Of Brands and Distributors

We are witnessing a shift at this time in the fashion industry, a rapprochement to the tech industry, opening up opportunities in distribution and marketing models that were not possible before the internet. From the fashion industry side, we've barely tapped into the potential of this alignment. The challenge is finding a way to introduce the concept of endless possibilities to the fashion community in terms of technological tools and innovations, and the endless possibilities of branding through design (back and front end) to the tech community getting their toes wet with fashion companies. 

Fashion companies are accustomed to the idea of "anything is possible" in terms of realizing a creative vision, but when it comes to compromise concerning industry pain points, there is a consensus that generally accepts things to remain the same. Why can't we imagine our businesses with the view that anything is possible– design our businesses with the same precision and care with which we design our garments? 

Emerging product based technology doesn't need fashion designers for the time being because the most important and relevant innovations are in the health and fitness realms where tech-y looking things are ok. The innovation in online platforms is mostly coming from the tech and business side and acting as distribution models or branding 'basics' by adopting an existing aesthetic identity and ameliorating the experience through technology/online. There is an available space here for brands with unique and distinctive creative identities to step in, answer to a lifestyle and also define the direction of that lifestyle by carrying it into the future. That being said, there has to be a point of entry, a place for the consumer to connect with the product from where they stand, but for the brand to take the consumer away from the predicted trajectory–the rote of the fashion cycle, for example–and into a better and more highly designed, curated, and cared for experience.

What is the difference between a brand and a distributor? 

A brand has to have a creative ethos & a specific customer they create products for a lifestyle. It's about the aesthetic and the narrative.

A distributor speaks to a specific lifestyle through its curated selection of products from a variety of wholesalers. It's about range and customer experience.

Naturally, a bridge of similarities exists between the two and the obstacle is the status quo of how products reach the end consumer. Technology offers the chance to create a model  the benefits of both: reinforcing the brand identity through the methods of lifestyle curation pioneered by distributors.

What can the brand do beyond the creative ethos to add value?

A distributor focuses on experience, and hierarchy amongst distributors is determined by the quality of service and the level of personalization. Distributors take on characteristics of a brand when they capitalize on consistency. The narrative power of the distributor is in the brands they use to help tell their story. Again, rather than existing as two separate entities, the benefits of each to the other can be realized in one hybrid business model.

If the brand could provide a service that became a powerful acquisition tool, the product can tell a narrative that strengthens the ethos of the distribution model. It's something like a perfect storm of design, experience, online, offline, service, and communication. Empowering the business to prioritize all of these things through the use of technology. In places where digital can be more effective than brick and mortar, for example, the online experience will differentiate itself from the offline experience and already create two different demographic appeals. 

That bridge between brand and distributor is as real as the bridge between fashion and technology, but we're still swinging across the divide one by one, and even then it's only a brave few. In many cases I believe the fashion brands of the future don't exist yet and what we know of the industry today will get stuck in it's own vicious cycle. We adventure and explore more easily with lighter loads, so if brands start experimenting while small and agile rather than follow the predetermined business model of fashion brands which seems more certain at the time, we'll see some exciting changes in the way consumers engage directly with brands to get their hands on beautiful things while sharing a beautiful experience.

Fashion=SustainableFashion=Fashion Tech=Fashion

“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”

Fashion is a polarized industry. Subsectors that alienate parts of the community through stigmatizing language or seemingly foreign concepts have stagnated change. Sustainable advocates are out at one end, and high-tech engineers at the other end. In the middle are the companies that were established without leaning towards one or the other of these poles, but should consider both as they move forward. Although there is a disparity between the discussion of Fashion and Tech and the discussion of Sustainable Fashion, two separate communities, two separate vocabularies, two separate futures, from where I stand, the two are actually very much in line.

Both fashion tech and responsible fashion are complete with early adopters, skeptics, and campaigns for change. In both cases, the supply is out of sync with the demand. Eco fashion carries a stigma that alienates a large portion of the audience, and fashion houses hesitate to implement what can be high investment change in that direction. High-tech fashion in the product category hasn’t proved useful to the general public, and the fashion industry has adopted tech into their brand experience largely as novelty rather than internalizing it.

The concepts being discussed across all factions of the industry are in sync, it is the distinctive vocabularies that maintain the divide between them. Once we are able to change the narrative from subjective beliefs to measurable behavior, it will become clear that we all want the same thing: a thriving industry that can access new channels for growth, and then sustain itself. Responsible choices and technology can help on both counts.

Some brands have chosen to experiment with one or the other, but might find they are doing both:

It seems to me that there are many ways in which the two are mutually supportive and can build an audience based on combining their values. Fashion of the future is fashion with a conscience. Technology can answer so many questions in the ethics of the manufacturing and distribution, and both ethically conscious transformations and technological disruption offer opportunity for great change through which values can be rewritten and rebuilt upon.

Technology can help through commerce platforms – Bonobos, for example, can sell lower price and better quality and create amazing customer experience by eliminating the middleman between wholesaler and consumer– mechanical innovation – Recycling, for example, is becoming more advanced in the textile industry – and transparency – the Sustainable Apparel Coalition is proposing a QR bar code system that will detail the provenance of garments.

As a larger community, we are already in line with both of these two movements:

Without thinking about it, we all use technology everyday in ways that are unintimidating, and enhance our experiences. Fashion brands are being outpaced by companies coming from the tech world, which are disrupting the industry particularly through distribution channels and eventually in wearable tech. Consumers are growing accustomed to keeping up with these innovations, which are all conceived in answer to perceived consumer demand. Fashion design houses are finding they are limited in growth, unable to achieve the big brand scale of Ralph Lauren/Louis Vuitton. Fashion brands should be aware that technology offers new possibilities for business growth and scalability not limited to product but inclusive of service and experience.

Escaping the stigma of ethical fashion is also a question of changing the narrative. The mentality that the ethical fashion movement is trying to espouse is actually how just about half of the population shops without considering it responsible shopping: Men. If we use different narratives to bring understanding of what is means to shop responsibly, you might be surprised to realize you do this already. In this recent sustainable fashion discussion, we discussed that men already approach fashion as an investment, spending more and buying less. It might because they don’t like shopping and want to go as little as possible, but that in itself is a win against waste.

There are also many women who, like myself, begin adopting standard looks that require less inventory and more focus. Before I was aware of the dimensionality of sustainable fashion, I never considered myself an advocate. My choices were made based on my own desire to pare down, and settling into my own sense style. It’s a level of maturity that could be encouraged in shoppers that is completely outside of the lexicon of the sustainable fashion movement, but in which we find many of the same values.

As Coco Chanel states: “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” Fashion is “of the moment,” and just as cultural shifts happen over time, adaptation in the most complete sense, that is from both supplier and consumer, won’t happen right away, but these movements are fashion nonetheless. Eventually conscious consumption will be a no-brainer, and fashion companies will adapt to agility in technology or be replaced. Everyone will do it, it will be the norm, and we won’t need to classify it with imperfect words. 

The best way to demonstrate that a movement is happening is to show individuals that they have already adopted the movement without realizing it, without overthinking it, and without identifying with a group because of that choice. This is happening right now in fashion technology and sustainable fashion. No one needs to be singled out for their choices, because both poles are joining together to create one common definition of fashion. That is the fashion of the future.

The Story of Wearables Through the Headlines

It's hard to keep up with the wearables market, especially when every other article on the subject has a headline that contradicts the one before it. Here are some examples from recent news articles that sensationalize, dramatize, celebrate, and forebode the future of wearables.

Is your wearable tech helping you -- or watching you?

Smart devices, wearables pose security risks for consumers

Are they threatening to our security, or could they save our lives? Or both?

Wearable tech: It could save your life

JWT Singapore's New Line of Wearables Will Keep You Safe

Image From CNN

9 Provocative Ways for Brands to Flaunt Wearable Tech

Does the wearable sector have sex appeal?

Google Glass gets sex appeal with new Ray Ban deal

The Case Against Wearables, Or Why We Won't All Look Like The Borg This Year

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Exclusive: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware

Nike’s pull away from wearable tech might be good for field

Why an Apple/Nike Partnership Would Sell Wearables

If anything, this erratic approach to news keeps us active in finding those articles that actually add substance to the discussion, rather than playing on our anxieties and weakness to click on any provocative link.

Better yet, we can add to those substantive headlines by making informed, productive contributions of our own.

Challenge of Making Wearable Technologies Meet Real Needs in Our Lives

There's also a lot out there about wearables as data gathering tools for brands, and ways to have round the clock immediate access to users. But the day wearables are ubiquitous will be the day the user becomes the main benefactor, not the supplier. Brands will never maintain an audience through wearables until users see and experience real value in their wearables. This means answering real needs, which seems, so far, within all these spasmodic headlines, to be the one element that still eludes both engineers and designers.

'Designer' and 'Entrepreneur' Have Become Synonymous but are still Divergent

While working on a writing project, on Starting Somewhere, the words ‘artist’ or ‘designer,’ and the word ‘entrepreneur’ kept popping into my writing interchangeably. It occurred to me that I should be addressing one or the other, as it might get confusing and certain thoughts might be misconstrued as exclusive to one or the other. I realized the dilemma: that I’m trying to reach both with the same message because both are functioning in much the same way these days, we just don’t recognize it yet in our rhetoric or in our communities. I know this because I actually consider myself a hybrid of these categories, and but have had a hell of a time coming to terms with that and communicating to people where I fit in this disjointed system.

Although their activities are very similar, just packaged differently, it still challenging for an artist or a designer to be seen as an entrepreneur. The worlds are entirely separate, although the values and experiences are often the same. For artists, as for entrepreneurs the goal is to connect with an audience to sell your product or service. The term ‘design’ is being used more often to describe business practices and in job titles as industries evolve. The relevance, therefore, of the artist in the business world is understood now not to be a purely aesthetic thing. Design is systems and programs and infrastructure and interface. Startups use design skills everyday, employing their creativity and their inner artist.

Because artists are always expected to make choices for the sake of their art rather than to make money, they do not fit our conventional idea of an entrepreneur, whose primary pursuit is commerce. But this line has been blurred now that artists run businesses of their own and have access to many of the same outlets as businesses through which to reach their community, some of whom might be other businesses looking to outsource artwork or design work. Artists have had to learn to become entrepreneurs to promote themselves and build a following. And so a conversation with an entrepreneur and another with an artist might have many parallels. The startup and the artist pass through the same phases of discovery, experimentation and diffusion.

When starting out after graduating from Parsons in 2009, it took me years to understand that the language I was speaking was not the language of a fashion designer, but rather a hybrid of a fashion designer and an entrepreneur. It meant me meeting the right people at the right time, having conversations that I never thought I would have, and stepping off of a path that had been laid out in front of me since my first taste of fashion industry at the age of 18. In doing so, I had to step away from what I knew and into an abyss, hoping to find my voice and my people.

Once you decide to be a designer there is only one path to take, whether you have your own design business or you have a job with another brand: you must keep up with the cycle of all of the other fashion businesses. When you are in a startup you are basically required to do something totally different than what already exists. There is a huge dichotomy here, and for anyone who is interested in change and progress, fashion as it exists is quite suffocating.

 There is a real opportunity here to start considering the business of fashion at all of its levels and in all of its shapes and sizes, and accepting entrepreneur as synonymous with designer.

There are bridges forming between the fashion world and the startup world, but they are all being built from the land of technology towards the land of fashion. The land of fashion has little moments celebrating the innovations of technology, but mostly through content creation and in various novel ways. They know how to create buzz, but they aren’t changing the world. Even an example like Burberry, celebrated for their embracing of all things digital, are only dressing up a business that remains tied to the cycle.

The innovation in these big companies has to be in communication and marketing, because they are too big and working too well to alter from the bottom up. The problem is not that heritage companies all function in the same way, but that all fashion businesses starting out head down the same path by default, without questioning it. that's just the way it's done. We celebrate unique aesthetics and content creation, but new business models cannot take off because they are rejected by the gatekeepers. Our innovation comes in marketing strategies and commercial channels, but not in business models. And where would we go to find a mentor to guide us through innovation? Likely to tech land, where a new idea can be flushed out and developed rather than scoffed at. 

When you are a startup in tech land, you have access to long list of incubators, accelerator programs, and mentors. New ideas are encouraged and plentiful, and are up for grabs to the one who does it best. As a designer our options are limited to competitions, show room sponsorships, and a select few programs, like the CFDA incubator in New York, where the focus on the business is a bit more long term. But these tend to focus on businesses that already have some traction, whereas for a startup you find support from, well, the moment you start up.

This is not a question of fairness, or of all designers deserving a shot. It is an argument that I’ll eventually (in another article) bridge into how fashion can be more sustainable as an industry if we learn a little something from the startup model. And this is speaking to both designers and industry decision makers: we need to start building the bridge back towards tech land. Young designers should consider business models that break from the rules of the gatekeepers, and industry decision makers should encourage this dialogue for future change.

Why are the most exciting things about Fashion the ones happening in underground movements like those of ethics, sustainability and tech?

There is a real opportunity here to start considering the business of fashion at all of its levels and in all of its shapes and sizes, and accepting entrepreneur as synonymous with designer. Conversations on Omni channel retail and Omni channel marketing, interest from big tech companies to collaborate with fashion brands, and organizations like Decoded Fashion are all breaking down the barriers that have restricted movement within the fashion industry for so long.

What I’ve learned is simply that in order to find a place in the no-mans-land that I linger in, somewhere on the fringes of fashion and the fringes of tech, the conversation must continue. Every new discovery leads to a new opportunity, a new idea, and a new door. This is the thrill of innovation and newness that has always inspired entrepreneurs, and has begun to cause fashion to loose its edge. Why are the most exciting things about Fashion the ones happening in underground movements like those of ethics, sustainability and tech? The beauty of the garments becomes, at a certain point, obscured by their detachment from reality.

It’s not just in regards to fashion; the future of all industries is going to be a hybrid way of thinking. To think like an entrepreneur and designer means being capable of imagining new platforms for communication and ways of exchanging and engaging with information, products, and our environments. It means to face problems in the market with a viable solution and become responsible for creating a new way. Not all of us need to be both, but we need to build our businesses and our industries in a way that cultivates this mergence of ideals. We, the individuals to drive that movement already exist and are taking our own steps in that direction. But our real achievement will be showing that it’s possible for us to remove the stigma of classification and adjust perceptions now engrained by adjusting the rhetoric.

On Starting Somewhere : E-book excerpt

May 2014 will be the release date of my first E-book: On Starting Somewhere.

The book addresses the phase of entrepreneurship or a creative endeavor before success. This usually means in the midst of failure, or a few failures, that we build ourselves back from. 

This first excerpt is from the introduction, which recounts some of my personal experiences leading to the concept of this book.

Once, in one of my first seasons as a correspondent for a New York based fashion website, I was outside of the Ecole de Medecin near Odéon in Paris, waiting for the Martin Margiela Mens’s Fashion Show to begin. Actually, waiting to even get inside to take a place where I would then wait some more for the show to begin. I was surrounded by fashion heavies and fashion up and comers  and fashion wannabes . I don’t know where I fit in in all of that because in my mind I just didn’t belong there at all. As privileged as I felt to be in attendance, I felt terribly uncomfortable as part of the scene. I wished to be invisible. I wished so much to be invisible. Just to take my place and watch the beautiful show and write my article and store it away in my mind bank of experiences. But I was not invisible. (I am still not). So I stood there, out of place and awkward and unsmiling and tense and trying not to make eye contact with people or stare too long at people who were too obviously dressed with the hope of being stared at. 

From WeAreTheCoolKids (which makes my point for me)

When through the crowd I see the Fed Ex delivery-man. He walks purposefully through the mob of people in between his truck and the door he’s heading towards and I thought to myself: “Why can’t I just be a Fed Ex delivery person?” 

He has a sense of purpose, and at the same time can blend into any setting without self-awareness. His workday consists of a list of tasks just like the day before. An unadulterated comfort zone.

From IBT

I truly believe sometimes that this would make life so much simpler. I am so tormented (it sounds dramatic, but it does feel terribly dramatic a lot of the time). If I could just have a simple job that was the same every day, where nothing will be asked of me tomorrow that I don’t already know how to do today. My God, what a life that would be. 

Would I be bored? Would I wonder: “There must be something else?” Is ignorance bliss? And once tasted, does a life of building and problem solving become your curse? Futile questions. The Boss knows it, too. A Jersey boy looking for more: “There's something happening somewhere, baby I just know that there is.”

And it’s not as if, after gaining a certain amount of experience, the questions stop. With every new day comes a new set of unknowns. There is an evident propensity for tackling these daily impediments within the entrepreneurial class. Otherwise we would not get past day one. But this is also that pivotal moment of no return. We can always take the easy way. And so we ask ourselves: “What am I after?”

...

Copy and Paste Culture: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, companies are looking at new ways to capitalize on that flattery: Create or take part in desirable narratives, and make them shoppable. I like to believe that as individuals we make choices reflecting our own desires rather than those of others. But advertisers will be there every step along the way to tell us that our sense of self will be more complete if we buy whatever it is they are selling. And today advertising is so integrated into our sensory experiences that the line between creative content and paid content is practically indistinguishable. Media, which basically runs on advertising dollars, is one of the most vulnerable industries and it has been forced to evolve.

We opted out of commercial breaks only to get our regular programing saturated with product placement. We opted for free access to the news, only to find advertisements and sponsored links scattered like land mines across the page. We have traded transparency for convenience. 

In Hollywood, costume design has always been a great source of inspiration for designers and shoppers alike. And now with the rising legitimization of television alongside film, certain prime time characters are becoming popular sartorial references. With this rise of TV icons, the concept of Shazam-ing (yes, it's ubiquitous enough to be verbified) is being applied to fashion as well. But rather than wait for monthly magazines to tell us where to find the real-people-priced version of Gwenyth's latest red carpet dress, we want the information now. This trend began via shoppable runways, videos (Barneys and Nowness), and online editorials, and is now coming to a TV near you.

Conceptually, shoppable TV is a cool idea. But mostly it raises many concerns. Some of these are brought up in this Fashionista article, like preserving the creative license of the costume designer, a logistically reasonable way to provide the information, and the fact that people aren’t watching shows in real time. Transparency is a real issue in regards to which the format and messaging is key. While it seems like a great tool to know exactly where to go buy that great office wardrobe from the Good Wife, for example, the format of the medium leaves too much ambiguity between the creative prerogative and the sales pitch.

Beyond the ethical issues that would need to be addressed, this idea of prefabricated wardrobes from a celebrity or television character removes the allure of fashion and commoditizes it. It would be one thing if these movies and shows were introducing viewers to designers and products that are hard to find or unknown and ripe for discovery. But the job of costume designers is not to tell you where to shop, it is to develop characters through clothing. And the reality is that most of the sponsored content we see in media comes from big brands and distributors that are accessible to a vast audience because they are the most actionable, and they are backed with the most advertising dollars. 

It begs the question that so often comes to mind as technology tackles new frontiers: Just because we can do it, should we? 

Isn’t it better to take inspiration from what we see, rather than try to replicate exactly? In literature when we copy and paste it is called plagiarism, in art, forgery. In fashion, to copy and paste is not a crime but it does feed a biassed branch of consumerism. Fashion is one of the greatest means of self expression. To curate one’s identity by emulating someone else is to be deprived of that privilege. There will always be a distinction between leaders and followers. The danger here is not in being a follower, but in choosing your leader, and making sure its a person or a cause you truly believe in, not just the one that is convenient.