Warby Parker runs Google Hangouts on site at Social Media Week

It might have been all about Topshop’s big partnership with Google during London Fashion Week, but at Social Media Week (SMW), it’s Warby Parker we’re talking about.

The eyewear brand, a long-time social media enthusiast, has set up an installation at SMW’s New York HQ that allows visitors to gain feedback on which frames to choose via a Google Hangout.

A shelf at the stand is filled with glasses, encouraging users to try on different options. Rather than just looking in the mirror, they can log in to a live session where various experts are waiting to share their professional thoughts on which ones to go for.

Those on hand throughout each day include celebrities, influencers, fashion experts and members of the Warby Parker and Google teams, according to a post on SMW’s blog.

Each Hangout is being screened on site, as well as live-streamed on Warby Parker’s G+ and YouTube pages. See a couple of examples from today below.

SMW runs from February 18-22.

 

#SXSW Interactive: Fashion’s greatest challenge lies in realigning production with communications

“If I were the CEO of a major fashion brand today, my focus would be on trying to compress the production cycle so it realigned with communications,” Imran Amed, founder and editor of The Business of Fashion, said at SXSW earlier this week.

Speaking on a panel called Who needs a fashion cycle? I’ve got social media, he explained that we’re at the beginning of a seismic change in the way consumers communicate with each other, make decisions, and ultimately purchase.  It’s only by changing the operational side of what we do, he said, that we’re going to be able to catch up.

As we all know, the internet has revolutionised this industry. Where once fashion shows were private trade events, now they’re more consumer facing than ever before, highlighted Michelle Sadlier, global digital communications consultant for Karla Otto International, and moderator of the session.

Designer collections used to only be seen by the public when they hit shop floors six months later – or the pages of the magazines just before. Now they’re viewable in real-time. The likes of Twitter and Instagram, not to mention bloggers and live-streams, mean consumers have the same level of access, at exactly the same time, as those invited to the catwalk presentations.

The issue of course, is that the operational side of the process is still the same. Rather than speeding up alongside, production has remained a lengthy and complicated system. The user is subsequently seeing something online, that isn’t available to buy for a further four to six months.

This gap, said Chris Morton, founder and CEO of fashion discovery site Lyst, means brands are missing out on capturing that “intent to purchase at the point of inspiration”.

He referenced a handful of companies attempting to address this: Burberry’s Runway to Reality initiative – where viewers can shop straight from the catwalk for delivery in just eight weeks – for example, as well as start-up Moda Operandi, which offers a similar solution across a variety of brand names.

Lyst itself launched a Runway Tracking service last September, which at least reminds consumers of the items they liked, by sending them a notification once they’re available to buy.

Amed however, said while each of these ideas is attempting to work around the issues, they’re not actually solving the problem. This is the industry’s biggest challenge, he added, and there’s no easy solution.

One of his suggestions was to create two separate events around the shows. One small and quiet for trade to see the season ahead, and the other a big, all-out affair for consumers, timed so it’s in sync with the actual season. So in other words, shifting the position of the fashion show as we know it today, so it sits at the end of the cycle rather than the beginning.

Of course to do so, would mean skipping a season, something Natalie Massanet, founder of Net-a-Porter, first suggested to Amed in an interview in 2010. No mean feat to pull off…

Which takes us back full circle to the very first line of this post. At the end of the day the company that masters how to realign the production cycle with the communications one, will be the one that finds success. And the likeliest way of achieving that right now, is by focusing first on compressing operations.

Watch this space.

Lanvin chief’s email-free Wednesdays

Love this: Lanvin chief Thierry Andretta, has declared Wednesdays email-free.

Having a full day without interruption reportedly helps him concentrate. He implemented the initiative earlier this year after feeling increasingly depressed and frustrated by the  volume of emails he was expected to handle each day, reports Reuters.

“Generally, I think we have become too accessible. We all lose too much time reading and writing emails and they prevent you from thinking clearly,” he said on the fringe of the FT Luxury Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland earlier this week.

He explained how he would frequently clear his inbox before flying from Paris to New York, but have another 250 messages waiting for him by the time he arrived.

Perhaps needless to say, there’s not been a huge amount of uptake from the rest of the employees at the luxury brand.

“I think they are not really interested but it might be also because they get fewer emails than me,” Andretta said.

Jean-Claude Biver, chief executive of luxury watch brand Hublot, however, said Andretta’s idea was nice but unrealistic and impractical. “The one who can allow himself not to read or answer emails during an entire day in a working week indulges in real luxury,” he told Reuters.