The Cloud Hits the Catwalk
The cloud’s gotten itself a foothold in just about every industry now, and evidently, the catwalk is no exception. We’ve seen a fair amount of cloud updates circling around the fashion industry, starting with the New York Times’ coverage of the next gen fashion collection.
“Today the most audacious prints and jacquards are created by computers… And during New York Fashion Week, many designers, including Narciso Rodriguez and Joseph Altuzarra, used computerized print.”
The latest example of designers utilizing tech to produce designs come from Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. The two utilized a computer to create Najavo blanket-inspired patterns, which they later converted into fabric. Professional fashion designers however, are not the only ones turning computing power into clothing. Online fashion game Stardoll recently announced a licensing agreement with Mattel to create the company’s first real-life product line coming out this autumn. Stardoll has a user base of over 92 million accounts, which translates into a huge offline/retail revenues potential for the company.
Cloud computing and Big Data are becoming an increasingly powerful presence in the fashion industry, and even the biggest players are paying attention. Seattle-based fashion retailer Nordstrom announced yesterday it will acquire online private sale marketplace HauteLook for $180 million in stock. The news of the acquisition came right before the LA Times’ reporting that Nordstrom’s net income rose by 35% to $232 million in Q4 2010. “That compares with $172 million, or 77 cents per share, a year earlier. Its quarterly revenue rose more than 10 percent to $2.92 billion.”
In addition to Nordstrom, another major fashion industry cloud development comes from Lawson Software. The company launched Lawson Fashion PLM on the Cloud, a low-cost product lifecycle management software offering deployed via Amazon EC2 targeting fashion companies.
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