One of the factors of e-commerce often underestimated in scope is the goal-oriented analysis of data. In particular, for highly unpredictable industries such as fashion, a good analysis of internal or industry data can deliver enormous competitive advantages.
The London-based startup Editd analyses data which is publicly available on the ‘Net and offers the results to manufacturers, suppliers and retailers:
"Crawling fashion retail sites, monitoring consumer opinions on social media and analysing output from key industry events, the platform blends machine-learning with human editing to turn vast amounts of raw data, captured in realtime, into the kind of actionable information that can give brands and retailers a competitive edge when making decisions like placing orders, determining pricing and managing merchandising."
Julia Fowler, co-founder of the company, details the work of Editd in an interview with The Business of Fashion:
"People express opinions about fashion constantly — we have more than 100 million opinions sourced over the past 12 months specifically on individual garments, fabrics, prints and styles. One great example is our data on the longevity of skinny jeans — a trend that endured much longer than traditional forecasting would have predicted. The demand curve was obvious in our data. Making calls on short-term trends based on data is tremendously valuable as well."
Like Garmz, Editd was one of the winners at the Seedcamp 2010 and received $1.6 million at the beginning of June from a group of investors led by Index Ventures.
Originally posted in German by Marcel Weiss, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
Thanks so much for the great post. I'm so glad for more information on the fashion industry.
I have such a fascination with clothes and love to stay up on the latest fashion
trends and newest clothes on the market.
http://www.clothingobsession.com/
Posted by: Janet | 08/17/2011 at 04:37 PM