A view from Affiliate Window Fashion Focus

Do you know what the key trends are for 2013? Michael and Suds from Poq certainly do, after they went to Affiliate Window’s Fashion Focus event last night (#fashionfocus2013).

Apart from finding out about the latest trends (monochrome for ladies and ‘safety orange’ for men, if you didn’t already know), the most interesting thing discussed was the emphasis on fashion brands putting more information into their product feeds.

The ‘Data Feed Dream’ from Fashion Chick – this is our dream too!

Never heard of product feeds? Basically they’re files containing all the information about products that retailers have on their website. If you work with an ecommerce platform such as Magento, these feeds get produced automatically on a daily or hourly basis. Affiliate networks use them, as well as shopping networks like Ebay and Amazon.

They can be short and sweet, and contain just the product name, size, and stock information. Or they can be more comprehensive, and include the description, the sizing, the materials, and more. That’s what Fashion Chick are promoting in the slide above. They use these feeds on their site, and want fashion brands to include more information.

At Poq, we’re big fans of product feeds. They’re the tool we use to smoothly and easily integrate our mobile apps and websites with our clients’ existing webshops.

Product feeds are a great way for brands to actually put into practice all that talk about omnichannel retail, and a solution to some of the practical problems of bringing bricks-and-mortar and online retail together.

Mobile for fashion brands

The event also saw also some good discussion about mobile, and how it relates to fashion brands in 2013. In fact, Affiliate Window picked ‘mobile’ out as one of their top four trends for affiliate companies, along with movement away from CPA, image recognition, and personalisation.

They highlighted some ways that fashion brands could optimise their mobile strategy, including checking their analytics, working out the pros and cons of responsive design and native apps, and making sure emailing marketing is optimised for mobile.

Mobile can be a vital link between off-line shops and online retail. After all, your customer always has their phone with them.

Another trend discussed was that of bloggers driving quality traffic via affiliate networks. They may bring less volume, but the conversion rate is a lot higher (you can read our article here on connecting with bloggers if you prefer to reach out to them directly)

This was a great event, so thanks to Affiliate Window for inviting us along!