Big Data in fashion: transforming the retail sector

The potential impact and usefulness of analysing different types of data is rather apparent and obvious in numerically driven fields such as finance or insurance where companies have been early and enthusiastic adopters of Big Data. Although the fashion industry traditionally has relied heavily on intuition and creativity for direction in designing, buying and merchandising, it has also been playing around with Big Data for a few years now, with New Gen Apps (2017) asserting that the fashion industry can use Big Data for a number of different purposes, including market identification, trend analysis, understanding the consumer, converting high ticket purchases, lifting new designers, measuring influencers’ impact and improving cross-selling. While previous research has identified numerous beneficial opportunities related to the application of Big Data, this paper focusses specifically on how Big Data can be exploited by fashion retailers in practice. At a time when the highly volatile economic conditions are threatening the survival of fashion retailers, Big Data can potentially provide a much-needed competitive edge which can improve profitability and the chances of survival.