In a recent interview, Bob Nieman, editor of Plant Laundry magazine, asked me a deep question:
What is the future of the garment care industry in 3 words?
My response: data, closets, and experiential.
Don’t get me wrong — the future of our industry depends on quite a few factors, but these three stand out as the most important to me.
Let’s explore why.
Data
Data plays a huge role in our lives.
If you look at everything you do, someone (or some entity) is analyzing your actions and interactions, from ordering food, buying food, shopping, the apps, and games you interact with, and even the ads you click on online.
We are creatures of habit and our behavior patterns are repeated — meaning companies can use this data to predict what we’ll do next.
Think about it this way: if you’re shopping for a new laptop, you’re likely researching options online, which then trigger the ads you see later on.
These companies predict what we might do next, and serve ads to us, all for us to engage with and increase profitability.
Why can’t we do the same in our industry?
We should be using the data in our POS system (or business management systems) to determine the behaviors of our clients.
Let’s think about it at the most basic level.
Here’s just some of the information you can gather:
- How many clothes the client sent to you (or how many pounds)
- Whether they are laundry, dry cleaning, sneakers
- How many bags do they send
- Frequency of their orders
If you took a year’s worth of data over the next year for one client, you could determine when they order more frequently. It could be during the summer, back to school, during the winter, or when they come back from vacation.
Knowing that data, you could create ads to market to them.
