding the right data management solutions to collect information and present it in a readable and actionable format. Organizations in the retail industry can do this to learn what clothing items sell, what don’t and what changes they will have to make to ensure they keep up with the trends in the industry.