With the ongoing  economic turbulence many sectors including that of fashion have seen significant global disruption. The fashion retail sector in particular has seen profitability surge south in the past number of years, we have seen many high street brands simply drop of the radar. This is derivative of two major factors; challenges by way of online technology and also due to the fact that fashion is an elastic sector and is duly affected by economic downturns.

Yet every other week there are whispers of fashion start-ups blowing up, that the Fashion E-commerce industry is simply dead and is a saturated market, too easy picking and low hanging fruit. Furthermore, it is thought of as being very capital-intensive to maintain, innovate and even more expensive in terms of marketing and PR requirements for customer acquisition.

So is there a magic formula? A significant number of fashion start-up firms flounder and very few survive without significant angel or VC funding. Each one seems to be looking for the next explosive formula. Perhaps there isn’t a grand design “per se”? Maybe the answer is “right here” and simply involves keeping adept with the times. We have seen the impact of social media on the bottom line in many industries maybe these methodologies need to be employed? It should no longer be about shopping it should be about social shopping. Women are the largest demographic in terms of online purchases and we all know that they are a “social species” when it comes to shopping! The advent of Facebook and twitter have somewhat alleviated the strain of marketing overheads and some relatively new start-ups such as Farfetch.com have gained a significant proportion of their user base from Facebook so social commerce seems to be one way forward.

Team Modafirma

