Decoding Fashion Decoded 2013

So I, and a number of my colleagues at SoHo Digitech attended the Fashion Decoded 2013 event, which began a couple weeks ago with the launch of a Fashion Hackathon, and built to the climactic announcement of the team who came up with and developed the most industry beneficial concept.

The winner was a team entitled “Swatchit” who developed a B2B app targeting the artisans of India in an effort to provide them with a more streamlined connection to fashion designers and manufacturers.  The app facilitates this connection by providing artisans with the ability to build and maintain an inventory and provide designers and manufacturers with imagery of that inventory.  At that point, contact can be made, orders placed and fulfilled, etc.  All in all, a clever concept targeting a known issue and delivering genuine value.  It is far from complete, but hey, these people only had a week to engineer, design, develop and then tweak before the panel of judges (including fashion tech luminaries Uri Minkoff and Alexis Maybank) decided their fate. 

Of the event, I was certainly impressed with the ability of this disparate team of individuals, many of whom had never met prior to the hackathon, to produce such a quality result in so little time.  Additionally, I thought that the event was extremely well run, and experienced very few kinks for what was essentially a ‘first time endeavor.’

The solution presentations by the finalists, judging and selection of the winner should have been the dominant highlight of the event, however this was clearly overshadowed by the conversational keynote address of Dennis Crowley, founder of FourSquare. His keynote address had the unintentional consequence of revealing what the rest of the conference (with the possible exception of Swatchit) had entirely missed; namely that the technologies being developed must provide a meaningful and experiential improvement to the consumer.

The millennial consumer values their digital persona and information to a very high degree, and nothing presented at this event took that valuation into account.  The customer expects true value in exchange for access to their digital temple, not some 20% off coupon or a nebulous and tangential ‘benefit’ of more targeted advertising.  These are benefits to the retailer, not the consumer, and this serves to highlight what we at SoHo Digitech believe is the single greatest issue facing fashion retail today…

Fashion retailers are looking to technology to solve their problems, but they are not taking the time to properly analyze, understand and define what those problems are.  Technology is without question the future of this industry, but just as an automobile cannot provide the solution for transatlantic travel, neither can a flashy new app provide greater insight into an improperly defined and misunderstood market.  Mr. Crowley’s discussion was all about the consumer, what they want and what he hopes to achieve for them, and that’s the type of discussion that the industry as a whole must engage in.

This conversation is one which the industry has avoided for far too long, and must now embrace.  It is a conversation about change, and not of the excitingly fluid design side of the industry, but rather of the very underpinnings of fashion operations.  This conversation represents a daunting task and will undoubtedly result in changes to every facet of the industry, but to quote a recent conversation with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy;

“Change can be scary or it can be inspiring.”

So I say to the industry; 

Let’s be inspired together.