Online With the 21st Century Shopper
Clothes shopping is unlikely fodder for a medium like the Internet. Absent the sensual pleasures of stroking a silk velvet jacket or draping a pashmina shawl around our shoulders, we might as well be flipping through the pages of the Sears catalog. Except for one thing: In cyberspace, shoppers get to tell designers exactly what they want. Not in groups, not by voting with their wallets for or against the whims of some ivory tower designer, but by direct one-on-one contact. And that simple difference could radically alter the face of fashion in the new millennium.
My body’s perfect, but my stomach looks like I drink a six-pack every night.
“How can I not learn from that as a designer?” says Norma Kamali, regarding an e-mail sent to her Web site. Kamali is one of the first designers to recognize the profound difference between brick-and-mortar selling and electronic commerce. Two years ago, she pulled her collection from all outlets except her New York flagship store and put it on the Web at https://www.omo-norma-kamali.com. The move brought her an entirely new audience made up of women between 16 and 26. “She’s at one with the Internet,” is how Kamali describes her new customer.
Kamali’s enthusiasm for cyberspace was born out of a love of the modern and disdain for the hidebound practices of traditional retailers, even those revered Manhattan-style bastions that once carried her clothes. “It was so outrageously hot here [in Manhattan] you couldn’t even breathe,” she says. “And do you know what they were showing in the windows? Black wool and leather. Something in the way we communicate with our customers has got to give.”
Enter the Internet. Kamali can conceive a design and quickly put it on her Web site, using a flock of young e-mailers as an instant focus group. Their message, according to Kamali, is loud and clear: These young women want Kamali’s style but at a lower price than typical designer clothes command. So while she continues to make chic white leather jackets for $1,000 and one-of-a-kind ostrich-feather-trimmed dresses costing even more, her mandate now, she says, is to find a manufacturer who can produce her designs at prices a Gen-Xer can love. (The designer declines to give sales figures for her privately held company.)
Fans of Steve Madden’s platform thongs and leather Mary Janes pour out their thoughts to the designer on the “Dear Steve” page at https://www.stevemadden.com.
“I ordered my shoes online when I couldn’t find them in the stores, and although a bit leery, I bit my lip and went forth. . . it was the best decision. I got my shoes within three days and they fit perfectly.”
Bitten lips notwithstanding, Steve Madden’s 16-to-25-year-old audience is game for Internet shopping. “There is no history of rules for this generation,” says chief operations officer Rhonda Brown. “She will shop the Internet, direct mail, street vendors or the mall to get the items she must have to go with her lifestyle.”
With projected online sales of $1 million for 1999, Brown predicts that by 2000 the Web site will be the largest of Steve Madden’s 37 stores. An agreement with America Online, announced in July, will make the company one of three shoe stores to anchor the footwear department of Shop@AOL, ostensibly boosting Madden’s total sales above last year’s $86 million.
Although the online clothing market generated $530 million in sales for 1998, that is a fraction of the $180 billion-a-year apparel market. But Internet sales are expected to rise to $20 billion by 2003, according to Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Couple all those dollar signs with research showing that women are going online at a faster rate than men--and that apparel has become the fastest-growing category of e-commerce--and you have the makings of a fashion gold rush.
“I can tell you without blinking an eye that the Internet is going to change the entire distribution of consumer goods--from the factory to the shopping bag. And in many unpredictable ways,” says Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard’s Retail Trend Report, a forecasting company based in Upper Montclair, N.J. “It will be as easy for a lady from Ottumwa, Iowa, to place an order from a store in London as it is to order from the store across the street.”
Sportswear, Barnard notes, is already doing well online. “More sensitive fashion items, like designer clothes, will take longer.” He describes a scenario in which a woman views a $1,000 dress on a Web site, prompting her to go to the store to try it on. “What the seller of the dress gets--at the very minimum--is a national audience. As a result, influence is likely to be very strong on a very short order.”
One of the most glamorous entries into the fashion online sweepstakes is https://www.boo.com. Scheduled to go “live” in the fall, the site is generously endowed with investments from Bernaud Arnault, chairman of Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMH), and the Benetton family. That pedigree, along with a trio of attractive young chief executives, has garnered boo.com reams of coverage by both financial publications and fashion magazines.
Your host on the site is a 3-D shopping bot named Ms. Boo, whose flaming-red ponytail and high cheekbones recall video game heartthrob Laura Croft. Boo.com features sportswear
and footwear by American labels such as DKNY, Puma, Vans and Fila, and Australia’s Royal Elastics. Visitors can zoom in on a sneaker’s stitching or examine it from all sides. Through the site’s lifestyle-oriented Boomagazine, a teenager in small-town America can visit Carnaby Street or a soccer match in Brazil. “An interactive playground for your mind,” is how a Boom editor describes it.
“Telling a story” is how smart magazine editors have always turned ordinary pieces of clothing into “fashion,” season after season. The same tactic works online. The delectably eye-popping site https://www.girlshop.com, for example, leads the visitor on an ironic fantasy trip to Coney Island for a day of ‘50s nostalgia. Sun too bright? Click on a pair of Cynthia Rowley retro shades, $95. Sand in your shoes? Kick them off to reveal a trio of 14-carat diamond toe rings from Toesies, starting at $135 each. The narrative, devised by girlshop.com founder and former Marie Claire art director Laura Eisman, is a clever way of grouping disparate items from a collection of New York designer boutiques. Eisman launched her Web site last year after finding nothing online that she wanted to buy. “There wasn’t much in the way of fashion except mall sites, which were very generic and discount-oriented,” says Eisman, who also spent a year as creative director of the Web site https://www.iVillage.com.
Figuring that she typified the young working woman most likely to fill her wardrobe via cyberspace, Eisman built girlshop.com using “gut instinct. I did the complete opposite of most Web sites. It’s very low tech, very simple to navigate.”
The relatively tiny (10 employees) company has struck a chord with stylish cyber shoppers, with girlshop.com shipping 1,800 packages around the world and scoring 4 million hits to its Web site each month.
Over at the Generation Y-oriented fashion Web sites, it’s like walking into a party in progress. New York-based Alloy Online, https://www.alloy.com, fuses music, romance, gossip, fashion and Hollywood in a way that looks more like MTV than a traditional catalog. Visitors can “dis” a fashion trend, read a peer’s review of “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” see a snippet of video from “American Pie” or go into a chat room. Shopping appears almost incidental.
“It’s an opportunity for girls to talk to boys, boys to talk to girls, to deliver music, to deliver fashion, to deliver a lifestyle,” Alloy CEO Matt Diamond told CBS MarketWatch. The company sold 3.7 million shares at $15 each in its recent initial public offering.
And then there’s convergence, when you, your TV and the Internet are at one with your credit card. Imagine, in the not-too-distant future, sitting at home watching Candice Bergen on her Oxygen cable talk show interviewing President Hillary Rodham Clinton . . . and all you can think is, “Wonder where she got that dreamy cashmere sweater?” Double-click on the sweater and a window pops up with size, color and price. Double-click on your virtual wallet. It’s all yours.
Veteran cable executive Geraldine Laybourne is gambling on convergence. The theory behind her Oxygen Media is that women shopping online will someday gratify such high-profile investors as Oprah Winfrey, Carsey Werner and Paul Allen. Five years from now, Laybourne told Forbes Online, Oxygen hopes to be in 50 million cable homes.
Much of the miracle of convergence, however, will materialize only after Web site designers conquer the eight-second rule. If it takes more than that for a Web page to download, shoppers lose interest. And there’s the rub: The kind of saturated colors and crisp imagery that are necessary to online merchandising are the slowest to appear onscreen. Even Kamali admits she has her employees download information for her. “Who has time?”
Internet retailing reminds shopping anthropologist Paco Underhill of another so-called revolution: catalog shopping. For working women, catalogs “were going to replace physical retailing,” writes Underhill in “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.” But sales topped out at about 10% of total retailing. Even if Web site shopping doubles the rate, that still leaves 80% to be done the old-fashioned way.
In contrast to the cold pixels of cyberspace, Underhill argues that brick-and-mortar stores offer “sensory stimuli, immediate gratification and social interaction.” And yet, he points out, there is a factor that can balance online’s shopping scales: fun. The aforementioned Ms. Boo at boo.com fulfills one of Underhill’s prescriptions for pizazz.
It’s possible that someday we’ll barely be able to distinguish virtual space from reality. High-resolution digital photography will enable shoppers to better visualize fabrics. Zoom and 3-D modeling will enhance our perception of designs. “What you see right now online is not even in its infancy--it’s pre-embryonic,” says retail analyst Barnard. “The advances and changes we will see in the next two or three years will become more and more attractive for a lot of people, particularly for people who don’t have stores like those in major cities.”
But nothing has titillated the online shopper quite like “My Virtual Model.” Created by Louise Guay, CEO and founder of Montreal-based Public Technologies Multimedia, the virtual model is a 3-D mannequin constructed of polygons. A shopper puts in hair color, shoulder width, bust and waist size, skin color and height and within seconds is offered a creature that in a vague and slightly disturbing way looks like her. The accompanying warning sums up both My Virtual Model’s virtues and flaws: “If you lie to your virtual model, she will lie to you.”
Guay, who is one part technological wizard and one part philosopher, says she got the idea while hunting for clothes with a personal shopper. She felt uncomfortable with the woman’s sizing up of her physical assets. Back in the laboratory, Guay drew on her 10-year background in communications technology to create what she calls “an intelligent agent,” an online twin that tries on virtual clothes in a virtual dressing room. Add a virtual mocha latte and you’ll believe you’re at Barneys New York in Beverly Hills. Well, maybe.
In November 1998, catalog giant Lands’ End, which reported Internet sales of $61 million out of total sales of $1.4 billion last year, incorporated PTM’s Virtual Model onto its Web site, christening it “Your Personal Model.” By June of this year, more than 400,000 had built personal models from the site, says Thane Ryland, spokesman for the Lands’ End Internet Group.
Seducing more women into shopping online appears to be at the forefront of every cyber merchant’s marketing strategy for the new millennium. “By 2003,” says Ryland, “women will constitute a majority of consumers online.” After all, he notes, “85% of all purchases made in the U.S. are made by women.”
Guay is taking the virtual model technology even further, incorporating a photo of the shopper’s face on the mannequin’s body and imbuing it with a choice of personalities and speech patterns. Your virtual shopper might, in fact, become your virtual therapist. “Claude Levi-Strauss once said that the future of anthropology is the study of the self,” says Guay, “and I see My Virtual Model as a way to do that.”
A more immediate possibility would be a virtual fashion show featuring a variety of body types. One designer told Guay that it would be like Beethoven using a Walkman to listen to his compositions instead of having to hire an entire orchestra. Imagine a catwalk crawling with Kate Mosses, her polygons adjusted to range from pre-rehab scrawny to fin de siecle pulchritude.
Kamali likens the pending evolution of online shopping to the arrival of fax machines. “You couldn’t have imagined what a fax was and now you can’t imagine what you’d do without one.”
On the other hand, Beethoven was deaf for much of his career. The Walkman wouldn’t have helped, and the Fifth Symphony turned out just fine. Stay tuned.
