Candid thoughts from top fashion, retail and technology leaders reveal pain points, lessons learned and winning strategies for connecting with consumers today.
1. Stitch Fix on data science and men’s wear: Founder and CEO Katrina Lake says she had an “epiphany” that much of the innovation in retail has been focused on how to get things to customers cheaply and quickly. “But when you have a Friday night date, you’re not thinking about going on Amazon to find the cheapest dress,” she notes. There’s a lack of innovation in what people really want from the apparel industry, and while Stitch Fix is an e-commerce company, its inspiration results from “what brick and mortar used to be,” Lake explains. The company uses data science to drive business decisions, and 100 percent of its sales are based on recommendations passed on from stylists to customers. For example, a stylist may know that a customer is going on vacation to Mexico and will love a fun new skin-baring romper, even though the algorithm says that particular item should only have a 25 percent chance of resonating with that customer.
What Stitch Fix predicts versus what actually happens in terms of customer sales is very closely correlated, Lake says — the tightest correlation chief algorithms officer Eric Colson, the former data science vice president at Netflix, has ever seen. Overall, the company employs 80 data scientists, 50 of whom hold Ph.Ds. “We have an implicit contract with the customer that giving up their data will make their experience better,” says Lake. “We have to be careful to ask the right questions, because there are questions that would be helpful for marketing on our part but don’t help the customer experience.” Stitch Fix, which recently rolled out services for men, hypothesized that men and women are more alike in their shopping habits and preferences than was previously thought.”
This article was originally published in Apparel Magazine on October 6th, 2016. Read the full article here.