Personal styling technology. Does it limit what my customer will buy?

A question we get asked a lot at HOLM is whether personal styling technology limits customer choice. Good fashion retailers are proud of their entire collections, so is it not bad business to tell a customer which five or six dresses she should be wearing? We agree. The HOLM app was designed to curate rather[…]

5G handset

5G is coming. Is your retail business prepared?

5G will transform retail 5G ‘fifth generation mobile networks’ is set to launch in the UK as soon as 2019. The retail industry needs to prepare if it is to gain from a world where users can connect no matter where they are and with the exact performance they need. 5G’s promise to deliver ubiquitous[…]

We’re women not smoothies – the problem with fashion retail personalisation

Retail personalisation technology is supposed to be the magic bullet for the problem of online fashion returns. But does asking shoppers to guess their own body shape provide accurate data or a good customer experience? […]

Nearly 22,000 retail jobs hit: is e-commerce completely to blame?

Retail news? Barely a week goes by without another chain parading its woes: announcing profit warnings, negotiations with creditors and store closures. BBC News today reported that 22,000 retail jobs are at risk in 2018 alone. The finger of blame is frequently pointed at the growth of e-commerce and Amazon in particular, but is it really that simple? After all, Amazon has been around since the mid 1990’s so it is hardly a new challenger.

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Five ways to make in-store technology a success

A previous HOLM blog post discussed the importance of empowering retail sales staff with technology to put them on an equal footing with today’s ‘mobile first’ consumer. Yet there remains a reluctance among retailers to roll out in-store technology. They have their e-commerce platform for that sort of stuff after all. Then there is the risk of getting it wrong – an expensive mistake for any ambitious retail director.

But the problem is that customers simply do not silo your retail business into ‘stores’ and ‘e-commerce’; they view you as a single brand and expect a seamless transition between their online and in-store activities. In-store technology is the only way to provide this true omnichannel experience. Here we share five ways to make your in-store tech a success: […]

This person could save your fashion chain. Why not let her?

Which fashion retail head office positions didn’t exist 30 years ago? Head of Multichannel; social media manager; customer experience analyst… to name but a few. Yet on the shop floor we still have ‘shop assistants’ and that’s pretty much it.

In this post I’m going talk about how the role of the shop floor workforce has evolved dramatically in the past three decades. Next I will share four simple changes fashion retailers can make to ensure today’s sales staff feel relevant, valued and productive. […]

How to solve a problem like a store portfolio – and it’s not closures

Closures and portfolio consolidation are sure bets in the game of fashion retail results bingo, right up there with unseasonable weather. While the e-commerce boom has admittedly left the sector with too much space on its hands, bricks and mortar has been unfairly dismissed as a dying channel. This has resulted in customers feeling short changed when their local store gets the axe or, worse, watching it slowly decay due to under investment.

Here are five reasons it’s more important than ever to invest in stores and make sure the baby doesn’t disappear with the bathwater. […]

Returns – the true cost to fashion brands (and how to prevent them)

Technology has transformed the way in which we shop for clothes: purchases are made at the touch of a button. Yes, as we whizz towards a 5G world, the buying process has never been easier. It’s what happens next that has failed to keep up. Here we examine how ‘the returns problem’ is set to be the decade’s defining issue for online fashion retailing, and more importantly what can be done to solve it.
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Want to reverse fashion retail store performance? Think how your customer feels.

It makes sense to start HOLM’s series of expert blogs with the why? Why, when bricks-and-mortar fashion shops are closing left right and centre, and there’s a bunch of tech companies developing online personalisation tools, am I launching a system that involves both of these things – interaction with a sales assistant and an app?[…]