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Although to a different extent than fashion brands, the wholesale segment is also required to manage digital content production processes. Diverse and distinct, yet with many inevitable points of connection. In the world of fashion and luxury, brands and retailers share many aspects and are closely interconnected. Their paths run parallel with many intersections, but both brands and retailers follow specific routes that are far from secondary.
In this context, content production has also become central for wholesale. The digital content factory revolution now involves this segment as well, which faces ambitious goals, challenges, and opportunities, some of which overlap with those of brands. However, just like brands, multibrand retailers can also ride this revolution. The goal: to achieve high-quality output while reducing the time and cost of omnichannel production and publication of digital product content. We discussed this in the retailer edition of the Digital Content Factory Revolution, a series of events designed to share insights and engage with various players in the ongoing revolution in content production and distribution processes within the fashion industry.
Retailers and digital content
Let’s start by defining the scope of our discussion on this topic. When we talk about retailers or the wholesale segment, we’re referring to multibrand stores in the fashion sector.
Since these entities resell branded products, they need to produce content for three primary channels:
- Their own e-commerce platforms;
- Marketplaces like Farfetch;
- Social media/digital marketing platforms, used both to promote their stores and to support sales on their e-commerce sites.
Retailers, therefore, must manage processes related to receiving the items, photography, metadata creation, product descriptions, image post-production, and content publication. It’s essential to understand the specific needs of this segment compared to those of brands and respond with the most suitable solutions—both from a technical and process perspective.
Inside the Factory
Let’s start with a premise: technology alone doesn’t solve problems. It’s similar to what we’ve seen with artificial intelligence—AI isn’t magic. Rather, it’s an important process resource. Technology, in a broad sense, can make a difference if it’s properly integrated into a workflow. This is why, at Hyphen, we always begin with a process analysis.
In our view, the content production process for retailers should be structured just like a factory, with different production lines—descriptions, translations, metadata, images, and videos. And just like in a modern factory, AI comes into play, replacing or enhancing some workflows that are currently manual.
Why do all of this? Because the digital version of a product increasingly drives and often fulfills the desire to purchase. Therefore, particular care and attention must be devoted to this activity, using new paradigms to optimize the content creation and distribution process.
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Wholesale market challenges
Addressing solutions means starting with an analysis of the problems retailers face. The wholesale segment encounters several factors that objectively complicate content production.
First of all, there are many brands to manage, each with its own technical (product nature, materials, etc.) and creative peculiarities, as every brand may require different photographic treatments and attention. Furthermore, retailers not only manage multiple brands but also different product categories, each with its own specific shooting configurations.
Wholesale also suffers from a lack of product information provided by brands. Currently, few companies supply their customers/retailers with a complete and sufficient set of information. In most cases, retailers only receive the product, not its digital identity, which they must then create, with all the work that entails. This includes the set of distinctive attributes (images, videos, texts, translations, attributes, etc.) that belong to the physical product.
Why is creating a product’s digital identity so crucial? Because it provides retailers the opportunity to optimize and increase their capacity to produce, manage, and distribute digital content based on the usage context and the needs of the process and channel. It’s all about managing the digital factory effectively—eliminating redundancies and waste of time and resources, not complicating processes.
Time factor and post-Covid era
When analyzing the main challenges of the wholesale segment, the time factor stands out. Retailers have much tighter timelines than brands for creating content. Products are received only when they are ready for sale, whereas brands have samples months in advance, giving them more time to organize shoots and gather product information. In short, they can get ahead and outline a clear schedule. Retailers, on the other hand, are often forced to rush. Each extra day spent on shooting is a lost day of sales, and without content, products can’t be sold online. In many cases, this is the same problem that brand e-commerce platforms face. Being able to view all content production (physical and digital, textual and visual) as a single supply chain offers tangible advantages for the wholesale segment as well.
In this overview, we cannot overlook the impact of COVID-19. In many cases, retailers have over-invested in digital, allocating resources (both human and otherwise) to manage the increased importance of e-commerce and the surge in demand. Now the scenario has changed. Retailers find themselves with higher fixed costs, and it is urgent for them to find effective solutions to reorganize their processes and structure them efficiently to better manage content production.
New paradigms for optimizing content creation
So, what’s the direction? In other words, what should retailers do to tackle these pressing challenges and emerge as winners? Once again, there’s no magic wand that fixes everything. Instead, a different approach is needed, along with the right software and hardware solutions, integrated with AI systems, to help optimize the content creation process.
This is where Hyphen extends a helping hand to retailers, understanding their specific needs to manage the digital factory efficiently. Specifically:
- Creating exclusive content from an industrial foundation;
- Optimizing production from a technical standpoint, but also in terms of process and management (economically and time-wise).
