Fashionable Big Data: The “it” Trend

I’m really into fashion, love following blogs, using Instagram and Tumblr to know the new trends and get inspired by new ideas.  After reading a case study about Burberry, for my marketing class, and discovering that this 157 year old brand has evolved and adapted to keep up with most of the new technology without loosing its essence (please refer to artofthetrench.com and see what I mean), I started to wonder about the connection between Big Data and Fashion and how the fashion industry could be related with the new “It” trend of technology?

As we already know, Big Data (BD) can help us gain insights to improve already existing products and services or to create new ones.  Lately this hasn’t been a mystery to fashion designers and trendy retail stores, that’s why these two are using information to understand what the customer wants and additionally get a financial benefit out of it by optimizing production and by minimizing the leftovers of garments. How? By hiring companies such as Bodymetrics, that collects data about body measurements and sizes and gives this statistics to the designer and retailer to better predict the demand of their products according to how many items of a certain size are sold.

Another way in which BD is improving the fashion business is trough social media, in this case the information gathered from Facebook, Pinterest, Polyvore, Instagram, and other social websites can help to figure out consumer sentiments towards a certain brand or product, which is essential feedback for retailers and designers and avoids them from relying exclusively on post-experience or intuition. 

Now that we have a clearer perspective about how the fashion industry and Big Data are linked, we can confirm that this is a match made in heaven. And can ones more ratify that BD is improving everything around it, so tell me what’s not to LOVE about BIG DATA?