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The year in fashion tech

In 2020, fashion accelerated some new technologies, reignited existing ones and left others on the back burner.
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This year has seen a remarkable acceleration of fashion-tech. With stores closed during the pandemic, luxury fashion customers went online; as brands adapted within weeks, tech investments shifted from experimental to necessary. Budgets made a hard pivot towards selling online, creating digital assets and rethinking supply chains.

The clear winner was e-commerce. Black Friday in the US — typically the biggest in-store shopping day of the year — became the second-largest online shopping day on record. This marks a turning point, especially for luxury consumers who lean towards in-person shopping, because new holiday shopping behaviours often serve as an impetus for longer-term tech adoption. While some technologies enjoyed the spotlight, others failed to deliver or faced headwinds. Here’s a review of fashion-tech’s biggest successes and toughest challenges in 2020.

Winner: The metaverse and AR

Virtual shared spaces became the new normal, and digital items took on more significance. Video games became fashion’s new playground, with Balenciaga, Burberry and Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh among the fashion heavyweights to endorse the sector. This gave digital clothing and digital beauty more credibility, and usage of fashion games Drest and Aglet soared. Digital avatars emerged as a potential commercial opportunity, with Ralph Lauren betting that people would want to shop their Bitmoji.

Balenciaga introduced its Autumn 2021 collection as a device-agnostic video game that brought viewers through a digital store, a street and then nature, throughout which avatars wore the collection.

Balenciaga “Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow” Fall 21 video game

Fashion and beauty brands also took augmented reality more seriously; it expanded from an occasional marketing moment to an always-on tool used throughout a customer’s purchase journey. Gucci created an experience within Snapchat that let people digitally “try on” shoes, then click out to buy them, signifying an important milestone in digital try-on tech and the eventual ability to “wear” digital items in virtual worlds.

Winner: 3D digital design

3D digital design, which can create realistic-looking three-dimensional items, proved its merit from design, sampling and showrooming to social media, marketing and e-commerce imagery as the pandemic cut off industry fixtures like trade shows and photo shoots. While the end of 2019 saw Tommy Hilfiger pledging to convert to an entirely digital supply chain, 2020 saw others tapping into its playbook.

Brands found interesting use-cases: Pink Shirtmaker is using 3D to prototype shirts in one day; Sergio Rossi created digital archives; Balenciaga used a CGI version of Kendall Jenner in an ad campaign. “The confinement has been an accelerator for a revolution that was bound to happen, and it could have taken another few years,” said Sacha Djorkaeff, Pink Shirtmaker 3D lead.

Sergio Rossi created a virtual collection based on 3D sampling of its Godiva pump. Online shoppers select a colour, then the shoe is made after the order is placed, aiming to save 30 per cent of sampling production costs.

Sergio Rossi/PlatformE

Meanwhile, 3D digital design is paving the way towards the still-nascent adoption of on-demand manufacturing, which would have mitigated many of the inventory issues plaguing brands in the first and second quarters. For example, Ministry of Supply’s Gihan Amarasiriwardena and designer Misha Nonoo, who have both already implemented the technology, shared that this capability allowed their brands to quickly respond to the demand for masks and optimise usage of raw materials, while side-stepping the waste of unsold inventory.

Winner: Omnichannel and fulfilment tech

Buy online, pickup in store, click-and-collect and kerbside pickup aren’t new, but many consumers tried them for the first time this year. This behaviour is expected to last; 64 per cent of consumers are already using buy online, pickup in store or kerbside pickup more often this year, Shopify reports, and conversion rates increase when retailers offer bopis, according to Adobe Analytics. As Google director of apparel and branded materials Michael Burke said, consumers now expect these services.

Meanwhile, stores are being reimagined as micro-fulfilment centres, and flexible shipping technology became more relevant as supply and demand became unpredictable. Flexe, for example, which provides on-demand warehousing and fulfilment tech, raised $70 million and was named among the fastest-growing companies in North America.

Winner: E-commerce marketplaces

Despite an ongoing direct-to-consumer push among big brands like Nike and Kering, online marketplaces became more valuable as sellers of all sizes moved online. Shares of Etsy are up 250 per cent, while Shopify’s aggregator app, Shop, became the third most downloaded shopping app during Black Friday. Shopify, which also added an in-house fulfilment service, has seen shares rise 166 per cent.

Shopify’s Shop app provides package tracking for all e-commerce deliveries (regardless of the source) and personalised recommendations from Shopify merchants, which aggregates its network while letting brands maintain independent online identities.

Shopify

Even luxury lucked out. This year saw the launch of The Yes, an app founded by Stitch Fix’s former COO that uses data science to make personalised recommendations from 60,000 styles, while Farfetch received a combined $1.15 billion from Alibaba, Richemont and Artémis. Plus, Mytheresa, Thredup and Poshmark all filed to go public.

Winner: Video shopping

Video shopping, already popular in China, got a pandemic-driven jumpstart. Live streaming on Instagram finally found a use-case, TikTok matured to become the social platform to beat and entities ranging from QVC parent-company Qurate Retail Group to startups including Popshop Live, ShopShops, Curated, Clicktivated, Ntwrk, rewardStyle's Liketoknow.it, Bambuser, Powerfront and Hero fast-tracked tech that enables video shopping.

Luxury companies, looking to bring high-touch clienteling online, replaced in-person moments with videos: Moda Operandi reimagined intimate designer trunk shows, while Gucci added one-to-one “in-store” appointments via a video set in its Florence innovation hub. Videos also flipped the script with fashion shows; this year, fashion editors, buyers and global fashion fans alike all accessed the same content at the same time.

Loser: Big tech

Amazon’s sophisticated logistics led to big gains during 2020, and this year it also made inroads with luxury fashion with a CFDA/Vogue partnership and September’s launch of Luxury Stores. But overall, this year was a mixed bag for the e-commerce behemoth. A number of CFDA designers discontinued their relationships after appearing on the platform for the first time, and anti-counterfeiting measures required more investment than ever. Meanwhile, regulators in the States, the EU and elsewhere scrutinised its aggressive business practices.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies in front of the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law during a July hearing with the CEOs of Apple, Facebook and Google.

Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images

Google, Facebook and Apple joined Amazon at the virtual table opposite lawmakers and regulators who say that they’ve gotten too big; Facebook and Google were both hit with lawsuits. Usage of Facebook’s tools increased, but its advertising growth slowed as it faced competition from TikTok and fallout from the advertising boycott.

Loser: In-store tech

Technology that requires in-store shopping — aside from contactless payments — did not face a fair testing ground, so there were not many in-store technologies to make headlines. Additionally, facial recognition technology faced roadblocks due to its privacy and bias shortcomings, and Amazon’s “just walk out” tech saw slow uptake.

However, a few brands made early bets for when the pandemic recovery is in full swing: Nike opened a House of Innovation flagship in Paris, Levi’s opened a NextGen store in Palo Alto, CA, and Burberry introduced a social retail concept in Shenzhen.

Loser: Blockchain

Despite momentum in 2019 as a tool for verifying luxury authenticity, securing ownership of digital goods and validating ethical supply chains, blockchain took a backseat as brands focused on more urgent needs. Even the Facebook-led cryptocurrency project, Libra, lost numerous members. It’s been rebranded as Diem, and Farfetch and Shopify are still on board, so it might be a wait-and-see for blockchain.

Loser: Digital fashion shows and VR

With many fashion shows after March cancelled in light of Covid-19, virtual runways had an opportunity to shine. But these so-called virtual fashion shows largely failed to generate the type of viral buzz that physical shows inspire. While virtual reality presented a compelling medium, headsets and know-how were too elusive to immediately implement at scale. While there were numerous iterations that pushed the envelope on creativity and even interactivity, it’s still too soon to vote on, or veto, digital fashion shows — after all, physical shows have a 200-year head-start.

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