Jewelry Industry and Retail News
We permanently get informed by our friends and partners from around the Web - about news, trends and/or best practice advice, loosely related to the jewelry retail business. Therefore, we present you here the most interesting or most useful of this information every month - from the following 3 top categories:
| Trends | Sales | Tech |
|---|---|---|
| Hot new/continued jewelry trends as presented to your customers from around the Web. See what they see when they scour the Web and think about your inventory. | Marketing news and related info that you could use in your daily operations. How to get your name out there, wherever you can and get people to know about your business. |
Tools and Trends (mostly tech related) that can make your business life easier. These are tools or trends that can help your business grow, get more organized, save more money, and/or streamline operations. |
Hopefully, you will get some tips/suggestions for your own business activities from this!
April 2018
5 Technologies Transforming Retail in 2018 - 3/5
From artificial intelligence to blockchain, five important innovations can help fashion businesses make their processes more efficient, enhance user experience and offer an improved overall customer value proposition.
2017 was the worst year on record for brick-and-mortar retail. By December, more than 6,985 stores closed across the US, according to retail think-tank Fung Global Retail & Technology. That’s up more than 200 percent from a year ago, according to the firm’s findings. It also beats the previous all-time high of 6,163 store closings that took place during the 2008 financial crisis, according to estimates by Credit Suisse.
The reality is that many stores are closing for the same reason they’ve always closed — they simply don’t meet the needs and demands of customers. But at a time when consumers are empowered with choice and market conditions are increasingly volatile, new technologies can help brands and retailers drive valuable business efficiencies, and improve the overall customer experience and value proposition.
“The biggest upside to technology in fashion will be the ability to offer consistency, and being able to personalize the customer’s shopping patterns,” said Robert Burke, chief executive of retail consultancy firm Robert Burke Associates. Indeed, fashion companies that effectively deploy the right technologies will be able to enhance their competitive advantage by personalizing products and shopping experiences, and refining logistical processes that nibble away at budgets.
However, fashion has been slow to harness many of these opportunities. “We’re only scratching the surface right now of technologies like virtual reality or artificial intelligence,” said Doug Stephens, a retail industry futurist and author of “Reengineering Retail: The Future of Selling in a Post-Digital World.” “But directionally, we can already envision a point where the margin of error for consumer shopping for clothing — both online and offline — will be almost nil.”
Here in this short series, we spotlight the five important technology innovations that can help brands and retailers boost their businesses.
3/5 Block Chain
The underlying technology driving crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, block chain is a decentralized and distributed digital record that offers new opportunities for managing product safety, authenticity and ethical standards. Records cannot be altered after they have been added to the block chain. The global block chain technology market is predicted by Statista to reach $339.5 million in size, and is forecast to grow to $2.3 billion by 2021.
The most obvious use of this technology in fashion is to verify the originality of a garment. Microchips utilizing block chain can tell a customer with complete certainty whether a piece of clothing is genuine or an imitation; whether it was stolen, where it was made and the product’s general history. All this information could be accessible via a Smartphone, and could help prevent counterfeiting and theft.
According to the OECD and EU’s Intellectual Property Office, imports of counterfeit and pirated goods are worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year, or around 2.5 percent of global imports. The organization put the value of imported fake goods at $461 billion in 2013, compared with total imports in world trade at $17.9 trillion.
Block chain can help retailers garner greater trust and brand loyalty throughout the product lifecycle, as it can tell consumers not just where an item was made, but also who it was made by, the conditions they worked in and how much they were paid. Shoppers could also learn about the composition of a garment, where the fabric was grown and what chemicals have been used.
De Beers, the world's biggest diamond producer by the value of its gems, aims to launch the first industry-wide block chain this year, to track gems each time they change hands from the moment they are dug up from the ground. The technology could be used to verify the authenticity of diamonds and ensure they are not from conflict zones, where gems could be used to finance violence. However, the technology has yet to be more widely explored by the fashion industry. “This is in the early stages and brands are not yet thinking about it,” said BCG's Seara, adding that the biggest challenge for fashion would be finding “the people who are able to work with the technology and implement it.”
