London Fashion Week has become a hotbed for digital retail innovation. Spearheaded by Burberry, it’s now par for the course for major fashion brands to integrate digital into their walkway shows. High-street fashion retailer Topshop was seeking to leverage the trend as it unveiled its Spring/Summer 2013 collection yesterday, in a bid to help determine its forthcoming fashion lines.
Live-casting the show, a ‘Customise the Catwalk’ feature allowed users not only to see & purchase the looks as they watched, but to change the colour and add other accessories within a seamless purchase experience. Items bought directly from the runway will arrive on shoppers’ doorsteps “3 months ahead of industry lead times”. Further social layers to the stream meant viewers could take pictures of the show and upload them straight to Facebook, putting the editorial job directly into their hands.
Topshop’s CMO Justin Cooke (Burberry alumni) said, “By putting our customers in control of the live experience, they show us what they love, how they want to consume information, the ways they like to share and more. We will be able to measure the engagement of the customisation pieces against the other looks and see exactly what it is that makes customers want to spend time with specific elements of the experience, and we will also have tremendous insight into the colours that they want, which is very powerful for a company that delivers newness at a speed that very few others can.”
The retail ‘experience’ is a hot topic right now, but the instances of brands really getting it right, and in fact really getting it, are still pretty few and far between. The Topshop show on Sunday was certainly social entertainment, and offers a major heads-up for other retailers; consumer engagement – to a purpose.
