Buying clothes online is still painful. Here’s what needs to change.

Then there are new shopping and buying models entirely, such as Stitch Fix’s human-and-algorithm-personalized recommendations, and Rent The Runway’s subscription rental concept, to compete with.

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more

For a long time, retail survived on taste and real estate — curation and distribution. The internet made it possible for regional clothing stores like Need Supply to sell to a global audience and build larger businesses. But then it also made it easier for consumers to find everything, anywhere — at the lowest price — challenging any sense of loyal... See more

During the first few decades of the internet, we were taught to search for things in a certain way. We might type in “blue jeans,” for instance, or “black dress.”

Search is changing rapidly, as search gets smarter and more contextual. Observing younger people browse and shop, we see changes in real time. It’s becoming more common to search something... See more

While same-day delivery and free returns are eroding much of the rest: we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it. These are things where a lot of the role of a physical shop is curation, recommendation and dem... See more