Big data leads the fashion world

The fashion industry, which has been plagued by unpredictable changes in the market, has finally found a good helper. EDITD and WGSN, a retail technology company, are launching their own large data Analysis Services, which they hope will help fashion brands and retailers predict, and even establish, popular trends.

At the beginning of the 2000, Julia Lia Faller, who also worked in fashion design in Australia, found an annoying problem: there was too little information on hand to help her understand and respond to the latest trends.

"We have the internal data on the previous quarter's product performance, and we can visit some inspirational fashion sites, but we don't know what opportunities we missed, and there's no specific data on how we can improve our product mix." "she recalls.

Not knowing who to turn to, Peleg decided to develop a solution of his own. She picked the right time. Was。 A series of methods and technologies, known as "Big Data", have just begun to sweep through the technology industry.

Soon after, Peleg's title became the co-founder of the EDITD company. Another co-founder of Technology, Jiff Watz, is currently the CEO of the company. Their goal is to help global apparel retailers, brands and suppliers deliver the right products at the right price at the correct time.

"Every time you see a product on sale, it's due to the wrong decision," says Peleg. It has caused a lot of wear and tear in the industry and I hope to solve this problem. ”

EDITD Company boasts the world's largest apparel database. With 120 servers and hundreds of megabytes of data, the company not only provides customers with all kinds of clothing data, but also provides real-time analysis and various other tools. Headquartered in London, EDITD has 27 employees and 6 million of billions of dollars in capital, and big companies such as the fast fashion brand gap and target department are its clients. Watts claims that EDITD is now profitable, but declined to disclose the company's specific revenue.

53 billion data points

One of the secrets of EDITD's success is that it aggregates popular fashion data and sales information from a variety of sources worldwide-from retail sites to social media to designer catwalk shows to popular blogs-and then tries to get the data in real time. The company's database contains at least 53 billion data points from the fashion industry, some of which can be traced back to four years ago. It also covers more than 1000 retailers worldwide, with more than 15 million high-definition images. Its "social monitoring" function monitors the social activities of influential fashion 80多万名 and experts worldwide.

To read the data at any time, editd the bulk of the data in memory rather than the hard drive, Watts explains: "This is very important." We need to read and query all the data in any way possible, and it must have a very strong response. ”

In addition, it must be simple enough to understand, so that the layman can also know the meaning of the data. "Users don't have to be a data-literate to understand what the data means," Watts says. ”

With the services provided by EDITD, garment industry practitioners working on new product planning, procurement, trade and strategic planning can set their own "social monitors" on virtually any device. EDITD's services cover men's, women's, children's wear, accessories and beauty and many other fields. Since the information on the output is customizable, a high-end clothing store is responsible for the data seen by the salesman in jeans, which is quite different from that of the women's knitting shirts at a cheap clothing chain.

EDITD company publishes daily and weekly retail reports that reflect new and discounted items in specific market categories. Its analytical tools are dedicated to helping people in the industry track competition and improve their product planning. EDITD also has a virtual sales planning Archive tool that can help you develop a promotional strategy for the next quarter.

One of the biggest benefits of using EDITD is that the industry does not have to go to "competitive shopping" (ie, to investigate competitors). For example, EDITD company has a customer who attaches great importance to data, the company's entire procurement and sales team will be dedicated to a week every six weeks to collect information on the competitor's website, such as how many tight jeans they have, how much money each price and so on.

"They are going to bring the data to the Excel form and then make a brochure and distribute it in the company," says Peleg. This is the ' Art of Sale ' for the next six weeks. ”

Watts says this approach is not only time-consuming, but "fraught with danger and many errors can occur." "In some cases, some items may be recalculated, and sometimes some different data collection methods may be mixed."

In the fashion industry such a vague boundary of the industry, the mere classification of products is a small challenge. For example trousers have trousers, seven pants, shorts and many other kinds. "The way we analyze the product categories is also very important," Watts said. We use computer vision and natural language processing to classify clothing, such as ' This is a printed dress ' or ' this is a woolen cardigan ' and so on. For our work, unifying the classification criteria and generating a clean, consistent database is an extremely important part. ”

Peleg said that EDITD users now only need to enter the "wool cardigan" a few words to query, in less than a second can obtain results. She added that the EDITD system could track the 5000多万个 SKU (NOTE: SKU is the ' smallest unit of inventory '). For the apparel industry, a certain color of a certain clothing size, that is, a SKU. ）

EDITD, one of the users of the UK online retailer, Asos said sales jumped 33% in the fourth quarter of 2013 after using EDITD services. The company pays particular attention to the improvement of product pricing and has given more than 200 employees access to the EDITD system.

"This technology, and the changes it has brought to the industry, allows customers to get what they really want, rather than being decided to give them something," Watts said. It allows customers to more dynamically control their fashion style, but also make the market more efficient, green. ”

1 million products, 11 million SKUs

EDITD is not the only fashion company with large data on water testing. WGSN, a British fashion-forecasting agency, also wants a piece of the market. WGSN just launched its first big data service Instock last year.

WGSN says its database collects 100多万个 products and 1100多万个 SKU data every day from more than 10,000 online brands and retailers around the world. Instock is essentially a retail analytics service that adheres to the same product classification approach, designed to complement the company's widely used fashion trend forecasting service.

"We classify a T-shirt, a skirt or a kimono, and combine this classification with its WGSN instock," said Helen Slaven, the company's global managing director for Instock operations. "In other words, it is a unified, End-to-end classification method." Slaven points out that the industry can make more effective decisions by unifying different nomenclature, given that different companies may have differences in naming the same product line.

More than 6,000 customers are currently using the WGSN trend service. The latest Instock service also has 50 global customers in 9 countries. In addition to women's wear, footwear and accessories, WGSN also plans to continue to supplement the children's wear and menswear data this season. In addition, the company plans to launch a service called analysis+, which provides users with custom data and additional analytics capabilities.

"It's a very exciting time for big data and retailing," says Slaven. By providing a wealth of more operational insights, big data is radically changing the way retailers view business processes. ”

Watts, of the EDITD company, agrees. "We help retailers at the right time to deliver the right products at the right price." This can be said to be earthshaking in the retail business. If you do it right, it will bring you a lot of wealth. "(Fortune Chinese Network)

Original link: http://www.fortunechina.com/business/c/2014-09/28/content_222730.htm