Clothes retail AI needs to go back to school - Sneakers edition; Slogans as Vision vs Vision as Guide
You’d see this kind of complaint regularly on social media: someone bought a household item on Amazon and then they keep getting recommendations to buy that thing – again and again. Your social media feeds are flooded with ads for that product, and you keep getting emails from the retailer that you should buy more of that said household item. But how many ladders or meat cleavers do you really need? And do you only need meat cleavers from now on?
Let’s say it is spring and you bought a pair of summer trainers from an online retailer. Within a few days of delivery, you start getting emails like this from the retailer:
“Hiiiiii!! We noticed you bought a pair of light green Superga canvas trainers for the summer. We thought you should also buy all these black canvas shoes from Vans. Look! Here’s ten pairs of black Vans. Buy them now! Or we’ll keep emailing you lists of black canvas shoes till the day you die.”
No human who understands shoes and clothing (or fashion) would try selling you more stuff this way. They wouldn’t focus on trying to sell you more ‘canvas shoes’. A human would draw clues from all aspects of that purchase. They’d know, for example, that Superga and Vans brands represent very different things. Superga has collaborations with supermodels and luxury fashion labels like The Row or Viktor&Rolf. Vans not so much. (If you are States-side you might not see Supergas much but what if I tell you that Kate Middleton famously wears them regularly? Now you get it.)
A human salesperson would understand that if you are a woman who bought a pair of light-coloured summery canvas shoes from an Italian brand, you might need things like white T-shirts, sunglasses, linen trousers, floaty dresses, white socks, sandals, Birkenstocks – but not black skater shoes. Humans who sell clothes and shoes even on the mass market understand not just brand loyalty but that people buy certain brands also to associate with a particular idea, signal that they belong to a particular group or demographic. If you are buying a brand-name shoe you are signalling something. You think all this is silly? See the recent ‘outrage’, a ridiculous and funny one, about the British prime minister wearing Adidas Sambas.
There is a lot more learning AI needs to do – especially in areas where social cues and symbols are so important and not obvious to an outsider. Which fashion is notorious for.
Of course, it helps if the people involved in training an AI model for fashion retail understand styles and fashion.
Such a pretty list of values you have there! Is it for real?
I was listening to a conversation with the CEO of Cloudflare on the podcast Decoder with Nilay Patel. It struck me when he mentioned that in business school, like most of us, he scoffed at vision and mission statements. That is until he was faced with situations where the issue wasn’t just about money but he was presented with a moral dilemma.
Making sure your decisions and operations align with values throughout the organisation is something we don’t think enough about.
I’ve written a fair few vision and mission statements for organisations I was leading and helped others write their own. Numerous times I coaxed out what they really wanted and what they believed in. If you’ve never been through this exercise it is harder than it sounds. Important though.
Still, I cannot escape the feeling that most of these statements end up becoming pretty, admirable sentiments to be put on websites and recruitment brochures and don’t quite translate to the day-to-day of doing business. Even though the latter is what they are supposed to be about: drive the way the business operates internally and conducts itself externally.
Sentiments and intentions matter of course (let’s ignore cynics for a second) but what do you really do day to day? Cos that’s what really matters.
It is when establishing and implementing internal processes and when making big-impact business decisions that vision, mission and values should be there both to guide you and highlight the tension between the ideal and the real.
The truly difficult decisions are those that present a unique tension between the why and how you want to conduct business and the reality of the situation.
Maybe what you need to do as a CEO is in conflict with what you as a person, with a family, with a private life, want to do.