Last Updated on April 27, 2017 by Preetish

The fashion industry has been dynamic since the very beginning. Now, with the advent of digital age and the connectivity offered by internet, any new fashion trend that starts in a tiny corner of the world gets noticed and picked up by fashionistas around the globe. To gather more insights from the world of fashion, we decided to take a dive into the data that we aggregated from some of the most popular fashion retailers. Here are some of the interesting findings.

The data

We analyzed data from several popular fashion retailers like GAP, Macy’s, Old Navy and H&M which made up to about 450,000+ records. The data points used were:

Categories

Colors

Prices

Product names

Brands

Sizes

Fabric care type

Women dominate the world of fashion

Women are clearly the leading consumers of fashion products. We found the number of products available in women’s category to be about 5 five times higher than that of other categories. Popular colors available in women’s catalog are black, white, grey, pink and blue. Contemporary clothing seems out of tune at the moment with the lowest number of products listed.

Black is the most popular color

We found some interesting insights from visualizing the color and category of products together. Black came out to be the common and most popular color across different categories, except ‘Toddler’ and ‘Baby’ which had no products in black. It’s also interesting that these two categories have the highest color diversity; childhood indeed is colorful! Contemporary styles are the least colorful of the group. The rarest color is Navy blue as it appears only in the ‘Shoes’ category.

Brands vs Categories

Most brands seem to be focusing on a maximum of three categories. Old Navy dominates in terms of the number of products available. Again, most of the leading brands have a wide collection for women.

Popular materials used

Most of the clothing products sold are machine washable. Polyester and Cotton are the most common materials in fashion products while Wool is the least used one. Products that need to be dry cleaned fall in the bottom three in terms of number.

Pricing

We found some links between the number of products available on a retailer’s website and the average prices. While GAP and Old navy have the highest number of products in their catalogs, the prices fall between $8 – $40. However, with a very limited number of products listed, New York, Vince and Kate only have products with prices ranging from $80 – $400.

The most common price for a fashion product is $29.95. We found more than 4000 products available at this price.

Popular sizes

Most fashion products come in the Medium size category. While Large and Small are right behind, sharing the exact same numbers, the number of products available in Extra small and Extra large category are significantly lower than the others. People who buy size Medium will have a wide variety of products to choose from.

Conclusion

To summarize, women clearly have more fashion products to choose from and black is the most popular color across all the categories. The color diversity in clothing products seemed to get narrower with the target consumers’ age; products for toddlers and babies come in a great range of colors. The most common price for a fashion product was found to be $29.95 which is affordable by common standards. Polyester and cotton are the common materials used in the fashion products and people who buy size Medium have a significantly higher number of products to choose from.

The fashion data that we used for this visualization had much more juice in it and these insights are just the tip of an iceberg. Fashion retailers, e-commerce portals and data enthusiasts have a lot more to uncover using data extracted from fashion portals as it could improve their bottom lines, provide competitive intelligence and helps them predict future fashion trends among countless other use cases.