How Agile Retail is Disrupting the Fashion Industry

What industry hasn’t been transformed by technology? Uber has changed transportation, Airbnb has disrupted the hotel business, and Amazon has challenged the largest retailers in the world including companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Sears.
All of them have capitalized on revolutionary technology to lower prices, improve the customer experience, and move their respective industries into the modern era.
Some industries have avoided that disruptive influence, chief among them is the tradition-steeped fashion 
 industry. Not all, but many fashion brands are still clinging to the traditional fashion shows and storefront retail practices.
Fashion has stumbled along for years without a particularly influential infusion of new ideas. But all of that is changing, and it is happening quickly.

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Agile Retail

 

A new industry, one that CEO Roman Kirsch calls "Agile Retail," is capitalizing on many of the principles that have made other stalwart tech companies successful in their respective industries. Agile Retail, which most closely competes with the likes of H&M and Zara, is a direct-to-consumer model that leverages smart data to predict trends, manage highly efficient production cycles, and achieve lightning fast turnaround on emerging styles.
In the mid-2000s, companies like H&M came on to the scene calling themselves "fast fashion" companies, promoting high fashion at warehouse prices. Every year they produce 10,000 to 15,000 new styles and sell them at their hundreds of locations around the world. Zara’s founder Amancio Ortega is now the richest man in Europe with an estimated wealth of more than $70 billion.
But consumers want more and better and Agile Retail companies have stepped up to meet that demand. Kirsch’s company Lesara was just named Europe’s fastest growing tech company by TECH5, posting a growth rate of more than 3,000 percent.
And it is not a stretch to call Lesara a tech company. It looks, feels, and functions more like a technology business than a traditional fashion design company. There are no summer and fall collections, no fashion shows, and certainly no prima donna designers.
“We don’t just operate like a tech company because it is the most efficient way to run the business, we operate this way because it helps us make the fashion items that consumers want, and we are able to make them first,” says Kirsch.
Agile Retail companies represent a fundamental shift in approach. In a traditional fashion company, a venerated designer creates an entire collection solely based on his or her inspiration. These pieces are then flaunted down a catwalk for large retailers to preview and eventually make their way to store shelves six months later. This is a continued practice among large brand names like Gucci, Prada, Vera Wang, Armani and many more. But the truth is that getting a product to marketing in the Internet age can take much less than six months........