How Fast-Fashion Retailers Use Marketing Data to Speed Up the Production Process

Search and social data has a new purpose

Fashion can be a fast-paced, fickle industry. What’s trending one season is out the next. And as production times decrease and the avenues fashion retailers have to identify emerging trends increase, some retailers can react to market movement in just a matter of weeks. eMarketer's Lauren Fisher spoke with Andreas Reiffen, founder and CEO of retail performance advertising company Crealytics, about how fast-fashion retailers are using data from channels like search and social to be more efficient beyond the marketing department. Reiffen was interviewed as part of eMarketer’s August report, "Using Marketing Data for Merchandising: Optimizing Inventory Levels and Launching New Products."

eMarketer:

What's your process for helping your fashion clients use search data to inform their product and merchandising decisions?

Andreas Reiffen:

We aggregate search data across all clients and use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, where you can insert keywords and get a sense of how much traffic volume you might get. We use this information to understand intent-based information and identify what people are looking at.

That information is then relayed to a buying or product system to get a sense of how much a brand will need to either purchase or produce based on the user behavior you see.

eMarketer:

There's a lot of pressure for fashion retailers to shorten the time from conceptualization to production. How much time does your process take?

Interview conducted on June 28, 2018

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