After books (and music, e logistics, and foodstuffs, even hairdresser) Amazon's latest assault on retail is about fashion.
Indeed, today Jeff Bezos' company launches "Amazon Style", a store that combines the e-commerce giant's technological know-how with customers' long-standing desire to be able to touch and feel things.
The first location will open in Glendale, California at a large area mall. It is yet another effort by Amazon to break into traditional retail, and take another slice of the market, this time in the fashion sector (clothing and footwear).
Fashion and Amazon, longstanding relationship
The technology giant has already innovated for years in the fashion sector: the company has been researching for at least 4 years both on new business models and on ways to try on clothes without wearing them (even from a distance). He also has his own clothing label, Amazon Essentials.
Even in the USA (source: research Wells Fargo) already surpassed Walmart as the # 1 clothing retailer last year. What will your new physical store look like now?
A leap forward (and into the void, for traditional brands)
Simoina Vasen, CEO of Amazon Style, said in a blog post that "Amazon Style combines the best of fashion shopping on Amazon (great prices, selection and convenience) with a brand new in-store shopping experience built to inspire."
Needless to say, an experience based on Amazon's technology, especially for the selection of clothes. Few shelves and piles of clothes, in fact: shoppers looking for clothing, shoes and accessories directly use the Amazon Shopping app to scan the QR Codes and learn the details of each product.
When they are decided, with a simple click in the app, users send the items to the dressing room or directly to the collection desk.
Hybrid up-selling and cross-selling
Once inside that "reinvented dressing room", the user can try on that dress to be sure of the size, but with a large display he can also try on a thousand variations of that dress with the certainty that it will be of his size. Machine learning algorithms produce recommendations in real time to give customers the most personalized experience. It is also a way to upsell by digitally capturing a customer in the physical location.
New choices? New fashion quickly delivered to the dressing room. Fast delivery to the dressing room is also done with technologies and processes already tested in Amazon's logistics centers.
"Personal style was expensive and it was exclusive, but with Amazon Style's sophisticated technology we made it easier than ever for customers to discover the perfect fashion for them," Vasen writes in her post.
It goes without saying that the physical location will benefit from all possible synergies with the app (physical delivery or collection of returns). Sounds unbelievable, right? And now let's take a look at the occupational fallout.
Human employees? They serve like bread.
Working in a store means managing inventory and receipts, greeting customers, assisting them at the checkout or exit, assisting them with returns or exchanges after they've shopped, unpacking items from boxes and displays on the shelves. There will be work for humans for quite a while, at least here.
Escape from physical stores is not an absolute and irreversible consequence. Especially in the field of fashion, a tactile, emotional, personal component is necessary: as long as dressing and having a social aspect will make sense, people will make sense. The physical experience of evaluating a product is rewarding.
However, we must ask ourselves how many stores there will be in the near future. They will be physical (hybrid), of course, but they will no longer be as widespread as before and probably, as it is today for technology or cars, they will be in the hands of big players.
