Amazon Fashion is where fashion and cutting-edge technology meet. As America’s ‘Biggest Apparel Retailer’ according to Forbes, they experiment with bold new ideas while leveraging Amazon’s unique strengths. The aim is to provide intuitive experiences that accommodate a growing and diverse selection, while enabling customers to make confident buying decisions, having fun along the way.
Define the three year strategic plan for Amazon Fashion from a holistic CX perspective on how address the most pertinent customer painpoints and highlight key (foundational) opportunity areas to work backwards from.
The future of retail ...
Department stores weren’t always dull places to buy things less efficiently than you can online. In the early days, their wonders included elegant displays and original artwork. Stores held concerts and fashion shows. They provided playgrounds and hangouts. They were educational and gave all sorts of lessons- from makeup application to how to care for your product properly
... May well be in the past.
Historically, shopping has been a sensory experience.It was always as much an emotional experience as it was a physical, tactile one. The digital transformation must be seen as an opportunity to rethink experiences in shopping. The past teaches us that commerce has always been a hub, a major social event, a means to bring people back together over and over again. This helped frame the mindset that Amazon must act and react not just as a shopping destination, but as a shopping experience for our customers.
Based on what I was learning from the field studies, brick & mortar strategies, and the current gaps in Amazon customer journeys while shopping for Fashion, I began to develop an Experiential Mall concept that married much of what worked well and how it could exist and function in the digital space.
Top Amazon Fashion customer frustrations:
The Mall Directory
An anchored navigation that will allow customers to shop by department, by image, gender, brand, occasion, or range. Fit, style, price and brand preferences can be saved and applied for a curated navigation. This is a contextual nav that will; update based on customer query and intent.
Storefronts & Signage
Interesting window displays and signage/verbiage help entice customers to come in. Change it up on a regular basis so as not to grow stale or boring.
The Decompression Zone
Instead of serving up an overwhelming set of results, send the customer to a decompression zone, similar to a store entrance. Showcased products and sections of the store are quickly taken in. Customers need this time and space to acclimate themselves to their surroundings.
Strategic In-store Layout & Displays
In-store displays help show customers how things look in context, on-model, through clever visual merchandizing. Inspire on all levels and allow the customers to shop all the items displayed directly from the lifestyle shots.
The Loyal Treatment
While shopping, store associates help you find what you are looking for, help swap sizes and items when you are trying things on, suggest other items that will pair nicely. They know what you like, how you like things to fit, and have a good idea of what would pair nicely with things that are already in your wardrobe. “Show me more like this” and the results will update to reflect everything that is visually similar within a customer’s particular tier- akin to a sale associate running the store and pulling every item they can imagine might fit that same look and feel. Over time, often after multiple visits, the associate may get to know your likes and dislikes and begin making recommendations based on this.
The Community
Similar to people-watching and being inspired by those around us, customers can find people whose unique style and looks resonate with them. Follow to see more street style influences, similar looks, purchase directly from the image and save to your style preferences to get recommendations based on the influencer’s styling.
Clustering
Strategically placing stores, brands and products that are alike, related, and share a similar look & feel or demographic- close together to make the shopping experience as effortless as possible.
Pop-ups
Limited time items, hot new releases, quick pop-ups to showcase a local designer. Collaborate with brick-and-mortar pop-up spaces to create a truly immersive experience where a customer can visit the location to learn more, get special deals, try items on and order from the showroom.
The Concierge
Like a fashion magazine or fashion show- Spacing, sights, sounds can all set a mood and inspire a customer. Leverage rich, engaging media to help customer remain engaged and excited. A feed page where everything and everyone is relevant to you. This modular stream serves not only as an anchor point for everythingAmazon Fashion and all pieces of the mall, but seamlessly leads you in and out of stores and featured collections, all while giving you an up-to date glimpse around. Window-shop your favorite brand stores, learn about the latest programs, sales, drops, featured designers, take in the sights and sounds, get inspired by the people around you, drop in and get recommendations from your stylist, collections based on past purchases and style preferences.
The Dressing Room
A ranking/segmentation system or destination that helps steer a customer’s results and targets the collections/products/services specifically for that individual based on demographic, input preferences, fashion profile, past purchases and“hearted” items or brands. The more a customer engages, the more accurate the results set becomes.
Amazon has made strategic moves over the last several years that positioned it to take advantage of consumers’ digital desires. They had a nearly 16% share of the overall clothing and apparel market in 2020, up from 9.5% in 2019 and just over 7% in 2018. Looking just at eCommerce, Amazon has a 45% share of clothing and apparel sales, up from about 41% in 2019.
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a product design strategist is watching something start as a rough sketch, to turning into something millions of customers are interacting with and utilizing every day. Each concept outlined in the Experiential Mall was dialed up over the last 3 years across the Amazon customer's shopping journey and many of which continue to be foundational to other shopping experiences, scaling beyond it's the immediate use.
