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Digital Showrooms can bring tons of benefits to fashion brands. They can help them be more efficient, more sustainable and when used effectively, boost sales. Brands like Tommy Hilfiger have reaped these benefits for years, setting a benchmark across the industry. What many brands don’t know yet is that Digital Showrooms can do much more than digitizing wholesale selling. Here are three benefits of digital showrooms you haven’t heard of yet, but Tommy Hilfiger has known for years.
#1 Smaller, stronger collections
From sample delays to SKU productivity, getting ready for a sales season can be a logistical nightmare. On top of that, most wholesale collections are unnecessarily big and ultimately lead to product cancellations, which are in most cases the result of the size of the collection itself. GASP!
Merchandisers can benefit from Digital Showrooms to build better wholesale assortments. Digital Showrooms increase the visibility of key hero items, making it easier for sales reps to push the same products across markets. This pushes commonality forward and results in higher SKU productivity, which in turn can enable brands to gradually reduce their total collection size.
#2 Better marketing campaigns
Marketing campaigns are usually created after the wholesale sales season. Marketing teams don’t always have it easy: orders aren’t that consistent, hero items haven’t been bought as planned and time to execute is tight. Marketing campaigns end up promoting products that aren’t widely sold-in, products that not all key retailers have bought in or that aren’t even present across their own & operated channels.
One benefit of digital showrooms is using storytelling to drive sales. Marketing teams can use this power to create campaigns (instead of collateral assets) earlier in the calendar for wholesale customers, giving them the confidence to buy into key assortments. The earlier marketing teams work in the calendar the more time they have to create campaigns that are relevant for the brand, customers, and consumers.
#3 Enhanced omnichannel experience
Be where consumers can find you and tell a story that inspires them to buy. That is the omnichannel dream. The main challenge to this dream isn’t presence, but relevancy. In order to be more relevant, a brand's presence needs to be more consistent. Retail, E-Comm, and Wholesale offerings aren't always that aligned and that results in confused consumers and poor brand positioning.
Consistency is a benefit of digital showrooms too. The visual and collaboration features from digital and virtual showrooms make them useful for internal teams too. Brands benefit from this by increasing channel consistency in three ways:
- Product teams create key assortments that will be supported by marketing. Wholesale, Retail, and E-comm teams can build their buys starting with these assortments.
- Wholesale customers buy more into key assortments thanks to the better storytelling that digital showrooms bring into the process.
- Retail and E-comm teams can use the assortment-building capabilities of digital showrooms to visualize buys outside of excel and other retail planning tools.
Technology can’t unlock these benefits. Brands can.
Fashion is digitizing at an incredible speed, but the true value of digitization is yet to be discovered. Technology can “keep business running”, but digital can do much more. All these benefits of digital showrooms are possible (Tommy Hilfiger did it), but the software alone won’t do it. You will. You’ll need to change things and you’ll need a new mindset.
Push through the pain points using digital to grow.
“No pain, no gain” they say.
We say “Learn, grow, repeat”.
Watch the webinar Adopting a Digital Mindset in Fashion for a deep dive on this topic
