So, the big picture is obvious: The internet, and especially the social platforms and e-commerce sites are taking a huge part in every western citizen’s life regarding almost any subject available — From the moment he opens his eyes and until the moment he shuts them again.

Now the next question is — How does it reflect in terms of the world of fashion?

Fashion and Social Media

The big companies have already realized the potential, and many of their marketing budgets are aimed towards the social networks, including paid campaigns, work with influences, activities, social management and interaction as well as creating conversation about the brand itself. Another popular digital marketing method is fashion blogs and bloggers.

economist.com

Here are some numbers about the effect of social media on decisions regarding buying various clothes and accessories:

→ In 2017, 40% of YouTube users used the platform in order to learn more about a product before they’ve bought it.

→ 52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if their current brand doesn’t show an effort to contact them using personal interactions.

→ Within six months after an multichannel shopping experience, customers who logged 23% more repeat shopping trips to the retailer’s stores and were more likely to recommend the brand to family and friends more so than those who used only one channel.

The most popular social channel for fashion is Instagram. Here are some examples of fashion brands with active and popular Instagram page include:

Madwell (1.2m followers)

Nike (81.m followers)

Zara (29m followers)

Primark (6.4m followers)

Under Armour (6.2m followers)

Only those 5 brands sum up together to a crowd of over 123 million people who have expressed their interest in fashion and specific brands, and this power can’t be ignored. Those profiles also lead traffic to the brand’s site and allows the users to instantly buy whatever they like from the online catalog.

Those social networks also allow users to get a more personalized service than ever before. As studies show, in 2017, 54% of consumers stopped doing business with a company due to bad service, and the trend is using newsletters and replies to comments and messages in a more personalized matter, while fitting to each customer’s details, preferences, behavior and taste, including gathering data from users who use social media using tools such as Facebook’s Pixel and Google’s Tag Manager.

Many social network users know and even follow various influencers: People whose social media account is considered to be “The right place” for people from the same ideals to get updated from. The numbers and variations include all genders, races, professions and more, summing up to thousands, millions and even more followers who serve as a dedicated crowd.

In 2017, A whopping number of 86% of fashion retailers have conducted influence-based marketing campaigns, resulting in 37% of them planning to increase their influencer based marketing projects budgets in 2018.

As for the ROI of using such a tactic, Revolve reported that 70% of its revenue in 2017 came from influencers. Considering the fact that the brand’s revenue was 1 billion dollars, we can see that this channel can’t be ignored.

Influencers aren’t always celebrities. Even though research shows that 85% of people are influenced by celebrity endorsements (i.e. The fashion retailer Boohoo reported to double its profits after using celebrities to promote their products to girls in the ages of 16–24 on Instagram), research also shows the 81% of people will also be influenced by their friend’s posts, thus creating the micro-influencers genre, which promotes local accounts and users who are known in their community and origin, having a crowd of a few thousands/tens of thousands followers, but hold a great integrity among their followers.

Those numbers aren’t only relevant for the big brands. Small businesses have shown interest in social media, resulting in 46% of them launching paid campaigns and 92% of them plan to invest time and/or money on those channels in 2018.

The social networks are a strong player when it comes to marketing also in the terms of bad publicity as we can see in the next graph, showing a high percentage of actions that can directly harm a brand’s reputation and sales:

The summary is simple. If you have a business, your competitors already have a digital presence over you, and you have to take part in it as well if you want your business to succeed — Especially when it comes to the fashion industry, as we can see even further in terms of e-commerce data.

Fashion and E-Commerce

The world of fashion e-commerce is rapidly growing, and is expected to have an increase of almost 150% in the next 5 years — A growth pace that can’t be matched by the retail fashion industry.

Those numbers are backed by initializing a few key elements:

Better integration and access with smartphone users.(In 2021, 53.9% of all retail e-commerce is expected to be generated on mobile)

Marketing towards markets around the world and not only for western customers.

Offers that cater to middle class earners.

Investment in new technologies that improve the overall experience.

If you only think that e-commerce is not affecting the market portion, think again. in 2017, we can see that a big chunk of the American fashion market is occupied by online retailers:

Seeing this, there’s not much to explain: The potential of online retailers isn’t even close to end, and as we can already see — The internet shops are basically killing the shopping malls for a simple reason: Almost anyone today can buy a full wardrobe from the comfort of his house, whilst enjoying the advancement of the market, with various improvements in service, quality, delivery and basically any parameter while usually offering better prices by a huge margin: You can’t compete with someone who has low to non existent costs regarding storage, stores, workers and more, and many of those shops can also be micromanaged using third world countries workers and facilities.

As a matter of fact, a lot of online stores today don’t even produce or store the products themselves. Those stores are known as dropshippers, who serve as a third party mediators and only serve as the store front and anything related to marketing.

The picture is bright, but it also most represent all of the elements in it: The fashion e-commerce market has still a few issues it has to resolve in order to advance to the next level:

Return fees can go up to be as high as 50% of its cost.

Most online retailers can’t create and manufacture personalized products and styles on demand.

Having almost no brand loyalty due to the market being flooded with various brands.

Using non-environmental materials to reduce costs.

Almost all of the big brands have their own online shop, but many of them report loss of revenue or even bankruptcies in some cases over the past years, resulting in actual danger to the retail fashion business. Aligned with the problems of limited audience and other issues such as storage, loss of inventory, errors, boycotts and more resulting in many small and medium businesses that started or have fully transformed into online retailers:

The e-commerce revolution affects of course, the growing rates of retail employment as well.

In conclusion, the whole fashion industry is going online. It applies to marketing, sales and almost every aspect of your business. The 1# rule in the theory of evolution applies here perfectly — It’ll be the survival of the fittest.

Fashion Groups and Communities

As mentioned earlier, one of the main marketing methods in the digital arena is using and creating discussions, wit the fashion industry not falling behind.

We can see various fashion communities, groups and forums in different platforms, many of them feature high traffic statistics. Here’s some examples:

/r/ Female Fashion Advice (630k subs)

/r/ Clothes Make the Man (1.4m subs)

/r/ Streetwear (822k subs)

4chan /fa/

The Fashion Spot (70k members)

StyleForum (185k members)

LookBook (Unknown)

StyleHawk (Unknown)

StylesWhat (Unknown)

Ssense (Unknown)

Ask Andy About Clothes

Conclusion

The report may sound dark to some, but in the end, it represents trends what happen and will happen no matter what we’ll do — We’re in the middle of it for quite some time.

The fashion world was always a world that kept changing, improving and bring new options to the table.

The online revolution isn’t a threat, it’s a blessing.

Those who will embrace the change and go with it will be the ones who will truly benefit from it.

There’s nothing to be afraid of — It’s just that you need to be updated more than ever and feel free to really go with what you believe and feel — Today you can find those who will see and appreciate it.