Using technology to gather and analyze market data is not new, what is new is Stylumia’s approach. The company has developed a proprietary demand ranking system (real-time demand) based on a wide range of traditional and nontraditional signals that it picks up from across the internet.
Chasing Supply or Driving Demand?
“You can collect a lot of data today and know what’s happening. But what is happening today is a supply signal. So it’s like going through a mall and coming out and saying ‘I saw a lot of red in the windows’, and conclude that red is on-trend. However, that might not be so. It could be that there’s a lot of red garments in the stores because red isn’t selling well.
“If you just go by what’s out there, then we using supply to predict trends. And we know two-thirds of fashion does not meet the consumer demand,” said Ganesh Subramanian, founder of Stylumia.
To address this problem, Stylumia created what is called a demand science where they inverted the pyramid. They decided to start from what consumers were looking for and use that data to identify product trends.
