Fashion has witnessed a tremendous shift in consumer behavior. They have moved on from physical showrooms to web and mobile rooms, high-fashion to high convenience. Cost, convenience, and comfort are key for sustaining and driving fashion's growth. These changes in the purchasing habits among buyers have caught brands off-guard and compelled them to think of more advanced digital solutions that enhance shopping experiences. The web2print software works on similar grounds and allows fashion and luxury brands to let their buyers print their apparel, footwear, headgear, and mugs, among many other fashion items. Additionally, it has built-in digital features that enable customers to preview the customized product as they design it. It permits them to make final changes in the designed product as they wish from scratch before placing the final order.
Web to Print Design Software Allows Brands to Notch Up their Game with Digital Solutions
The fashion industry is going back to its normal days by organizing fashion weeks in person, but real change is coming in the way marketers are luring millions of viewers on various social platforms with mega-influencers and out-of-the-box formats. Leading brands, such as Moncler, Hugo Boss, and Gucci, are tapping on these changing trends by collaborating with tech giants to entice younger and wider audiences. Though, in the pre-COVID-19 days, brands had immense pressure to bridge the gap between online and offline stores. However, as the restriction on the number of people allowed to attend the fashion shows is limited, brands were compelled to seek alternatives that help them deal with the rising concerns of the Coronavirus spreading. Implementing digital technology is the only way forward that can help brands attract more buyers while also safeguarding their health and reducing the negative impact on the planet. And since customer experience is continuously evolving, buyers expect something new and different from their favorite brands, and they have to comply with the changing needs. Therefore, Balenciaga has collaborated with The Simpsons on a custom episode and Balmain head a ticketed stadium-filled "festival" with thousands of guests and a celeb-strewn show.
The case mentioned above studies indicates that fashion and luxury brands are desperately in need of technology. They have to walk the extra mile to ensure that their business models are as flexible as possible to strive for higher business growth. Nonetheless, there are numerous brands that are yet looking for options and ways to modernize their models. For them, we have listed out a few strategies that will enable them to comply with the new digital trends and entice young buyers will novel social media hacks.
Here are some factors that will allow fashion and luxury brands to scale up their businesses across various digital platforms:
· Bringing In More Celebrities than Influencers
In the digital era, influencers have been a key attraction for several brands. Consumers too looked up to them and followed everything they did, whether it was about fashion, brands to follow, how to walk, speak, everything. Influencers and key opinion leaders (KOLS) were a must-have at fashion shows; however, the situation began to dwindle. It was reported that a number of shows across SS22 were 42 per cent below pre-pandemic levels compared to Autumn/Winter 2020. Nevertheless, the social media visibility of fashion week's content gained popularity up to 20 per cent across the season. This is linked to luxury's focus on mega-influencer musicians with over 1 million followers, from K-pop stars to Gen Z favourites like Dua Lipa, replacing pure fashion influencers with a smaller reach. For instance, Blackpink's Jisoo represents 64 per cent of Dior's $7 million earned value. This shows that K-pop stars continue to be among the most powerful ambassadors for brands today. In fact, in Milan, Dua Lipa alone drove one-third visibility of Versace by walking the show and attending its star-studded afterparty.
Similarly, Cardi B generated similar visibility for Richard Quinn in London; though she didn't attend the show, her endorsement made it the highest-visibility London brand from September-October, over more longstanding brands, such as Vivienne Westwood. As for New York, music star couple Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes made up 51 per cent of the total $4.34 million in earned media value for Michael Kors. It is the highest of New York Fashion Week, wearing the designer at the Met Gala three days after the show.
Despite facing some of the unprecedented and turbulent times, the fashion and luxury industry was able to evolve quickly. Labels were quick to respond to the need to offer interactive sessions to their buyers to enhance their experience. Considering the case of Oliver Rousteing's live music festival that was shared on Instagram Live, along with real-life experiences including Balenciaga's red-carpet "extravaganza" and a custom episode of The Simpsons shared on Instagram via Stories, Highlights and feeds. The industry had announced its comeback with intimate experiences for consumers standing out. Engaging digital show experiences indeed were a requirement that was exhaustively tested during the pandemic period. Social content across platforms should provide real-life experience if they hope to make a comeback with a bang among their buyers. It means in-country and across globe activations for global clients, press, and fans who still can't travel. Karla Otto's Shanghai office has partnered with Camera Moda and the Féderation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to help brands stream on platforms such as Weibo, Wechat, and Douyin. The agency has also collaborated with Tencent and works with local influencers to drum up excitement, with influencer activations and screenings in Seoul, Moscow, and Beijing.
For instance, Moncler streamed its Mondogenius experience, a live streaming screening hosted by Alicia Keys across the platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Weibo, Wechat, and a network of Moncler Genius e-tailers and media sites. The brand recorded a total of 74 million views of the show in China alone.
What if you can allow your buyers to become a trendsetter on their own. The panacea is a customization solution, and web-to-print software is a designing tool that allows print businesses to simplify and automate orders and reorder for their retail, corporate, and reseller clients. It comes with exclusive and advanced features enabling businesses' robust b2b strategy to highlight their key products, services, and promotional offers to engage with buyers and generate new and repeat sales. It also leads to increased productivity and expands your business as it is available in various investment options that offer leverage to our purchaser to start with the cost-effective subscription.
· Becoming More Public Than Ever
This is an ironic business strategy as in this new evolved landscape, emerging designers inadvertently hold exclusive shows because of the lack of money or platform to display their collections. It is well-known that money is required to stream live shows, develop costly influencers, and social media strategies are costly. For high-end brands, it is relatively easier in this new digital age to reach out to every customer. The digital platforms offer lucrative opportunities to integrate creative expression experience, which reinforces customer desire across the purchase funnel. However, budding designers and emerging brands in digital brands have the golden opportunity to go public with the help of social media platforms. They can tag and display their innovative product collection and inspire and attract more buyers on these platforms. All courtesy to Instagram, especially to Stories and Reels, they enable brands to combine creative tools, such as augmented reality effects and music library, and create a format that generates desire among various individuals to buy more. Indeed, many experts in the fashion industry believe that brands need to transform themselves by becoming more open and democratic. The onus lies more on the leading fashion companies to push the door wider for the SMEs to compete with them and strive to remain relevant and connect with the new generations.
Learning from the above mentioned, Balmain launched its Instagram interaction and received a warming of 18 million interactions, compared with 5 million last season. Though the brand's event had been woven together with a festival and a catwalk show, it had to work extra hard to ensure multiple audiences were catered to. The runway was streamed across Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social platforms. This shows that going forwards, the fashion shows format will be heading for combined offline and online shows that allows brands to be more public. It is the way fashion show format will look in more seasons to come.
Likewise, an article on "Zara Meets Netflix" was written in Forbes magazine to highlight the growing significance of a business-based model that works on "speed-to-market (fast-fashion), customer centricity and excellent operations" meets the "platform economy". It mentions that a startup Finess has replaced designers and buyers with data. It has raised $4.5 million for artificial intelligence (AI) designed clothing and creates fashion by combining time series analysis, natural language processing, and computer vision within its machine learning algorithms and listening to new generations on social media. Thanks to its shorter supply chain and 3D Modelling software, their time-to-market is faster than average fashion businesses.
· Focusing More on Tik Tok
The emergence of various platforms during the pandemic has helped brands to attract more buyers and influencers, but Tik Tok is one such social media platform that has stuck with fashion and luxury brands. For example, Twitch, a streaming platform known for gaming, has hosted various brands' shows, such as Burberry and Dior Men, but didn't host any active fashion sessions this season. Similarly, after the launch of Balenciaga's Afterworld, there were no announcements for game-style collection; instead, the brand released a Fornite collaboration just a few weeks ago before the show. However, this hasn't been the case with Tik Tok, which recently hit 1 billion subscriber monthly active users. This number has placed it on par with Instagram in terms of audience. As fashion continues to grow on the digital platform, there are some brands that are reluctant to produce any content on it around fashion shows. In fact, leading brands, such as Chanel and Hermès, do not have Tiktok accounts.
TikTok stars are prominent and get special status during the fashion weeks. For instance, comedy star Rickey Thompson attended Paris shows including Balenciaga, Ludovic de Saint Sernin and Tiktok makeup star Abby Roberts was seen at Charles Jeffrey to Moncler. The second most followed person on the platform, Addison Rae, drove around $400,000 of earned media value at Versace shows, and the star attended the show in full pink Versace, broadcast to her combined 120 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. Likewise, Hugo Boss staged a baseball-themed fashion show to mark its collaboration with US sportswear label Russell Athletic that featured Italy's most famous Tik Toker Khaby Lame with 115 million followers alongside Gigi Hadid and Irina Shayk. According to Lefty, the Tik Tok star garnered $282,000 in earned media value during the event, which ranked fourth in terms of visibility during Milan Fashion Week. And as per the brand's press release, it achieved 3.9 billion impressions in four days across the social media platforms. The platform's challenge #BOSSMOVES, thousands of Tiktokers created content to compete for five exclusive NFT bomber jackets, reached 2.2 billion views on Tiktok. Social engagement increased by 1,600 per cent on the Boss Instagram account.
Additionally, Tik Tok has sponsored London Fashion Week to place itself at the centre of the narrative, as it constructed the show space and sponsored the British Fashion Council Newgen designers, such as Saul Nash, Nensi Dojaka, and SS Daley. The collaboration has resulted in generating 7.1 billion views.
Wrapping Up-
Towards the end, all we can say is that digital platforms are enhancing fashion and luxury brands' market presence and helping them improve their game. These platforms are offering opportunities that make brands look more humane and sensitive to their buyer's needs. Likewise, the Web2print Software by iDesigniBuy allows brands to establish a personal touch and relationship with customers by enabling them to design the fashion products they like.
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