Fashion authority can’t be taught and it can’t be bought. Natalie Theo, Dressipi’s Style Director explores the importance of fashion intuition, and how combining it with data creates a powerful personalization solution.
Fashion + Data = A Match Made in Personalization Heaven
In a recent interview about her fashion-led vision for Farfetch, Yasmin Sewell Vice President Of Style and Creative told Glossy’s Hilary Milnes, “Fashion authority doesn’t come from analyzing data.”
The article really resonated with me because it perfectly summed up the importance of that intangible concept of ‘fashion intuition’. “Finally, someone has explained it!” I thought. As a fashion authority myself, it also got me thinking about the emotion of fashion and how integral it is to any technology built around shopping and fashion recommendation platforms.
Fashion authority is that unexplainable human touch. It’s the one that can just sense without logic when a brand will be the next must-have. It’s understanding a new way to wear something noted months and months in advance thanks to catwalk collections, influencers and brands. It’s also the reason why when building a fashion-specific personalization solution, the fashion and technology teams are intertwined. You simply cannot have one without the other.
The predictive instinct of fashion authority can’t be taught and it certainly can’t be bought. However, the now ever-present data and technology expertise is the tool that cleverly translates this fashion authority into something tangible. There is no doubt that when you match the two it’s a potent results-driven combination.
For example, take the curated edit of themed weekly Style Adviser emails we create for our retail partners. Our algorithms add that layer of personalization to these curated stories so that each person sees a different version that is suited to them. The same applies to our personalized Home Page Edits. As a customer, you in effect have your own personalized-to-you curated online shop front.
Our fashion and tech team have worked hand-in-hand right from the start, which is one of the key differentiators that has allowed Dressipi to truly innovate better and faster than our competitors. Just like fashion, our technology is constantly evolving. Continually creating ways to channel that fashion authority alongside everything we understand about our customers (from our 4 million profiles) enables us to deliver personalized fashion recommendations, discovery and inspiration at scale.
At a time when e-commerce sites like Farfetch and Yoox Net-A-Porter are ramping up the content publishing arm of their businesses (YAP’s content platform went from weekly to daily and then there’s Farfetch’s content and commerce partnership with Condé Nast) I can’t help but imagine what a game changer layering this level of fashion personalization onto that fashion authority would be…
If you are at the beginning of your Personalization journey and are interested in learning ‘Five Things Every Retailer Should Know About Personalization’, download our recent whitepaper by Dressipi’s co-founder Donna North.