The fashion retail industry as we know it, including the swimwear and intimate apparel sub-sectors, are living on borrowed time. The global pandemic has served to accelerate a wave of technological transformation that was already washing over the industry, says Eleanor Thomas, Head of Research at Wholee Prime.
Rarely has the fragility of Britain’s supply chains been more self-evident than during the current petrol crisis. But the fragility we are observing also extends to every aspect of the retail industry, including fashion. Last year, the UK apparel retail sector accounted for £52 billion worth of sales and employed some 555,000 people. Despite the industry’s size and scale, however, the challenges confronting large swathes of it, including the swimwear and lingerie subsectors, are vast. Even before the global pandemic the shifts in the industry’s tectonic plates were sizable. Coronavirus has only accelerated this trend.
Resilience in the face of changing consumer demand
Driving the transformation is the fashion industry’s need to strengthen its resilience to cope with shifting patterns in consumer needs and behaviour. Technology, particularly as an enabler of automation, has been a primary driver in enhancing resilience and accelerating market value. Evidence of this is abundant, just look at the surge of e-commerce and the decline of the high street.
In terms of fashion retail, while coronavirus has wrought a devastating blow to many of its competitors, Boohoo has showcased the nimble effectiveness of a technology-based autonomous operation by capitalising on the situation and acquiring brands. The company has fewer than 3,000 employees and yet is valued at over £3 billion – in contrast, Marks & Spencer has 80,000 employees and is valued at under £2 billion.
Next generation online retailing
Innovation is also being seen in the function performed by online retail platforms. Launched amidst the height of the pandemic, Singapore-based shopping app Wholee Prime has served to transform the traditional online retail model pioneered by the likes of eBay and Amazon. Their platform works by connecting its members directly with over 100,000 qualified factories and manufacturers from across the globe, offering them access to millions of modern consumer fashion and lifestyle products across a range of categories, including swimwear and intimate apparel.
The app gives users access to a global shopping platform offering good quality products at lower prices, where users only pay for the production cost on millions of products across a range of categories, including swimwear, intimate apparel and other fashion and lifestyle items. The price paid is the price set by the manufacturer and saves consumers from having to pay for the distribution and marketing costs they usually face.
Autonomous distribution
Advancements in drone and vehicle technology are allowing fashion retailers to bolster resilience and reduce their dependency on labour by automating the distribution of goods from the warehouse to the consumer. The low cost of drone delivery also provides manufacturers with the ability to begin circumventing the warehouse entirely and deliver goods direct from the factory to the door, cutting out a key element of the traditional supply chain and bolstering resilience by reducing manual dependency.
Autonomous checkouts
Driven by a need both to improve consumer experience, while also reducing human dependence, autonomous checkouts offer consumers the opportunity to enter a fashion retailer, choose their products and leave.
California-based start-up AiFi has introduced a scalable autonomous solution with major retailers such as French supermarket chain Carrefour, Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, and Valora in Switzerland. On the security front, UK disruptor ThirdEye is developing context-aware alert systems to detect relevant events in CCTV streams for retailers. Both start-ups rely on a combination of AI-based machine vision, cameras, edge computing, and sensor fusion technology.
5G is key
A central enabler to key areas of technological innovation in the fashion retail sector is 5G telecommunications. Currently being rolled out across the UK, the technology offers consumers multi-gigabyte connection speeds eliminating lag-time, delivering greater reliability and enabling consumers to connect to retailers in real-time. 5G is central to revolutionising user experience in retail – in London alone, telecoms provider Vodafone estimates 5G will deliver economic benefits to the UK economy in excess of £30 billion by 2030.
The technology also offers fashion retailers the opportunity to benefit from richer consumer data in real-time, in turn driving improved consumer marketing campaigns.
Virtual reality retail
With the speed offered by 5G, shopping in virtual reality can become ubiquitous, vastly improving customer involvement, from virtual tours of shops to finding products from the comfort of their own home. 5G will profoundly change the way consumers buy things, allowing them to experience a product before they purchase it. With augmented reality tipped to reach a value of £150 billion in 2020, the role of 5G in the modern retail experience offers a well of untapped potential for those companies willing to embrace it.
COVID-19 and its implications for the fashion retail industry
COVID-19 has illustrated the challenges the traditional retail industry faces. But far from being insurmountable, the challenges confronting the industry can be overcome through the embrace of technological innovation, improving resilience and driving growth.
Ultimately, the by-product of the successive lockdowns we’ve experienced will be to have accelerated the industry’s pace of change. A slow adoption of technological change is unacceptable. Consumer expectations toward their shopping experiences will continue to grow and will last well beyond lockdown. Those fashion retailers failing to embrace the pace of rapid technological change look set to become a footnote in retail history.
