Oren Michels | Photo: Scott Beale

NEW YORK, United States — Today, rapid innovation in consumer technologies and accelerating adoption rates are driving explosive growth of new devices and platforms — from iPads and gaming consoles to web-connected cars and internet-enabled TVs — putting pressure on brands to design and support a diverse and fast proliferating array of digital touchpoints. Keeping pace with consumers means thinking beyond the web browser. The days of simply building and supporting a brand website are over. But creating new experiences and applications for every new channel dramatically increases the cost and complexity of engaging consumers, a significant challenge for even the most savvy and well-financed brands.

While there is no escaping this new reality, forward-thinking brands are learning to efficiently leverage external partners and developers to create new experiences and applications for them — driving innovation and increasing revenue while reducing cost and complexity — by creating and publishing open APIs.

An API, or application programming interface, enables interaction between pieces of software, much the same way that a user interface facilitates interaction between people and computers. Specifically, an API makes it easy for one piece of software to open part of its functionality or content for other programs to leverage. Technology leaders like Google, Facebook and Amazon have long published open APIs, making specific content and functionality available to external partners and developers who can then use these building blocks to create new experiences and applications. For example, Amazon’s Product Advertising API provides programmatic access to the retailer’s vast product range so that external developers can easily advertise Amazon products on third-party websites.

Now, embracing APIs and the ecosystem growth strategies they enable is rapidly becoming vital for all brands and retailers, not just technology companies. Indeed, Gartner predicts that by 2014 over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will have APIs.

BoF spoke with Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of leading API management, infrastructure and strategy firm Mashery, to find out more about the fast approaching future of brand APIs.

… Continue Reading

Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts | Source: Editd

LONDON, United Kingdom — Clearance sales point to a perennial problem in the fashion industry: the misalignment of supply and demand. Using traditional market research, brands and retailers are unable to predict with high accuracy what products consumers will actually purchase during any given season. As a result, merchandise that doesn’t sell is marked down, while demand for popular items goes unmet, leading to significant loss of income.

But better aligning supply and demand is a complex matter. That’s because, in trend-driven product categories like fashion, historical sales data never results in consistently better commercial decisions. What brands and retailers really require is information about what’s going to happen, not what’s already happened. But traditional fashion forecasting tools like panel-based research and trend reports are slow and unscientific, leaving buyers and merchants to make important business decisions based largely on intuition.

Now, an ambitious London-based startup called Editd — which, earlier this summer, raised a $1.6 million round of seed funding led by Index Ventures, investors in Net-a-Porter, Etsy and ASOS — is offering a realtime data monitoring and analytics platform that makes commercial decision-making in the fashion industry more scientific.

… Continue Reading

Simone Cipriani, Andreas Kronthaler, Vivienne Westwood, Federico Marchetti at the launch of the Ethical Fashion Africa Collection | Source: ITC

FLORENCE, Italy — Simone Cipriani spearheads the Ethical Fashion initiative of The International Trade Centre (ITC), a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation. Connecting “the world’s most marginalised people to the top of fashion’s value chain for mutual benefit,” it enables communities of artisans and micro-manufacturers — the majority of them women — to thrive in association with the talents of the fashion world by fostering local creativity, enabling female employment, and promoting gender equality in order to reduce extreme poverty, according to a detailed brochure published by the ITC this month.

Of her recent collection with the Ethical Fashion Initiative, unveiled during Pitti Uomo last month and now available on Yoox.com, Vivienne Westwood said “it’s quite incredible to think that we might save the world through fashion.”

But ethical fashion remains a somewhat fuzzy, idealistic concept, which has proven difficult to implement in practice. It also remains a niche market, even if consumers are becoming more conscious about their purchasing habits and sales of ethical fashion are growing. According to Mr. Cipriani, its widespread adoption will require a wholesale mindset shift for the fashion industry, which must eliminate waste from a fashion system that remains bloated with excess product and underpays those at the very early stages of production.

Mr. Cipriani’s official title is typical of bureaucratic nomenclature: Head, Poor Communities & Trade Program, Chief Technical Advisor, Ethical Fashion. But make no mistake, this is no ivory-towered diplomat. Cipriani spends most of his time in the field — the slums of Nairobi and rural communities around Africa — laying the groundwork for ethical fashion at the front lines and building ties to fashion houses in Europe in order to make his vision a reality.

I caught up with Simone Cipriani on a quiet rooftop terrazza during one of his rare visits to his native Florence for the launch of Vivienne Westwood’s Ethical Fashion Africa collection.

… Continue Reading

Sramana Mitra | Source: Sramana Mitra

MENLO PARK, United States — Since 2003, when Web 2.0 first hit the mainstream, we’ve seen an explosion of user-generated content (UGC). Since then, fashion innovators have harnessed the growth of UGC to build experiences like Polyvore, where consumers can mix and match their favourite fashion items for others to see and shop.

But as more and more consumers become increasingly active on the social web, the volume of content being created is starting to overwhelm our ability to organise and make sense of it. Amongst the thousands of sets on Polyvore, for example, how can a fashion consumer easily find the sets that are most relevant to her personal style?

But if the explosion of content associated with Web 2.0 is the primary cause of this problem, it also contains the seeds of a solution that will usher in the next phase of the internet and create an exciting opportunity for fashion retailers. In a world where people constantly share personal information, it’s becoming increasingly possible for retailers to analyse this information to better understand the specific context of the individual — her interests, personal style and other parameters — and deliver content and products that are personalised to her needs and desires. Simply put, “Web 3.0” will enable personalised experiences built on the data created by Web 2.0.

BoF spoke with Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley strategy consultant, author and entrepreneur — among other projects, Ms. Mitra ran Uuma, a VC-backed personalised fashion startup which received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren before the company was caught in the first dotcom crash — to find out more.

… Continue Reading