Small and personalized

I downloaded an app today featuring the work of Canadian designer Dace Moore. Available for iPad and iPhone it is a well-made but very simple presentation of the designers work. Romantic photography and video highlight the designer’s fashions and each style has easy links for social sharing, list making and buying. Retail is handled through the web site and the transition between web site and app is smooth.

So it’s a nice fashion website, what is the big deal. I feel this kind of retail gets at the notion of personalization in a very different form. To be sure, individual designers have proffered their work online for a few years now but the level of sophistication has improved dramatically. Dace does a better job of branding than a big retailer ever could because she is able to articulate a singular perspective. The design sense here may only appeal to a relatively narrow segment but that group has high loyalty.

Big retail looks at personalization as the data we have about narrow segments of our population to serve targeted information. If you only buy men’s clothing we will not send you marketing for our children’s sale. See, we know what you like. In the marketing group we all congratulate ourselves on the granularity of our targeting but is it really personal? I was standing at the copy machine recently, when a friend pointed out that both of our shirts were the same. This isn’t an issue for me but when I consider it in the context of the growing movement toward individualization… it feels wrong.
The obvious pushback has many reasonable arguments- big retail must serve millions of shoppers that transact billions of dollars. We must manage hundreds of thousands of pieces of merchandise with offers and messaging on an immense scale. Our reach is on a National scale and single designer’s little site cannot compare to what we do.

While all of that is true I have to ask who really needs it? Big retail hitting the broad target does not address the individual preference in product and that was fine when there were no other choices. Now there are more choices. The corduroy from the Big Box retailer is OK but the ones from Peterman.com are perfect. While you can argue that specialty shops have been around forever the real access to them has not, the difference in that access is indistinguishable in our new world.

The old model has been “from the few to the masses” but I think the masses maybe taking back that control. Can any large company adopt, even on a small scale, personal focus?