London Fashion Week: Retailers Move to Expand their Digital Footprint

Topshop’s London Fashion Week Digital show display

As a week of London Fashion AW13 shows concludes, it’s interesting to take a look at some of this week’s digital highlights.  Topshop connected with consumers via a partnership with Google to show not only their Fall AW13 collection, but the show’s backstage scenes and even a gag Harlem Shake video online. Burberry used digital and mobile technology to live-stream its collection to its online channels like Twitter and Facebook and then enabled viewers to buy right off the runway on their website.

It’s little wonder that all the digital fashion stirred up a plethora of searches.. According to retail research agency Conlumino, the UK’s £44 billion fashion market will grow a further 3.4% this year. It predicts 11% of sales will be derived from the online channel by the end of 2013 compared to 8% at present.

So what are consumers, our British fashionista sisters searching for?  Plenty.  Fashion Week in any country seems to bring a strong surge in fashion related searches.  In the UK,  the latest data from leading independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight, shows the number of consumer online queries for fashion-related products on Google UK grew from 2.5 million in October 2012 to 2.8 million last month.  That’s a significant jump.  Is it any wonder smart retailers like Topshop & Burberry are expanding their shows digital presence    Here’s how the increase in fashion searches broke down:

• Searches pertaining to womenswear were most popular, and accounted for 46% of queries compared to 19% for accessories and 8% for menswear.
• The search terms ‘ Wedding dresses ‘ and ‘ dresses ‘ proved to be the most popular. Cumulatively they accounted for 11% of all searches. ‘  That makes sense as wedding dresses are quite expensive and anyone shopping for one is like to do a lot of research.
• Other top search terms were Shoes’ and ‘Prom dresses’ .

Surprisingly, a retailer who didn’t show at Fashion Week, ASOS was ranked as the most visible  in the organic listings.   This could be because of the sheer volume of items and pages on the ASOS site.  I can never find anything there, BUT, clearly, they have everything and their price point resonates with consumers.  According to Greenlight’s research ASOS’s online fashion store was visible to over 1.7 million searches and achieved a 61% share of voice.  Debenhams was the most visible advertiser in the Paid Media space, attaining a 58% share of voice. Marks & Spencer was the most visible brand in Greenlight’s Social Media analysis.

This data is interesting to me as the search volume and social media visibility put recessionista brands with lower price points at the top of Internet visibility research according to the Greenlight study.