Obviously, your online store is going to be your biggest store. Obviously, your online store is uninhibited by scale and reach and foot traffic. And obviously, your online store has a lower cost of entry than a store on Fifth Avenue. So obviously, brands treated their online store like a campaign.

The e-commerce budget across the technology infrastructure, UI, and UX would typically be less than what they would spend on a billboard for 2 markets.

The incumbents had left the runway wide open. Eventually, a crop of DTC-based fashion brands and companies leapfrogged the traditional players in their e-commerce footprint. For the newcomers, e-commerce was their only footprint. They didn’t have retail stores. From Warby Parker to Everlane to name your favorite mattress or beauty company (I’m looking at you, Glossier), they all started with a digital-first, technology-first, e-commerce-first mentality, which let them build completely differentiated businesses.

When the legacy companies finally realized their mistake, they eventually caught up. They caught up, but only in terms of understanding the need to invest, not the magnitude of the investment, or the subsequent ROI. Today, the budget that luxury brands will spend on campaigns, social content, influencers, and marketing versus what they will spend on infrastructure and technology to drive high-conversion, high-margin sales, remains fractional.

It’s likely that fashion brands have simply decided that their customers don’t need to be wooed and wowed. People who want to buy a $10,000 purse are going to do so regardless of the digital consumer experience. And so, fashion brands don’t see the value in investing in tech because they already reach some customers and believe the group of people they could win over with tech is infinitesimally small. This is precisely why these companies were too slow to react to the internet and e-commerce: they couldn’t grasp the potential outside of their existing revenue stream.

Ultimately, this is a cultural problem of siloed departments. There’s a clear bifurcation between the people who make and market the products and those who own the most important touch point: the digital properties. These are not the same people. They’re not even in the same organization. They operate as if they have different competing goals. Someone owns the tech and the platform, someone else owns product development, and a summer intern who owns marketing.

This internal division exacerbates the problem, creating a blocker for any adoption of technology and innovation. Fashion brands aren’t interested in extending the latest tech across back-of-house, product development, marketing activation, and sales. They view technology as an inhibitor, rather than an enabler, of brand and product value.

As long as companies in the fashion industry continue to operate under this premise, and organizationally bifurcate the various touchpoints within a consumer’s experience, they will be playing catch-up and opening themselves up to disruption.