The Edit is our weekly show, where Social Editor Grace Robinson quizzes editor-in-chief Ben Hanson on some of the most significant fashion and technology stories from the past seven days.
This week, Grace and Ben are on a quickfire tour of: e-commerce’s shaky foundations, eComID’s shopping passports, Anthropic’s retail agents and Model Hardware Standard, fast-fashion fees and Shein’s positioning, and Gen Z’s relationship with fashion and technology.
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Grace Robinson: Welcome to The Edit from The Interline, the show where we run a quickfire analysis on our pick of the most important fashion and beauty technology stories from the last seven days. I’m Grace, the Social Editor, and I’m joined by Ben, the Editor-in-Chief. Together, we have around 25 minutes to give you our analysis on the stories that we think really matter.
Ben Hanson: Hello, Grace. Good to see you again. Both of us back in our usual backgrounds this week.
Grace Robinson: Yeah, exactly. Good to be back in the regular places, for sure.
Ben Hanson: Cool. Let’s do it. Hit me.
eCommerce: innovation needs solid foundations
Grace Robinson: I want to begin this week by talking about a report from BoF, Business of Fashion. I know that you actually contributed to this report, so I’m really intrigued to get your thoughts.
In partnership with Amazon Fashion, BoF did some investigation into what big fashion and sports brands are getting right and wrong in terms of how they’re selling online. They discovered a whole load of different things, but one thing that really stood out to me was the fact that big brands are chasing novel innovation rather than mastering the fundamentals when they’re selling online. They’re not mastering things like product information or fit information.
Since you did contribute to this report, I wanted to get your take on why you think brands are chasing innovation on such shaky foundations.
Ben Hanson: Yes, good question. This is the first time I’ve been asked to contribute to a Business of Fashion report, so it was a nice milestone for me individually. They also sent me a printed copy of it, which I’m not used to getting. It feels old school in a very pleasant way.
It’s 85 pages. I would recommend people go read the full thing. There’s no way we can do all of it justice in this discussion. The bit that you zeroed in on, though, is the bit that I had the most input on and was able to share the most thoughts about. It’s also the one that I think is the most relevant to some of the other stuff that we’re going to talk about.
It’s the disconnect between the degree of priority that brands and retailers are placing on user experience, newness and innovation in e-commerce, versus the back-end data and the product information, the completeness and accuracy and availability of all that. I think the statistics in there are something like 50%+ of brand and retail leaders are concentrating their efforts on improving the front-end experience. I think something less than 20% of industry leaders put the product information as a priority.
Now, I hate to kick us off this way, but those two things are both AI stories at the moment in particular. In order for AI to recommend a product or to translate your intent as a consumer, as a person that’s been having a multi-turn query with an AI agent, it needs a robust, complete and broad set of product information.
It’s one thing to just have a woolly product description that says, “Hey, this is intended for this, and you couldn’t use it in this scenario.” You also need to supplement that with really accurate information. If people are having natural-language queries about products, those have to be anchored in what the product actually is, as well as the broader story around it.
That’s also where companies are applying these front-end efforts. When you talk about user experience and innovation and newness in e-commerce, you’re talking about new ways to put interfaces in between brands and consumers. You’re talking about, very likely, optimising for AI interactions either on-page or within chatbots that already exist out there.
This is one of my favourite types of thing to get asked about and have the opportunity to talk about: the fact that to do cool new stuff, you need boring foundations in data. It’s a really interesting finding in this report, and it’s something that I think we’ve been banging the drum about, not just in e-commerce and retail, but in general, for years and years at this point.
I would say go read the report, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a lot in there.
Shopper passports: personalisation that travels with you
Grace Robinson: The next story was actually something that happened while I was away on holiday and while you were travelling, but it does relate to the BoF report, so I still wanted to talk about it.
A Stockholm-based company called eComID is creating the landscape of shopping passports. These are essentially digital IDs that shoppers and consumers can use, and they carry different information like taste preferences or fit information. They help shoppers have more intentional purchases while they’re shopping for fashion. They also help brands because the brands have more personal information about their consumers, so they can offer more personalised shopping experiences.
eComID has just raised $17 million worth of seed funding. I think it was announced just a couple of days ago that they’ve acquired Nilum’s AI technology. This is going to help them enter the second-hand shopping space and recommerce. This is obviously a really big fashion-tech story, so I wanted to get your take on what you make of this news and what it means for fashion.
Ben Hanson: Digital product passports, as we’re aware, are a codified way of capturing the journey, the composition, the sustainability and impact profile of a piece of apparel or footwear or an accessory and so on. eComID’s proposal is fundamentally the same thing, but for the shopper themselves. It’s designed to capture all of the attributes that are important when it comes to how we shop online.
People have tried stuff like this before with fit profiles and things like that. One of my guests at Première Vision Paris, which I’ve just come back from, was Carla Buzasi, who’s CEO of WGSN. She was talking about the Zara returns experience and fit recommendations experience, which has this element of personalisation to it: “Okay, you’ve bought things that fitted before. How likely is this thing to fit you?”
People have tried this consumer profiling, consumer passporting thing at that sort of fit level before. It’s obviously very straightforward to do it at the “What’s your name? What’s your email address? How old are you? What country do you come from?” level. All of that is table stakes for existing loyalty.
What eComID’s proposal is, and I think it’s the same one that the big AI companies are certainly circling at the minute, is all of the other stuff that gets baked into this idea of intent or personality. So that when you or I go and visit an online retailer, we show up in a way that allows them to instantly know and understand a lot about our preferences. They could be fit preferences. They could be sustainability preferences. A lot about our lives.
A long time ago, I think a good year or year and a half ago maybe, we wrote a piece about how AI memory was the next frontier. AI memory being, if you have it turned on in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, the profile of you that it builds up over time from the interactions that you have.
Those memories are all proprietary. You can import from ChatGPT to Claude and vice versa, but generally speaking, those companies want to keep that information about you within their sphere for two reasons. One, it makes it less tempting to switch chatbot providers. People say this all the time: “I talk to ChatGPT because it knows me, versus when I go talk to Claude or Gemini, I feel like it doesn’t.”
The other is that this kind of intent information is becoming more and more valuable to brands and retailers over time as well. If you have an AI shopping assistant on your webpage, if you do it that way, if you’re like, “Hey, we have a chatbot. Talk to it, and it will make product recommendations for you,” unless that customer is very loyal and is already signed in, or is a member if you’re a member-based organisation, you’re starting that turn over and over every time somebody new visits. It can be a good customer acquisition, conversion and personalisation lever, but you have to be able to pull it fresh every time.
The proposition here is very similar to, if you’ve ever heard about the way gambling approaches things like KYC, “know your customer”. In those regulated industries, it’s mandatory to be able to know if somebody has a gambling addiction, for instance. In fashion, it’s all preference-based and is non-mandatory, but I think this kind of enhanced KYC personalisation thing is a really smart idea.
If you extend it into the recommerce, the second-hand side of stuff as well, I can only assume that the vision is to pair this with what you and I have talked about before: that wardrobe quantification stuff and knowing what people already have and already wear. Enabling them to say, “Well, okay, maybe now is the time to sell this,” or, “If you buy this used thing, then it’s going to fit well with the other things that you have.” Being able to say, “Okay, you are somebody who cares about the carbon footprint of the things that you buy. Here’s the reduction that you get in this instance.”
I don’t know. We talk a lot about personalisation in fashion. I feel like these different bits of it are starting to come together in a more meaningful way. This is one of those areas where I think I personally will trade some privacy for some level of personalisation. This is something that actually does appeal to me: being able to have this agnostic profile.
It’s potentially a massive data breach risk down the line, but I don’t know what isn’t at this stage. I don’t know. What do you think?
Grace Robinson: I think it’s a kind of service that will be slow to be adopted, but I do think that in the future, it could be a way that everyone shops, and it could bring a lot of value for everyone. It’s just getting over that initial hurdle of people handing over their data and actually taking the time to give their preferences and everything like that. But I do think it has the potential to really change how people shop. Only time will tell, really.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. And it’s another third party, is the thing. Every time you introduce a new platform that you have to provide information to, that is a pause, it’s a barrier, it’s a risk for consumers. But at least it’s explicit.
This is going to sound like a completely parallel story, but I had an email from Manchester Airport Group last week. I fly out of Manchester a lot. It said, “Thanks to a third-party processor, information has now leaked about your name, email address, date of birth, phone number tied to your registration plate.” I’m like, “Cool. I didn’t opt into any of that.” None of that was explicitly made upfront to me, and there’s a fantastic data breach.
In this case, at least, I do feel that friction is there. But I think we live in a world where people assume that so much data is being captured about them anyway, that actually doing it explicitly, giving it to a provider where you get value in return instead of just, “You parked here, and now anybody can clone your licence plate,” feels like a fairer deal.
Anthropic: shopping agents and the Model Hardware Standard
Grace Robinson: The next story is staying on the topic of personalisation in a way, because I know that we’ve spoken a lot about the rise of agentic shopping in fashion. This week, it feels like there’s been a lot more developments in this space. Anthropic seems to be making an even bigger push into fashion retail and potentially fashion manufacturing as well.
The first story that I wanted to talk about, reported by Reuters, was the fact that Anthropic has just created this blueprint for fashion brands. The blueprint allows brands to create their own AI agents that they can put onto their e-commerce. These give preference-based suggestions, and they can also add different items to customers’ shopping carts. Essentially, this is all to drive more sales for the brand using the agent.
On top of this, there was another interesting story from Anthropic, because they’ve just released a research preview of a new model called Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Put very simply, it’s a set of standardised drivers designed to let AI agents easily interface with and also control arbitrary devices.
Right now, MHS is being used in test labs, and it’s helping to speed up different scientific experiments. But there is the potential for this kind of technology to be used in fashion manufacturing. I’m sure you have a lot of thoughts on it. What do you make of all these advancements?
Ben Hanson: You’ve been able to do consumer-facing AI assistants and merchandising assistants and things for a long time, even based on Anthropic’s own models. You could do something with Claude if you were a retailer and you wanted to say, “The holidays are coming up,” which is the thrust for this, “I need to make sure I’ve got a chatbot interface on my website.”
You’ve always been able to do that, but you’ve been able to do it in more of a DIY sort of way. You’d build it on Cloudflare Workers or something like that, and you would plug it into whatever model you felt like. You would ground it in your product catalogue and all those other things.
What these blueprints are is a much more user-friendly, turnkey way for, to me, small to medium brands and retailers who have not gone down the road of custom-building things like that on top of either closed-weights or open-weights models, who literally just play around with Claude or ChatGPT at the moment. It’s a way of starting to verticalise software that is very, very general purpose.
You know as well as anybody: you sit down, you chat to Claude, ChatGPT. It can and will do anything within reason. Both of those companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, have gone through very in-depth cycles of verticalisation for specific industries. They have prepackaged deployments and connectors and things for the legal sector. They have the same for the financial sector and banking and things as well.
Neither of them has one for fashion at this stage, for retail. I think this is probably a little bit of a stopgap on the way to being able to do some of that deeper domain side of things.
It’s an interesting curio, and I think it also represents just how many brands and retailers are thinking, “Literally, Christmas is coming, Thanksgiving is coming, other holidays around the world are coming. I hear so much about agentic commerce. I’m not ready to build something by myself. I’m not ready to go partner with a big third-party company to do it. I already use Claude. What can I meaningfully do to start to put it in front of people and start to improve the way that I use it?”
Now, the Model Hardware Standard is a little more interesting. Anthropic, as people listening to this will probably remember, are the company behind MCP, the Model Context Protocol, which is the standard that everybody has settled on that allows LLMs to fetch data from pre-existing solutions and platforms and databases and things like that. If you have Claude connected to your Gmail or you have it connected to your CRM or to something else, that’s the standard for that.
The push here is to do the same for physical devices. It is only in science at the minute. That’s how they’ve launched the preview window for it. It’s in science labs, as you mentioned. Science labs full of lots of very specialist machinery that people with specialist skills use to accomplish very narrow objectives. Fashion manufacturing can do the same thing.
I’m not suggesting that Anthropic is actually looking to have Claude drive material cut plans and optimise yields and things like that, or to drive digital printing, or somewhere down the line to push into sewing or what have you. But the principle is the same. If MHS becomes as established and codified as MCP is, there’s a lot of specialist machinery on a typical fashion shop floor as well. I think it’s not unreasonable to say that if the standard takes off, it’s a standard that could play out in not just shopfronts, but on factory floors and things as well.
Fast-fashion fees: Shein’s price and positioning problem
Grace Robinson: The next story is also something that happened while you were away on stage at Première Vision, but I’m still really keen to talk about it because I do think it’s really interesting. Ever since Shein has been on its journey into the public markets, covered by the Financial Times, it feels like it’s been facing more and more challenges. One key challenge has been the regulatory and financial pressure that’s really forcing the company to raise its prices.
Just to give a couple of examples, the US ended its duty-free exemption for small parcels, and the European Union introduced a €3 customs charge per item on low-value imports. Now this week, as the BBC reports, there’s been even more fees being put on ultra-fast fashion because France is imposing a new fee on cheap fashion items which could reach almost €20 per garment by 2030. Again, this is another regulation that could force Shein’s prices up.
I really wanted to get your take on this generally, but I will say that, from my personal perspective, it doesn’t feel like we’re witnessing the downfall of SHEIN. I think they’re just going to refocus their strategy because they recently launched a sub-brand called Musera. This is 100% operated by SHEIN, but it has different branding, and also the prices are a bit higher. It feels like SHEIN is trying to train the consumer to get used to these higher prices. I wanted to get your take on all of this news and this story.
Ben Hanson: Cool. Well, I’ve never bought anything from SHEIN, so I definitely didn’t notice that they were launching a new brand. Not primarily an ethical position. I’m just lazy. I do not object necessarily to the idea of ultra-fast fashion, and that is the crux of this, really.
You’re right. I was in France as this was happening. I didn’t notice this news. You brought this one across my desk. I think I’m on record before saying I don’t agree with the idea of regulating away demand. I’m not a pure laissez-faire capitalist, but I also do think, for a variety of reasons, not just cost of living but preference, people like cheap clothes, and they like buying cheap clothes in volume. I think you can divert some of that demand temporarily. I don’t think you can squash it through this kind of regulation.
Now, I’m certainly not arguing against the idea that ultra-fast fashion and high volume is damaging to the environment. It changes people’s perception of what fashion should be. I buy all of those ideas, and I do think it needs regulation from that point of view.
This also ties to SHEIN’s IPO, which happened pretty recently. You and I talked about it in the run-up to it when analysts were forecasting that it would be dramatically lower than their valuation was a couple of years ago. That panned out, and since then, it’s not been faring terribly well either out in the open market.
When you and I last talked about SHEIN, the conclusion we reached was it’s nothing different than any other fashion brand. It’s done a very good job of operationalising and optimising making cheap, high-volume stuff and shipping it around the world through loopholes that are now closed, but it’s been priced as a tech company. Actually, Hannah Crump from BoF Insights, who was on the Mailroom episode last week, said some of the same stuff. People have seen SHEIN as a very different type of company than a traditional fashion brand.
What we’re seeing here with launching a new label and saying, “Okay, we’re now moving upmarket slightly,” is they’re pulling the same kind of price and positioning levers that everybody else in the mass market is. Everybody is realising that they can attach a more premium price point to something and start to push into a different segment of the market.
I don’t think we’re seeing the end of SHEIN as the vanguard of what it takes to ship ultra-high-value stuff. I think we’ll see more competition in that space, and I think that will force SHEIN itself to innovate more. I think we’ll see newness in what it means to ship cheap stuff around the world in high volumes.
But I think we’re also going to see the Toyota and Lexus play. It’s the, “We need to have multiple brands for people to align themselves with.” That’s what it feels like to me, anyway.
Gen Z: products over brands and technology fatigue
Grace Robinson: Finally, I want to talk about a piece that we saw from Puck in Lauren Sherman’s newsletter called Line Sheet. She sat down with, I think, 18 students across 15 US universities, and they’re all scholars from the Fashion Scholarship Fund. She basically spoke to them about what they think about the fashion industry and if they want to get into it.
Essentially, to summarise what all of the students said, they said that they didn’t fear that AI was going to take their jobs, but they do fear that AI is going to impact creativity. They unsurprisingly said that they’re all really pro second-hand fashion and shop a lot of second-hand fashion. They also, which was a bit more surprising, said that they’re against celebrity endorsement for brands, and they’re more sold by a single product rather than just a brand.
I am technically Gen Z, even though I’m on the cusp of being an older Gen Z, but I am still in that bracket. I do still really relate to all of these things that all the students said. Personally, I think it’s because of the hyperfragmentation of media and the fact that there is no authority in fashion to really dictate the trends. This has meant that Gen Z has this more mix-and-match approach to fashion shopping and also how they see the fashion industry.
But obviously you’re not in the Gen Z bracket, so I wanted to get your take on what you think of this story and also what you think that brands should be thinking about when it comes to how they market and sell to Gen Z.
Ben Hanson: I am visibly, obviously not in the Gen Z bracket. You are correct. Thank you for that. I’m also on the older end of millennial. If I was born, I think, nine months later, I would have been Gen X. I also know what it’s like to straddle two different cohorts and not quite feel like you fit into either of them exactly.
I don’t think there’s much that’s surprising to me in this one, but the second-hand part is especially interesting. I think this was Carla from WGSN while we were at Première Vision. She was saying that, yes, younger people gravitate towards used and pre-loved clothing. They don’t just do it because it’s cheap. They don’t just do it because it’s valuable. They do it as a method of self-expression and also for the thrill of it, the thrill of the hunt, that kind of thing.
People have always liked getting deals. I don’t think you have to go too far back in time, to my parents’ or my grandparents’ generation, where people would clip coupons out of the newspaper, and that was part of their personality. I think there’s that kind of behavioural hook in there as well.
Lack of brand loyalty is something that every brand is wrestling with. The panel at PV that I hosted about growth, where I did have a celebrity-led brand on there as well as analysts from Business of Fashion and Euromonitor, was talking about how every brand is basically stealing market share from every other brand because there is not much in the way of absolute industry growth to be had.
What that means is that if no brand is able to really grow within its own lane, every brand is trying to steal market share from every other brand. You end up with very fickle consumers like this who prioritise product over a particular brand or a particular retailer. I do also think that’s a function of what we hear about younger people in particular being willing to spend more on more durable pieces and things like that. Naturally, in that kind of mindset, you’re going to prioritise the attributes of the product itself rather than necessarily the company that it comes through.
There was a really interesting quote in this article that I did like, and that I think maybe is a bit of tension between your generation and mine as well. There’s a student quoted in there who says their generation is a bit sick of technology. It’s the future to you guys, i.e. older people, me and upwards. It doesn’t feel like the future to Gen Z.
That’s something that I think we see in our research and across AI. It’s something I certainly saw at Première Vision in the talk I hosted about AI, which, spoiler, had a lot of divisive opinion that didn’t neatly sit across generational lines, but could have done. I think it’s this idea that young people feel like technology is just a thing that’s happening to them and that they have no agency over, and that they have not really had a net benefit from it in the way that my generation did.
I’m old enough that I lived through the introduction of the internet. I lived through the introduction of smartphones, social media. For better and worse, technology has really changed my life during the course of my life, and when I’ve been aware of it.
You’re born in the early 2000s and thereabouts, and so you’re in your early to mid-twenties. Technology has been a bit of a raw deal for you. It has not materially benefited you in the way that it has other people, certainly not in a way that you have a before and after that you can reference.
I think when you layer AI on top of that right now, that’s where a lot of this comes from. People do object to AI for creative and ethical reasons and things, but I think a lot of people object to it because it just feels like the latest in a salvo of technology that is not giving or conferring any advantage on younger people. It feels like it’s for somebody else and feels like it’s just being unduly piled on them.
I don’t know. As a younger person, what do you think?
Grace Robinson: Yeah. I think it’s exactly what you said: it just feels like new technologies, AI specifically, are being forced on people, and we don’t have a lot of control over it. I think that is exactly where the negative connotations come about. But it’ll be interesting to see where it all goes, really, especially in terms of fashion.