H&M Promotes The New Fashion Platform, And Also Recommends Competitors Such As Asos And Topshop.

The fast fashion business is blocked, breaking the boundary and getting to the new agenda of the giants.

H&M, a Swedish fashion group, opened a new version of the Internet platform Itsapark beta on Wednesday. The platform aims to provide consumers with a place to solve fashion problems and seek new inspirations, so that people can exchange ideas and suggestions around fashion modeling.

Itsapark adopts a visual format similar to Instagram. Users can ask questions or answer in the form of pictures, videos and texts. Besides answering, the website also provides links to all products, including not only private brands, but also competitors, such as Asos, Topshop, RiverIsland and New Look.

For example, there are user questions, "how can I find high-quality office wear?" or "if I ride a bicycle every day, what clothes should I wear?" Any user can answer questions, but the website mainly encourages quality content producers, that is, a group of key opinion leaders, KOL (KOL), providing answers.

By analysis, Itsapark is obviously affected by several major social media platforms. Its overall visual style is very similar to Instagram, and is also inspired by the spanformation of the latter's social business.

After the two co founders Kevin Systrom and MikeKrieger rushed out of office at the end of last year, Instagram executives reshuffled, and recently launched an internal shopping function in Instagram. At present, H&M has been selected by Instagram in the first round of testing the water function. Besides, there are brands such as ASOS, Burberry and Balmain.

At the same time, Itsapark encourages UGC users to produce content and interact with each other in the same way as domestic shopping sharing communities. However, the platform encourages more influential KOL in the field to give answers, and gives these KOL a certain degree of reward in return, intending to create a fashionable KOL community, which seems to be more similar to the Q & a website Quora or domestic knowledge. Obviously, H&M is pursuing the footsteps of emerging fashion businesses. In this regard, Revolve and FashionNova, which focus on social development, have become pioneers.

This may also involve the incubation of KOL, but H&M has not disclosed much information. At present, the content of Itspark is temporarily created by H&M group internal staff. It is noteworthy that last year, Nash, Kangtai, also set up the first SocialTalent Agency, which focused on net red hatching, signed 27 Italy and World Wide Web sites, some of which graduated from Kangtai Nash society Jiao Tong, founded by Kangtai Nash and L'OREAL Italy luxury department.

It is reported that Itsapark has been in the development stage since the end of last year, and is an important part of H&M group's digital spanformation. Last year, H&M also spent $20 million to buy a minority stake in Klarna, an online payment service provider, which allows consumers to launch payment for purchases. H&M also invested $13 million through its venture capital H&MCO: LAB to Thread, a male business start-up company. The platform recommends artificial intelligence.

Fast fashion giants including H&M are undergoing a difficult spanition period. According to the fashion business bulletin, in the three months ended February 28th, H&M sales increased by 4% to 51 billion kronor, or 5 billion 490 million US dollars, while the fixed exchange rate rose 10%, while profits fell 41% to 803 million Krona for about 86 million 550 thousand dollars.

Since 2018, the focus of H&M spanformation has been on enriching brand portfolio, optimizing online and offline business organizations and digitalization in three directions. In 2018, it was also the first year of digital spanformation for the fast fashion giant, which focused on physical stores as the main battlefield.

Take the Chinese market, which is particularly active in the online market, for example, H&M group has made many attempts in recent two years. In October 2017, the brand digital customer loyalty project H&MCLUB was formally launched in the Chinese market. By the end of 2018, the registered members of H&M CLUB in the Chinese market had exceeded 6 million.

It is noteworthy that in the Chinese market, H&M did not choose to "start all over again", but rather from the powerful local Internet platform. In March last year, H&M officially landed on Tmall. According to the fashion headline data monitoring, the H&M Tmall flagship store opened up to now, and the number of fans has rapidly increased to 7 million 400 thousand.

In March this year, H&M announced that Zhang Yixing, a versatile musician, became the spokesperson for his brand in Greater China, and also the first annual spokesman for H&M brand Greater China. Through continuous pursuit of market competitiveness and brand influence, H&M will take this opportunity to further promote the development of its business in Greater China based on menswear products with brand sense of design and quality. In March last year, H&M also announced the popularity of idols as the spokesperson of the brand new generation in China. Both of them have a high flow and appeal in the Chinese social media platform. Two

Recently, H&M Tmall flagship store has also worked with the casual trading platform leisure fish. It has tried to integrate old clothes recycling projects with online recycling methods for the first time. Consumers click on the "old clothes recycling" on the flagship store of H&M Tmall.

Old clothing recycling includes clothing, home textiles, etc., regardless of brand and old losses, as long as more than 5 kilograms, there will be couriers in accordance with the agreed time free to pick up old clothes. After the recovery order is completed, users can receive H&M Tmall coupons directly in the order page, and can receive 790g ant forest energy within 24 hours.

Some analysts say that for fashion retailing, H&M still has a strong moat and has a wide network of shops. But in order to let more young people pay the bill, they should constantly increase their sense of freshness in more precise positioning of products and marketing. Simple online shopping is too boring for consumers, and the content of users' spontaneous production can improve the stickiness of brands and consumers.

Whether or not we want to become a fashion designer, the purpose of H&M's move is to advance the layout of new businesses and new formats in advance, reduce risks and provide the possibility of breaking the fast fashion business in the predicament. But this does not mean that H&M will shift the focus of its main business to the operation of the Internet platform.

The ultimate goal of H&M is to get closer to the "digital Aboriginal" consumers who are stationed on various Internet platforms and grow with consumers.