Luxury Daily Media group Condé Nast is connecting the dots between readers’ content consumption and purchase behavior through the launch of a new data product. Condé Nast Spire leverages proprietary insights from 1010data, looking to better target campaigns for advertisers. With today’s fragmented media landscape, it can be difficult for marketers to follow the purchase path back to the original point of inspiration, but by merging first party and third party data, Condé Nast is looking to pinpoint the right message to deliver to the right person at the right time. Purchase pathCondé Nast Spire goes beyond the one trillion and more data points created each month across the media group’s titles. Condé Nast will use this information to develop micro-segments of its readership, giving advertisers a specific audience to target. These insights will be used to develop custom content that will resonate with this segment of the population. Condé Nast headquarters at One World Trade
Amazon (AMZN) is developing a 3D modeling system to solve online clothes shopping's biggest problem — Quartz In the 19th century, a hirsute aboriginal woman from Mexico named Julia Pastrana was billed on the freak-show circuit as “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” Brought to Europe, she performed according to Victorian norms: singing and dancing, speaking in foreign languages, undergoing public medical examinations, and other spectacle entertainments. Both in her lifetime and posthumously, she was labelled “ugly.” This word has medieval Norse roots meaning “to be feared or dreaded.” “Ugly” associations leave behind a trail of bedfellows: monstrous, grotesque, deformed, freak, degenerate, handicapped. The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi values imperfection and impermanence, qualities that might be deemed “ugly” in another culture. “Ugly” is usually meant to slander, but in recent decades, aesthetic categories have been treated with growing suspicion. In different times and places, any one of us might have been considered ugly: from the red-haired to the blue-eyed, left-handed to hook-nosed.
Decoding Amazon's Fashion Ambitions | Fashion-Tech | BoF NEW YORK, United States — In 2012, Amazon debuted its first fashion advertisement. It was reminiscent of an American Vogue spread and featured a dolled up Chanel Iman in a taut, alert pose. Printed across her shins was the phrase “Smart is Beautiful,” a tagline still employed by the glossiest division of the e-commerce and cloud computing giant, which generated combined revenues of $107 billion in 2015. Over the past five years, Amazon has made a series of moves aimed at the fashion market that go far beyond print advertising. The announcement of Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo | Source: Amazon Over the same period, Amazon executives have spent countless hours meeting with designers and brands across the pricing spectrum, trying to convince them to sell their products through the site. Even so, getting consumers to buy luxury products on Amazon.com is just one small piece of the company’s wider fashion strategy. Taking the Long View At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years.
Brand Ellen: Can Happiness Sell Clothes? | People | BoF LOS ANGELES, United States — For the uninitiated, attending The Ellen Degeneres Show is like entering an alternate reality. In stark contrast to the divisive American election campaign, pitting poor against rich, black against white, straight against gay and left against right, Ellen’s set is one where everyone can sit comfortably together, singing and smiling — and dancing. Welcome to the world of Ellen Degeneres, a uniting force for good and one of the most followed and connected celebrities on the planet. Today, The Ellen Degeneres Show is seen in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Macau, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Sweden. In the US alone, Ellen reaches 5 million adults and a staggering 23 percent of the total television audience. At press time, the Ellen show had more than 130 million followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube combined. It’s some start-up.
Brexit: what does it mean for online retailers? | Guardian Small Business Network Whether it’s selling to a customer in France or importing supplies from Italy, Europe plays an instrumental role for many of the UK’s online retailers. The EU is Britain’s largest trading partner, while western European markets account for more than 50% of the export market for online businesses, according to Volo, the community of multichannel sellers. Now online retailers – like many businesses, politicians and the rest of society – are grappling to understand what the decision to leave the EU might mean for their future. While nothing is clear-cut as yet, etailers say the effect is already being felt, not least because of the depreciation of the pound. On the other side of the currency fluctuation, wine etailer Baacco says the weakening of the pound has made some of its expensive and sought-after wines more attractive to international buyers. Batchelor adds that goods may attract local VAT and import duties depending on how any trade agreements are set up.
Is Stitch Fix the Goldilocks of Fashion? | Fashion-Tech | BoF SAN FRANCISCO, United States — When Melora Simon goes shopping for clothes at the mall, she has no trouble finding what she likes. “I use labels and brands to help signpost,” says the 37-year-old mother of two, who is currently employed by Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “I know I like the look of J. Crew, the aesthetic of Theory and Diane von Furstenberg. But after Simon had her second child, her trips to the mall became less frequent. For Simon, the concept held real appeal. The first box was a “total miss,” Simon says. We have so much control. More than a year later, “I still wear those things all of the time,” she says. Indeed, for many Stitch Fix users, the service is often as much about entertainment as it is about buying clothes. Getting things “just right” — à la Goldilocks — was one of Lake’s main motivations for starting the company. From the beginning, Lake knew data would have to play an outsize role. Consider a tough-to-fit category like denim. Related Articles:
FTC Cracks Down on Influencer Posts | News & Analysis | BoF Fashion blogger Cara Loren Van Brocklin with PCA Skin sunscreen | Source: Cara Loren Van Brocklin WASHINGTON DC, United States — Snapchat star DJ Khaled raves about Ciroc vodka. Fashion lifestyle blogger Cara Loren Van Brocklin posts a selfie with PCA Skin sunscreen. Internet personality iJustine posts Instagrams from an Intel event. Missing from their messages: any indication about whether they have been paid. This uptick in celebrities peddling brand messages on their personal accounts, light on explicit disclosure, has not gone unnoticed by the US government. “We’ve been interested in deceptive endorsements for decades and this is a new way in which they are appearing,” he said. This means more cases like the one against Warner Bros. Companies have been pouring marketing dollars into social media endorsements, paying everyone from a Hollywood celebrity to a mom who regularly Instagrams her baby snuggling with a puppy. The FTC disagrees.
Fashion’s big brands follow the money to join the wearable tech revolution | Technology We’ve all been there. You rush out of the house to catch the train to work, elbow your way into a seat and immediately reach for your smartphone. But it isn’t there. Cue sense of panic as you contemplate a day (an hour!) without being connected. But, in the future, as you look down in despair, you may suddenly realise that at the last minute you threw on your two-in-one ready-to-wear “smart” jacket with built-in phone and Twitter feed. It might sound like the stuff of sci-fi, but clothes that double up as smartphones aren’t as far away as you might think. From its studio in Shoreditch in east London, Rosella and her team have been fusing technology with clothing for a decade and have a reputation for coming up with some of the most innovative stuff. Britain – and London especially – has long been seen as a trendsetter in smart clothing. One big brand name that’s keen to talk about wearables is Ralph Lauren. But why now?
Arcadia Group to introduce 'Buy Now, Pay Later' scheme London - Arcadia Group aims to satisfy all UK consumers who can't wait until next pay day for their latest shopping haul with the introduction of its new payment plan, 'Buy Now, Pay Later.' The UK fashion conglomerate has partnered up with payment provider Klarna, which sees Arcadia's brands become the first to use Klarna's new e-commerce retail financing option in the UK, which offers shoppers the option to purchase something immediately online and pay for them over time. The new partnership will offer customers from Arcadia's brands, including Topshop, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, the choice to pay their purchase up to 90 days later, interest free. "Being able to 'Buy Now, Pay Later' at the click of a button empowers our customers to shop however and whenever they want," commented Richard Burchill, Head of Treasury and Card Services at Arcadia Group in a statement.
Culture - Designers think big at Paris Fashion Week "Technology is going to turn the entire fashion industry inside out" Fashion and technology: the digital revolution presents the "biggest challenge for fashion brands" according to digital fashion pioneer Francis Bitonti who asks: "How will an industry where value is communicated by exclusivity and craft cope with this new space?" (+ interview) The fashion industry has been slow to adapt to new technologies, says Bitonti, who warned: "Fashion brands are going to have to adapt to this, which is going to mean a shift in core values for many brands." The New York-based designer initially trained as an architect but has recently focussed on applying advanced manufacturing techniques to fashion, jewellery and accessories, including a 3D-printed dress for Dita von Teese and a pair of 3D-printed shoes. "We want to redevelop everything from design methodology to material and form, to distribution and production," he said. Bitonti berated the mainstream fashion industry for not being quicker to embrace technology. We don't live in a time for concepts and drawings.
Selfridges ‘most active’ department store on Snapchat Danielle Wightman-Stone UK retailer Selfridges has been named the ‘most active’ department store Snapchat user, according to L2’s Digital IQ Index Department Stores 2016 report. The index reveals that Selfridges posts 95 times per week, five times the index average, taking 26 percent share of the snaps posted, ahead of American department store Bloomingdales with 17 percent. L2 states that Selfridges has opted for a variety of posts to target millennials using Snapchat, featuring content on fashion week, collaborations with partner brands, as well as using filters. Other retailers listed as being active on Snapchat included Next, Harrods, Dutch department store chain de Bijenkorf, Asos, Neiman Marcus, Gilt, Mr. However, L2 did note that only 37 percent of its index brands maintains a presence on Snapchat, adding that brands have been slow to embrace the social media platform due to its limited statistics as brands are unable to calculate how many times their videos were viewed.
Faux Fur is More Than a Faux Pas, it's Poison One of the arguments most beloved of the anti-fur lobby is that fake fur is actually better for the environment than the real thing. That argument, however, is as fake as the apparel it supports. And some new research has thrown the whole issue around man-made fibres more generally into the limelight. What are these microfibres? But this new study is only part of the story. What the activists have notably left out, however, are the gaping flaws in that research, not least the fact it was commissioned by three European anti-fur groups. On the one hand, we can prove this figure is vastly over-inflated. It also conveniently ignored that mink manure is used as fertiliser and biofuel, and, most importantly, that real fur lasts a long, long time. This last point is perhaps the crux of the matter. And, lest we forget, fake fur, comprising polyacrylates, requires the extraction and fractionating of petroleum as well as the subsequent conversion into fibres and mass manufacturing into products.
Fashion’s Made-For-Instagram Moments | Opinion, Right Brain, Left Brain | BoF PARIS, France — In recent seasons, it’s become increasingly common for fashion shows to end with a tableau of models, perfectly positioned to be snapped and shared on social media. But at the most recent round of Paris menswear and couture shows, the staging of these instantly sharable moments rose to a whole new level of sophistication. On Thursday, it was Rick Owens’ over-the-top musical extravaganza featuring Estonian punk band Winny Puhh, followed by the huge gold backdrop at the Dries van Noten show, an ideal canvas for the Belgian designer’s stunning collection of dark floral prints. Then, the next day, arriving at Berluti’s magical menswear presentation in the gardens of a private hôtel particulier in the Place des Vosges, attendees were guided through a darkened hallway fitted with a pair of stationery multi-rider bicycles, manned by models wearing the brand’s iconic shoes, exposed through a perfectly-lit window that ran the length of the hallway.