Subject areaChannels and tools
Ultra fast fashion is the onlife evolution of fast fashion: the collection is no longer decided by a design office but by online sales data.
The company puts thousands of models on sale in its app in very small batches, measures in real time which ones sell and remakes only those, with the method called test and repeat. The catwalk becomes the smartphone, and the store is no longer needed. The case that defined the model is Shein, born in 2008 in Nanjing, China; Temu, PDD Holdings' platform, extended its logic to every product category.
In the European Union the digital-native model has an example in Sweden's NA-KD, which grew through Instagram and influencers; outside the Union, in the United Kingdom, the main names are Boohoo, PrettyLittleThing and Missguided, which went bankrupt in 2022 and was later taken over. For marketing it is the most extreme case of demand measured before production, with the downside of waste and quality issues that classic fast fashion already had.
An example
A platform publishes a hundred new dress models, each in a few dozen pieces. After three days it reorders in large quantities the five that sell best and stops producing the others.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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