Fashion Industry Consulting and Strategy

Retail

Our fashion consultants help fashion retailers rethink strategy and optimize operations to meet the changing demands of consumers, production, and supply networks. Our fashion consulting team lives and breathes fashion, bringing decades of experience with major-brand clients.

Fashion consumers have responded to the pandemic by shifting to value, buying online, and breaking longtime loyalties to try new brands that meet new priorities. We help you respond to this consumer-driven environment, finding bold ways to reduce cost so you can invest in essential digital capabilities.

Taking a broad view of your core business and supply chain, we partner with you to identify the right use cases, first proving the benefits before transforming a specific customer experience or operational process—covering brand, product, pricing, store concept, and store execution.

Increasing Market Share by Revamping Operations

Like many players in the larger retail industry, fashion companies need to reduce the immediate gap in earnings before interest and taxes. They must then prepare for the future by focusing on aggressive cost management end to end—for example, by pursuing programs for the cost of goods sold, right-sizing corporate headquarters, creating more agile merchant teams, and increasing suppliers’ share of risk. These efforts are critical to funding the investments needed to remain competitive, such as digitizing production, resetting the distribution footprint, and creating new digital consumer pathways. To ensure success, we help clients attract the tech talent who will drive change and heighten the customer experience across digital channels.

Digitizing Without Compromising the Art of Fashion

Most of the fashion industry is still catching up with digitizing core processes. Selecting technology solutions is important, but attention to the people whose work must adjust to those solutions is equally critical. We call this balanced approach the bionic company, where new technologies are intertwined with human creativity to ensure that your talent continues to drive fashion innovation.

Our team is ahead of the curve in helping clients create compelling designs that capture the next trend while also operating faster and more efficiently. By customizing our approach to your business and employing our digital partners, BCG Gamma and BCG Platinion, we selectively optimize processes in both the back and the front of the house, including:

Design and 3D Sampling

Algorithms aid designers by organizing images and fabric patterns and analyzing them. 3D sampling allows designs to be developed and fitted virtually before making prototype samples.

AI-Supported Demand Forecasting and Allocation

A transparent and data-driven demand-planning model uses multiple variables—such as brand, line, and store performance—and time periods to create store level targets that produce solid, bottom-line impact.

Creative Merchandising

Digital showrooms let your customers combine items, create personalized outfits, and see the look in real time—while also driving your brand’s overarching digital strategy.

Advanced Clienteling

Optimized segmentations personalize customer experience, boost retention, guide customer relationship management, and help you target segments of one, so you can meet consumers when they are most inspired to buy.

Our Client Work in the Fashion Industry

BCG’s fashion consulting teams have conducted more than 850 projects globally in the past five years in the fashion industry and luxury market. Some examples of our client work with fashion retailers include the following.

Turning Around a Global Jewelry Giant

BCG worked shoulder-to-shoulder with leading jewelry company Pandora to launch a transformation program that reignited passion for the brand and helped Pandora get closer than ever to its customers.

An Analytics and Demand Prediction Journey for a Global Fashion Retailer

Together with our client, we created a custom data and digital platform to align purchasing and allocation with demand, optimize stock, and equip store associates with customer analytics and tools. Delivering double-digit profit uplift, the hub optimized inventory across more than 3,000 stores; forecast sales patterns and prices for over 10,000 products; and sent more than 500,000 automated personalized emails. The project scaled from less than 5% of the global business to more than 70% in nine months.

Overhauled the Sustainability Strategy for a High-profile Luxury Brand

We used BCG’s proprietary benchmark methodology to reveal key environmental and social impact levers and areas for differentiation. Employing those insights, we crafted a strategy and end-to-end roadmap for execution within the organization and supply chain, including target setting, cost estimates, and corporate governance.

Learn more about BCG's approach to sustainability in the fashion industry

Transforming Product Creation E2E for a Major Global Fashion Brand

We began by defining a target digital operating model and implementing agile to reduce the complexity of collaboration. To enable 3D creation from design to factory to sell in, we leveraged our digital partners and Asian supplier network to create a state-of-the-art ecosystem that achieved massive operational acceleration: a reduction of up to 40% in time to market, a reduction of up to 70% in sampling cost, and the potential for a reduction of up to 20% in workload.

SEE MORE OF OUR FASHION AND RETAIL CONSULTING TEAM

Our Partnerships with Fashion Associations and Influencers

Fashion for Good is the global initiative that is here to make all fashion good. It’s a global platform for innovation, made possible through collaboration and community.

Sustainable Apparel Coalition is an industry-wide group working to reduce the environmental and social impacts of products around the world.

Highsnobiety focuses intently on culture, its role in shaping the future of luxury, and what brands can do to connect with the new fashion and luxury consumer.

Altagamma is an Italian association that includes many of its country’s most prestigious fashion and luxury brands.

Higg Co is a technology company with a suite of tools—the Higg Index—that enables retailers to improve their sustainability performance.

Council of Fashion Designers of America is a not-for-profit trade association devoted to supporting emerging design talent. Watch industry experts, including BCG's Sarah Willersdorf, discuss how New York Fashion Week can design and implement responsible practices to promote sustainability in fashion.

Learn More About the Fashion Industry

At H&M, AI Stands for Amplified Intelligence

Arti Zeighami, former chief data and analytics officer for H&M Group and current director and partner for BCG GAMMA, explains how H&M went from a digital laggard to an AI industry leader—in just three years.

Remaking Fashion & Luxury for Sustainability

Demands for more responsible practices can’t be ignored. Yes, Sarah Willersdorf acknowledges, making changes will be costly. Not making changes? Ultimately, even more so.

The Creative Destruction of Fashion Marketing

Although fashion shoppers’ expectations have changed dramatically in recent years, few fashion brands have advanced their marketing capabilities accordingly. They must.

Fashion’s Big Reset

Recovery from the COVID-19 crisis requires a radical business redesign. Brands must cut operating costs, boost e-commerce, and invest for the future.

The Advanced Analytics Behind Fashion Company Markdowns

Brands and retailers have traditionally relied on rules of thumb for determining their sales programs, but today’s technology offers a better way.

Why the Future of the Luxury Market will be Dictated by Youth Culture

Brands that offer authentic narratives and honest cultural interventions can build lasting relationships with the next generation of consumers. Successful brands will broadcast not only to consumers but also to the broader culture that surrounds them.

Explore more of our thought leadership on the retail industry