Unleashing the power of storytelling in fashion merchandising

In modern fashion merchandising, storytelling is one of the most powerful tools that can be used to build relationships with customers and foster brand loyalty. That’s why at Depict, we’re building a tool that can take your fashion storytelling capabilities to the next level.

Read on, and we'll delve into how fashion merchants are embracing storytelling, the challenges they face, and a groundbreaking solution that harnesses the potential of generative AI to create hyper-personalized stories for each customer.

Why embrace storytelling in fashion?

Fashion merchants have realized the significance of storytelling in the highly competitive and performance-driven fashion industry. 

As Google and Meta ads become more expensive, relying solely on these advertising methods is no longer sufficient. That’s why the focus is now shifting toward sustainable acquisition and retention methods.

Merchants need to seek to build lasting relationships with their customers through their own channels, fostering loyalty and trust. This then means you can stop pouring money into expensive ads, and focus on channels that actually work. 

Storytelling through your merchandising allows you to do this on your own terms, on your own site.

Along with this, as storytelling becomes more powerful and evident in building loyalty in other industries, such as tech, consumers’ will begin to expect it more from fashion retailers.

Embracing storytelling on every page

Succeeding at storytelling in fashion depends on a few different factors. One of these factors is consistency.

The way you visually merchandise your fashion E-Commerce pages has a huge impact on the storytelling of your store. And, if you’re aiming to boost brand loyalty, your storytelling should be consistent and recognizable to you. A great way to do this, is by ensuring that your pages all tell a story in a similar way. Whether this is category pages, collection pages, or any other onsite page.

As our CEO Oliver Edholm says:

Fashion is an art form, and storytelling is at the core of this industry.

Therefore, your storytelling should be recognizable and attributable towards your brand.

How can you ensure consistency in your fashion storytelling?

In theory, having well-merchandised pages depict your brand’s story sounds great. However, the manual effort required to maintain and update these pages with compelling stories can be overwhelming. 

Enter the concept of a merchandising copilot that can use an AI-powered engine, with a deep understanding of nuanced fashion-oriented details, and products to merchandise your pages. This greatly simplifies the process of storytelling in your merchandising, and enables a cohesive theme across your entire site. 

With a merchandising copilot like Depict, you’re able to automatically pair together products that tell a story. For example, a complete running outfit, or two items with a similar fashion. And, these products can be paired together across your entire site, giving consistency to your fashion storytelling.

Taking care of a task like this with a copilot frees up time for your team to focus on tasks that require their attention more.

The journey towards fully-fledged stories

While the above covers storytelling in merchandising, as AI capabilities improve, how storytelling is used in fashion E-Commerce will also evolve.

We’ve covered before how collection-driven merchandising also helps to build brand loyalty, foster relationships with customers, and boost product discovery. But, with the addition of story-driven merchandising, this brings fashion E-Commerce one step closer to publishing fully-fleged stories.

A collection page can now be created around a certain theme or idea, and visually merchandised in a way that continues this theme throughout the page. The result? A cohesive, continuous story-based collection, which interacts with the shopper on an emotional level.

A storytelling focus for Depict

While our current collections might include elements of storytelling, the next chapter for our merchandising copilot is about weaving complete, immersive stories that resonate with customers on a deeper level. 

The potential to transform mundane, generic product listing pages into engaging narratives is an exciting prospect that us and our customers are eager to explore. Want to know more about how we can help you do this, and take your retention and customer experience to the next level? Get in touch today and we can walk you through it.