Fashion

The Fashion Panel was all about the use of crowdsourcing for fashion brands. Vanessa Friedman, Fashion Editor for the Financial Times, moderated the talk with Natalie Massenet from the online luxury fashion retailer Net-A-Porter, who shortly before won the Aenne Burda Award, the Creative Adviser of H&M, Margareta van den Bosch and Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU and founder of L2, a think tank for digital innovation.

The main discussion focussed on whether the customers still want strong curators or prefer bringing in their own ideas and designs. Van den Bosch of H&M, which are producing a bloggers collection at the moment, said, that it had to be a mixture of both: Having your own ideas and surprise the customers as well as listening to them and following their taste.

Massenet especially approves of the opportunities of customization, mentioning the choice of a 1000 variations for a trench coat or the possibility to reorder things out of old collections as well as a better predictability of sales.

Galloway on the other hand doesn’t see crowd sourcing as a huge field for luxury brands to soon – many of them yet have to learn to communicate with their customers. He rather sees the importance of crowdsourced marketing. As the most successful tool to boost sales he brought up user reviews on the website. As long as the negative reviews only make up between 5 and 15 percent, the sales go up, because the negative reviews give credence to the positive ones.
Galloway also reminded: “The biggest success comes from those who trust themselves and ignore customer preferences for their own vision - for example Steve Jobs.”

Massenet talked about her plans for Net-A-Porter Live, a platform on which her customers will be able to see who’s online and what they put in their baskets in real time. “We want to start a conversation between them”, she explained the goal of the platform.

It seems that the big brands are still careful with crowdsourcing and not quite sure to what extent they will use it. Startups like Garmz weren’t mentioned in the discussion at all.