What to Watch: Cutting Out the Middleman, Customer Data Will Run Fashion Retail of the Future

Once upon a time a handful of individuals made decisions about what the general public would wear in six months’ time. But in today’s bold, new, online world, when data is often described as being more valuable than oil, the fashion industry is coming closer than ever to its customers — and mostly through the collection, then use, of personal information. All About You For Tarek Müller, cofounder of About You, Europe’s fastest-growing online apparel retailer, personalization is key. About You, founded in 2014 as the result of e-commerce experiments at German online giant Otto Group, is a unicorn start-up, valued at more than $1 billion. In the 2017-18 financial year, it saw revenues of 283 million euros, but this year is on track to grow that by around 60 percent, predicting revenues of between 450 million euros and 480 million euros. Although there are around 250,000 products from more than 1,200 brands available on the site, the company is trying to avoid the “fashion warehouse” business model, a description it uses for larger companies like Amazon and Zalando. About You’s success is likely due to its algorithmic emulation of social media giants. They call it “social e-commerce” and invite brands, influencers, bloggers

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