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give customers is also lacking in depth. This isn’t so much of an issue with luxury goods, as turnover tends to be lower, but it is with stores like Zara and H&M. If an H&M customer is looking for a specific dress that is out of stock or discontinued, for example, a salesperson might not know enough to suggest a comparable product. This is where technologies like RFID and barcode come into play. HIGH-TECH, NO-TECH For a long time the fashion industry wasn’t high-tech. It wasn’t even low-tech. It was no-tech. But the players in the industry that have gotten into technology are making hay with it. When the Spice Girls were at the height of their popularity in the early 2000s, Gerri Halliwell appeared on stage wearing iconic platform boots with a Union Jack
design. One UK-wide chain selling those same boots sold out very quickly. But staff dealing with customer demand were able to consult their store point of sale (POS) system, which suggested a substitute: a platform boot with an American flag design. Those boots sold briskly, as well. In another case, British retail giant Tesco came out with a copy of the dress that future royal Kate Middleton wore at her engagement in 2010. At £25, the dress sold out within one hour of hitting the shelves. The retailer could have done a brisk business in similar dresses, had Tesco provided staff with handheld devices and configured them to suggest a substitute, but alas—they didn’t have such a system in place. Few retailers do. Yet if you visit their websites, you will see major fashion retailers suggesting that ‘you might also be interested in this’ and ‘people
that bought this also liked that’ and so on. The intelligence exists; it’s just not passed onto handsets and POS systems. Consider this scenario. Footwear retailers don’t put every size of shoe out on display. If a salesperson disappears to a poorly organized stockroom in search of the shoe you want to try on, she might be gone a long time. If you stick around long enough to find out that she doesn’t have the shoe in your size, how likely are you to keep shopping and chance another long wait ending in disappointment? The ideal scenario would have a salesperson reading an RFID tag with a handheld device. They would discover that there is one pair left of the shoes you want in your size and colour. The shoes are not in the stockroom, however; they have just been tried on by
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