• Tackling the competitive fashion retail scene • Delivering the right message

However, building that meaningful connection with your consumers is not as simple as hiring a celebrity or influencer to endorse your products.

Instead, Ooi who is also the former chief executive officer (CEO) of online boutique Twenty3, explains that meaningful connections with customers are built by delivering the right message or the right product, at the right place at the right time with the help of big data and analytics.

“Analytics in retail revolves around two key areas: consumer analysis and market analysis. In the first, you want to know everything about your customer, such that the shopping experience delivered to them becomes highly personalised.

“This includes information that we’ve been tracking for years, such as browsing history, search history, social media engagements, and location history. If you aren’t already tracking these, you absolutely should.

“Ultimately, the goal in this area is to know your customers better than they know themselves, without them having to even say a word to you,” he asserts.

But that being said, just keeping track of customers will not be enough to keep players ahead of the intense competition of that they now face.

“With increasingly sophis- ticated shoppers with shorter attention spans, you need to also keep track of the competition: what’s their sell-out rates, what are the best performing trends, how many pieces per SKU to order, the optimum selling prices in the market, when to discount and by how much and so on.

“Understanding your competitors allows you to adopt the strategies that have proven to work and avoid costly ones that don’t. The end goal is to deliver the right product, at the right place, at the right time.

“The market is constantly testing and experimenting with millions of products, but you do have to pay attention to the results of their testing so you can react appropriately,” Ooi explains. Changing times, changing lives

Simply put, the fashion retail and retail industry in general has become extremely data driven. While this doesn’t really affect larger corporations who employ large teams of experienced analysts at their disposal, smaller players are feeling the pressure as many may not have the capabilities of accurately analysing their data.

“This is where a big data tool like the Omnilytics dashboard is useful, by aggregating millions of SKUs and simplifying the market analytics process, you can make accurate decisions faster than anyone else, without having to bear the cost of running those experiments yourself.

“For instance, if your audience isn’t responding to your products, Omnilytics data can show you new opportunities in new markets and the data can also help you find trends before your competitors so you can extract more margins before a price war ensues,” Ooi guides.

Looking at the future of fashion retail and retail in general, analysts believe that soon, retail will no longer be segmented into online or offline retails, instead retailers will soon be employing omni-channel retailing where they unify all channels of retail to create a single commerce experience.

“Omni-channel isn’t a new buzzword, but it’s still a concept that most retailers are only now starting to adopt, so we’ll still be seeing a lot of that in 2019-2020.

“The focus there is to create a seamless experience for the consumer when they move from online to offline, as well as to gather more data points to paint a more customised, holistic picture of your audience.”

And for the next shift in retail, Ooi guides that a frictionless shopping experience will likely be the next shift as consumers are now more likely to abandon a potential checkout if there is anything that impedes, distracts or inconveniences them during a purchase.

“The future is predictive, personalised, automated.”