As our regular readers will know, The Interline will hit a major milestone this spring. In March 2022, we’ll have been running for two years – giving us the dubious honour of being about the same age as COVID. A lot has changed in the world in that time – more than anyone expected. And the way we consume content looks very quite today to how it looked pre-COVID, as well as how it looked in the early days of the pandemic.
In those early days, the pendulum swung hard towards the virtual. We were entering uncharted territory, and at the same time as traditionally-physical experiences were being forced to go digital, people were looking for new ways to connect with one another at a time of acute isolation. In 2022, thanks to the incredible impact of science (and the more pragmatic reality of the virus becoming endemic), those physical experiences will come back, and The Interline is looking forward to attending and supporting in-person events a little later this year.
Life is also going to be springing back up elsewhere, for those of us fortunate enough to live in countries with high vaccination coverage. A world of coffee shops, trains, planes, parties, runway shows, trade fairs and much more is a world we’ve all missed.
It’s also a world that doesn’t always give us the time we’d like to consume content in a dedicated sitting. Traditional editorial has always been the foundation of The Interline, and we’re going to be producing even more of it this year than ever – both in-house and in our collaborations with technology companies. We know our readers value our written content, and we’re committed to taking it to the next level. But at the same time, as society gears back up again, we know people want content that fits around their lives.
That’s why The Interline will be launching a new initiative, starting very soon. To cap off each month of our editorial calendar, I’ll be sitting down with a guest (or sometimes a couple of guests) to capture the essence of the preceding month’s topic, and to discuss the key elements that brands and retailers should be thinking about in that particular area of their digital transformation strategies.
That discussion will be published as The Interline Podcast – freely available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and almost everywhere else you might want to listen to podcasts. At the end of every month, we’ll release a new full episode, and a little later we’ll publish a condensed version: just the essentials, in fifteen minutes. Perfect for a coffee break, a walk, or the drive to school.
We’ll be announcing our first guests soon, but to provide a bit of a teaser, this year I’m looking forward to welcoming brand CEOs, technology founders, creative designers (digital and physical), regulators and NGOs, and more. We plan to ask the right questions, and we’re honoured to already have a strong line-up of the right people to answer them.
We’ll also be marking our two-year anniversary in some other exciting ways when it comes, and before that we’re also putting considerable work into making sure The Interline can grow the right way in 2022 and well beyond. We’re in the process of securing and announcing a raft of new writers who really know technology and who really know fashion, and we’re working on another twelve months of now-multimedia content aligned with the topics that matter most to the fashion industry.
As we move forward from here, and into spaces – online and off – that have been fundamentally changed by the pandemic, The Interline will be sticking to its guiding principle: that technology for fashion deserves detailed analysis. What’s changing is that that analysis will come in new formats, so that the fast-growing pool of people who are tasked with delivering on digital transformation objectives for the world’s leading brands are armed with the right insights, however they want to consume them.
The first episode of The Interline Podcast will be released very soon, wrapping up our coverage of Intelligent Retail. New episodes will follow on a monthly schedule.
