Scaling Fashion and Apparel vs. CPG Brands: What You Need to Know
When scaling fashion and apparel brands versus CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands—think cosmetics, supplements, or food—there are similarities but also some stark differences. Understanding both can help brands craft strategies that are effective and tailored to their industry.
Shared Playbook: Lifestyle-Driven Innovation
In both fashion and CPG, it’s not just about creating products—it’s about selling a lifestyle. Creative leads in both sectors aren’t just designing for a target audience; they’re designing for how that audience lives. Whether it’s the latest athleisure line or a beauty product promising a wellness boost, customers are buying into an entire lifestyle experience through these products.
New Product Innovation:
Innovation is central to both industries. A lack of differentiation can lead to a flood of copycat products, making it hard for consumers to distinguish between brands. For both fashion and CPG brands, staying ahead of trends, improving products, and launching something truly unique is key to keeping a competitive edge.
Coordinated Product Development:
The product development cycle is well-defined in both sectors. Each company follows a critical path with milestones, deadlines, and dependencies laid out. From design through marketing, everything is planned to perfection. Campaigns and product launches are synchronised across departments—design, marketing, and CRM—and everyone is aligned with the brand's vision and goals.
The Role of Airtable in Fashion and CPG Workflows
Imagine having everything, from design inspiration to the final product listings on your online store, organized in one place. Thanks to tools like Airtable, this level of coordination is becoming a reality for both fashion and CPG brands. These platforms allow teams to seamlessly manage the entire product lifecycle, ensuring everyone is on the same page at every step.
Data and Quality Feedback Loops:
What truly differentiates successful brands is how well they use data. For fashion and CPG, performance data—like return rates, customer reviews, social media feedback, and even support tickets—feeds back into the product development process. This closed-loop system provides designers and product heads invaluable insights, improving product quality. Tools like Airtable, significantly when enhanced with AI, offer brands easy-to-consume summaries, such as product-level insights highlighting what sets one item apart from the rest of the collection.
Divergence: Scaling Customer Fulfilment
Here’s where fashion and CPG brands part ways: scaling fulfilment. While both industries aim to automate fulfilment processes as much as possible, their approaches differ.
Fashion’s Unique Fulfilment Challenges:
Fashion brands, particularly those that deal with limited-edition runs or seasonal items, don’t replenish SKUs like a CPG brand might. For them, once a season is over, it's often on to the next, making warehouse management and replenishment strategies distinct from CPG.
Global Warehouse Strategy for Fashion vs. CPG:
In fashion, a single warehouse—mainly if it's strategically located—can serve multiple regions. For example, UK-based fashion brands can often serve Europe and the U.S. from a single UK warehouse. This differs for CPG brands, where multiple warehouses in different regions (like the U.S., EU, and Australia) are often essential, especially as they scale and introduce more SKUs.
For DTC fashion brands, proximity to large retail customers doesn’t play the same role in fulfilment strategies as CPG brands, where frequent replenishment is needed to stock retail shelves. In fashion, it’s all about the next collection, not maintaining stock levels.
Why Every Brand Needs a Unique Tech Strategy
Whether you’re scaling a fashion or CPG brand, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. The needs of a luxury fashion house differ significantly from those of a cosmetics brand, even though they might share specific tools and processes. The mix of eCommerce, retail, and wholesale further complicates things, making it essential for each company to craft a tech strategy that fits its unique requirements.
As companies grow and evolve, so too must their technology stack. Businesses are not bathrobes, after all—no two are the same, and neither should their tech solutions be.
Conclusion: Finding the Right Balance
Fashion and CPG brands might share some strategic similarities regarding scaling, but they operate in fundamentally different worlds regarding fulfilment and inventory management. The key to success for both is finding a balance between creativity and data-driven decision-making while tailoring processes and technology to meet their specific operational needs.