Latest / The Interline Podcast / Shopping, Sizing, Social, AI Strategy, And Domestic Shoe Manufacturing
Transcript
- speaker-0: So, welcome to the Edit from The Interline, the show where we run a quick fire 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. And together we have less than 25 minutes to give you our analysis on the stories that we think really matter. speaker-1: Hey, Grace, good to be here again. And I'm back in the UK this time. So anyone who's watching this on video will see my typical background. Weirdly, I'm going away again on Saturday for a few days, but I will be back in time for the next of these. So yeah, good to be here. Good to be back on domestic soil. Let's go. speaker-0: The first story this week concerns what might be a bit of a milestone legal case for Agentic Commerce. So Amazon previously filed to prevent Perplexity from allowing its Comet Agentic browser to search and buy things from Amazon on users' behalf. So Amazon were making the claim that Perplexity had committed a federal hacking crime under the CFAA, so Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, accusing them of covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts. However, it's also worth noting that we can also assume that the claim stems from Amazon's effort to prevent Comet from overtaking its own Agenti KI Rufus. So the new ruling says that it was the user, not the agent, accessing Amazon's website. And this was because the agent was running in the user's browser under their command. So perplexity servers were simply receiving what the user sends. So this story does seem to show that we are in this significant Significant inflection point with AI shopping. So, what do you think of this, and what's really going on here? Do you think? speaker-1: This is a couple of things going on. The biggest one is I've never met anybody who actually uses an agentic browser for shopping. ⁓ I'm sure they exist. Otherwise, these companies wouldn't keep making them. But Comet, ⁓ OpenAI's version, I think it's called Atlas, did that get retired? Anyway, there was a whole push for a while towards the idea that AI would live where your tabs live ⁓ and that you would with an LLM as the kind of primary layer in your browser. I think since the... prevailing sentiment in the state of the art has moved on a little bit to where it's more likely that people interact with ⁓ Claude or OpenAI's codecs or like an agent harness like Hermes or something. And that then drives either the ⁓ browser they already have open or that it drives like a headless version that happens in the background. So this is a weird case in that it is a momentous decision. in principle, but it applies to a use case that I think is really rare and really sparse and I don't think is going to become the prevailing use case. But the interesting part of it is, so it was always a weird avenue to go after perplexity here for hacking, essentially, for going after computer fraud and abuse. What was really at issue, I think, was the question of whether Automation, automated browsing, so browsers that are, whether the user is requested for it to happen or not, the browser is taking action under its own steam. ⁓ And to retailers, to websites and so on, ⁓ that looks like bot traffic and it looks like automated traffic. We see this at the Interline, like there is a mess of... automated traffic that breaks down into like big, big format, wide format, scraping, crawling, ⁓ and then this kind of user directed agent excited things. Now, the interesting rule here is to say that. They're basically saying this does not constitute that kind of bot traffic, because what is actually happening here is that an AI agent is going out and taking action on behalf of a shopper who has directed it to do something, and that that is functionally and legally equivalent to the shopper taking the same actions. Now, you correctly called out, I think, that Amazon have their own AI built into the Amazon website, to the Amazon app, which is Rufus. Amazon also have a deep and abiding interest in not giving away a lot of information. They would prefer to capture things in the other direction. And I think the concern is that as more of this agentic stuff takes place, more of the route between the consumer and the retailer gets disintermediated a little bit. Like the consumer, you are not actively sitting there and sifting through Amazon's catalog. It's being done for you. And Amazon would like you to sift through their catalog because that's a chance to upsell you and everything else. This makes it part of this bigger conversation about is... the rise of chat GPT and the billion users, what have you there going to reduce the amount of time that people spend interacting with retailers. It takes us back to the conversation you and I had, I think, either last week or the week before about, ⁓ about daydream and so on being offered up as a service to retailers instead of going through dedicated apps. it seems like there is something shifting here and something happening. It's shifting in a place that I think is maybe less consequential than, the legal part of it would suggest just because behaviorally I don't use agentic browsers and I never really had it never really took root and I'm gonna guess you don't. Well, there we go. Let's see what happens on that one. speaker-0: So the second story is actually about AI again, but I still wanted to talk about it because we've just published the AI Report 2026. And really interestingly, some of the findings in our report actually have a lot of things in common with a piece that we saw from Mark Bain at The Business of Fashion. So Mark's piece was called The Reasons Your AI Investments Aren't Paying Off. And basically the article explains how fashion brands could get a better return on investment. On AI, if they first got a better grip on their internal data. So the article actually heavily focuses on Zolando, who are claiming to get a lot of value out of their AI strategy. And they say, I quote, have the best data on fashion and lifestyle in Europe. And in parallel, the BOF piece also pulls from a new Bain and Company survey that also looks at the barriers companies are facing in terms of them getting what they wanted to. Or expected to out of AI. Interestingly, this survey also shows that most of the respondents cited that the lack of AI progress that they're facing is actually to do with challenges with data access and also integration, along with compliance concerns like data privacy and also competing business needs following shortly after as well. So, do you think that this lines up with what we found in our own AI survey? Does it contradict anything? And are Are brands really struggling to get value out of AI? speaker-1: Yeah, I thought this was an interesting piece. Like Zalando is everybody's go-to for AI success for a bunch of reasons. Like I've interviewed ⁓ somebody, Glatziani Rocha from ⁓ Zalando, who's a creative director at their lounge division. And I did that because they are... ⁓ the furthest ahead, I think, and the most open about their use of generative product images and videography and so on. But as this article backs up, they're also pretty far ahead in having built out the requisite data foundations that are now delivering value when they want to layer AI on top of them. So that's all good and correct. And I think the the main company survey that's cited in here is also it does chime with what we found in the AI report. So the trend that we described is people at large use a lot of AI, but they don't put a lot of trust in it when it comes to making business critical decisions. So I think something like less than a quarter of fashion professionals trust AI enough to make a vital choice based solely on its output. They were always going to take in something else. Part of the reason for that lack of trust is the same finding as the Bain Company one, which is the majority of AI initiatives are either fully sandboxed, i.e. they live completely independent from the rest of the brand or retailer's technology estate, or they're largely standalone with a few connectors and things like that. So the situation that we have is companies are spending a lot of money on AI. People are using it either through heavy incentives and mandates or just of their own volition. People don't trust it because they don't believe they're gonna get accurate answers from it. They would get accurate answers from it, or at least they're far more likely to if they connected it to their wider technology estate, right? If you connected your AI chatbot of choice through API, CLI, MCP to your PLM, your ERP, your CRM, or any of your supplier management, any of these systems, it would then have context and grounding to give you answers that you could build trust in, and then over time that trust behavior would compound. But it's kind of a vicious circle. If you don't trust AI, you're not going to connect it to your sensitive systems. If you don't connect it to your sensitive systems, it's not going to give you accurate answers, and you're not going to trust it. ⁓ So that's kind of the key finding of our AI report. There's a whole bunch of other stuff in there. specific article that you're referencing and the Zalando part of it is evidence that there's no real shortcut to that. The reason that they seem like they've been able to get so much value from AI is because they put all those foundations in place years ago. You cannot just go and do it now and then hope to shortcut that trust. I think the key thing for listeners and watchers to take away from this is that you probably do want to wait what Zalando are doing with AI. It doesn't have to be in the generative image side of things. The pure kind of data level, ⁓ connecting AI to your important systems and so on, it's going to deliver. greater return than treating it in isolation, but you can't magically connect all your systems and you can't magically build those kinds of data foundations. It's still a big governance and technical ask that gets you on the way there. I'd suggest doing the behavioral stuff alongside it, but there's just a lot of heavy lifting and architecting that needs to be done, I think, for people to get value from AI. And that's the conclusion that this article reached. And I think it's the same one that our survey did as well. speaker-0: Next I want to talk about Pinterest. And they've just opened a new London office in Oxford Circus. And what stood out to me about this story and this news is that it feels like Pinterest is really doubling down on its mission to turn inspiration into actual purchases. So we have already seen really successful retail partnerships from Pinterest. For example, they partnered with Primark, and Pinterest reportedly contributed to a 115% uplift in store purchases for Primark. They also had really similar results from HM as well. Now, with regards to the new office, Pinterest's VP of International, Greg Owens, said that this marks retail entering a new era where AI, visual discovery, and physical stores blend seamlessly. And he also described Pinterest as a digital shop window as well, which was really interesting. Now, Pinterest isn't the only platform moving in this direction. More and more social platforms Are investing in features that actually help customers move seamlessly from discovery to purchase. So my question to you is, do you think every social platform is becoming a shopping platform? And what do you think that this shift means for brands trying to connect with customers and drive sales through digital content? speaker-1: So the first thing I'll say is you're more of a social media person than I am and you also live in London. So this story is in your backyard in two respects. I'm gonna give you my take on the latter part of it, which is I've always been open about the fact I don't use social media individually. Like personally, I do use it for work, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. ⁓ It's very clear that every social channel is becoming a transactional channel first and foremost. Like, it's already the case that the entire meta ecosystems of everything across Instagram, WhatsApp and so on exists in service of putting ads in front of people. That's been the stated and open business model for ⁓ a decade plus. ⁓ The transaction side of it. emerged organically from that, I would say. So what you have is not TikTok and Pinterest and so on suddenly going, ⁓ we should really try and become a path, a part of the path to purchase. What it is, is them recognizing that they've become such a force in the path to purchase that they can now start to exert. some power over the brands and retailers and to say, look at the contribution that we are making to your sales. Look at the contribution we're making to your GMV. Look at the incidence of people coming from. Pinterest and other places directly to you and look at the value of those visitors versus the value of visitors coming from traditional search or from direct browsing and so on. Now, I don't have those stats to hand and they're not part of this release, but you have to assume based on the bets that Pinterest and other companies are making that the value of the customer traffic that they're driving is higher than it is through other avenues. What that means is that digital shop window is both. a statement of power and intent from Pinterest and other people, because it recognizes the power, the position that they have in the product journey. It's also a bit of a damning testimony for brands and retailers as a recognition that they don't control the digital channel in the way that they would like to. ⁓ Like I am willing to bet that traffic to Pinterest is higher than traffic to the typical like non-famous brands, ⁓ direct to consumer e-commerce portal. ⁓ So if you're asking me, does social exert a big force over the way that people shop online, yeah, the answer is very clearly yes. ⁓ And I think Pinterest's journey is especially interesting because you've gone from... a platform that was just intended to help people pin images. was the initial thrust of it. I signed up for Pinterest in the early days. It was a pin board. That's where it comes from. Over time, it's leaned much more heavily into kind of duration and influences and people ⁓ kind of assembling collections and assortments and ideas and things from there. And then logically, that's become part of the handoff to ⁓ transactions and so on. This is a very interesting part of e-commerce, a very interesting part of retail tech in general. And it's further evidence of the force we talked about a couple of weeks ago, think around Substack and the native sponsorship programs and things there. Traditional spending on web search and so on is probably on the way out, and this spending on these kinds of channels is certainly on the way up because they just have so much control over the route to the path to purchase. speaker-0: So the next story is about GLP 1s and the fact that they're causing more people to shop in person. So this was covered a lot in the headlines this week, but I was looking at one piece from Reuters, and they were explaining that about 11% of Americans are on GLP 1 weight loss drugs, and with their new bodies, many are inclined to try on clothes in person to try and figure out what styles fit their new size. The piece goes on to say that with this change in shopping, Shopping habits, it means that many fashion retailers are going to need to re-evaluate things like the sizes they carry, the dressing room setups, and also the styling services they offer. So, from a fashion tech perspective, do you think something like Virtual Try-on could bridge this gap, or is there any other kind of tech that could help brands better build their size ranges from the start? speaker-1: Yeah, so ⁓ any conversation about virtual try-on has this baked into it automatically now ⁓ because it has become such a prominent force. it's not, notably, it's not the first time that fashion has, and in recent memory even, has had to deal with kind of changing bodies and bodies that don't necessarily conform to either traditional expectations or traditional... rules and I mean rules in the point of view of like sizing and grading rules rather than like social norms. ⁓ I remember speaking to somebody a couple of years ago, who this is pre-Ozampic and Manjaro, ⁓ and they were talking about having to change the way they approach sizing and points of measure because of the rise of strength training in women. So that's one thing. So women's bodies suddenly take on a slightly different and more muscular aspect than they have done traditionally because strength training just became much more. like universally appealing across, across genders. The other thing is kind of cosmetic surgery as well. So that's, that's been in there as well. Now you have size. you have size grading rules that traditionally would have covered most of the allowance for like chest size relative to waist size relative to hips and all these kinds of things. ⁓ When you start to deal with the rise of kind of cosmetic surgery and implants and things, you'd start to separate the traditional sizing rules from the actual reality. Now, None of that, though, was anywhere near as widespread as the GLP-1 uptake is. If it's true that 11 % of Americans are actually on Ozempic, Manjaro, and so on, I think it represents the biggest change in size data that fashion has had to deal with in a very long time. It also changes, I think, the way that... fashion communicates with its shoppers and buyers. ⁓ So previously outside of like inclusive, purposefully inclusive brands, like size inclusive ones, like companies that would, they don't use these words anymore, but companies that would have been like we cater to big and tall, like that kind of thing. ⁓ Those have always been. slightly kind of not hush hush, there's always been some sensitivity around the way that brands talk to ⁓ people with body types ⁓ that fit outside the typical like small, medium and large brackets. Now the conversation is much more open. I imagine you mentioned styling services, mentioned fitting rooms and so on. You mentioned people coming into stores because they have experienced a significant weight loss and they want to talk about it and they want to spotlight it and they want to be able to take advantage of fashions that they haven't previously been able to. Now, I think there's an opportunity for fashion there because right now a lot of brands designed to outdated size surveys and size sets and size ratios and assumptions and things. It's long been the case, at least for the last five, 10 years, that fashion has wanted to build better demographic data about the people that it actually sells to and the size of their bodies and so on. ⁓ There's never been a great way to do it. There's never been a great incentive to say you customer Please scan your body because I want to be able to better sell to you I think this might represent that opportunity it might represent that incentive ⁓ is to have people who are now advocates for a different way of learning people who are now proud of their body people who've been able to achieve a Level of weight loss that they maybe haven't in the past They're much more willing to have these conversations and you can have those conversations in store around fitting you can have those conversations online remotely in store in a bunch of different places around capturing more granular and more current and contemporaneous data around the size of your actual target demographic. speaker-0: So we're ending this week's episode on a bit of a positive note, which is nice. So I came across this story in Fashion United. An essentially New Balance has opened its first ever garden in its factory in Flimby, in Cumbria. So it's designed to offer a restorative outdoor space for the factory workers who are responsible for the craftsmanship of its made in UK products. Additionally, the garden has also been conceived as this restorative environment where employers Employees can step away from the production floor and spend time immersed in nature. Now, this isn't a typical story that you hear about fashion factories, but do you think we are going to start to see more of this, especially if more brands start to try to showcase their commitment to craft? Or is it just evidence of how differently companies treat their workers closer to home versus further away? speaker-1: It is a nice story, so I'm going to try not to be my usual cynic. Now, I will always commend New Balance for their Made in UK and Made in US strategy, because I went to a talk once here in Manchester, actually, from some of the folks behind the New Balance Made in UK thing. They are very candid about the fact that you can buy footwear made overseas, or you can buy the same footwear. ⁓ It's not always 100 % equivalent in color ways and stuff, but the platforms, ⁓ the uppers, the materials are the same, the construction techniques and things are the same. They're always very candid about the fact that you can buy a version of that made overseas, or you can buy a version of it made domestically, either in the UK or the US, and it's more expensive. I don't have an exact barometer, but it's something like £100 on top of the price of the version that's made offshore. I like the candor of that, I always have done. I always like the idea of them saying, this is what it costs to do this thing close to home. And if you make that investment, you are making it because you believe in domestic production, either for, because you work in the supply chain and you think it's interesting, either because you are somebody with some measure of kind of national pride or more likely. because you want to support a transition away from a more exploitative kind of model of production that happens globally. It's been harder though to then be able to kind of measure what your £100 did. If I was buying the made in UK version versus the made in, I don't know, Vietnam version, don't quote me on that, maybe they don't make them in Vietnam, the warm and fuzzy feeling that I would get... is the return. ⁓ Now when you see stories like this, you start to go, okay, this is what that buys. If I spend on made in ⁓ country, I am spending on improving the quality of life measurably of the people who made the products that I now wear. ⁓ And that's a good loop, right? That's the kind of loop that leads to more domestic manufacturing, more domestic purchasing, and so on. To put my cynics hat back on for a minute, ⁓ The reason this is a story is because, and there ain't no gardens in here now, but we have Bangladesh, they have restorative gardens as it were. And if you go work in a legal office, you go work somewhere else, you go work in a profession where this kind of worker... safety, worker well-being and everything is standard. This isn't the press release, this isn't the story. ⁓ Just because that's assumed. The quality of life of the people who work in those kind of knowledge sectors and so on is considered to be good enough that this would not make the news. ⁓ The quality of life and the well-being... of your typical garment, footwear, accessories, supply chain worker is bad enough that the deviations from the norm of this type are newsworthy. Now, I don't want to play down the effort involved here. I think this is a very nice story. I think it's a good effort from New Balance and I think their strategy in general is great. think it's one of those things where we're only talking about it because the plight of the typical garment worker is sufficiently poor that you need some good news in this area. So yeah, sorry, I'm trying not to end this on a downer. So good news, nice restorative garden. Let's think on that. speaker-0: Amazing. That's all the stories this week. speaker-1: Perfect, Grace, good to chat to you as always. Just going to final thing, I'm just going to encourage folks listening to this if you don't already tune in on Thursdays for the one-to-one interview shows that I do as well. At the moment, those are not video, they're going to become video sometime in the near future. They're audio only. They're longer format than this. They're typically like twice as long. We go to sort of 45, 55 minutes and so on. We've got some really interesting ones coming up. We're covering kind of the legal elements of AI. We're covering web native 3D digital product creation. recovering, consumer protection, buy now, pay later. ⁓ We get on some interesting folks like CEOs and so on. And if you like the kind of conversations that Grace and I have, which I do love having, I do love this new format, and you're looking for something longer, just make sure you're coming back here on Thursdays as well as Tuesdays.