Case Study #2 – Week-6
After reading the Case, write a two-page paper that answers the five questions on pages 10 and 11. Stitch Fix faces considerable competition from the Amazon Personal Shopper service. Hence, the framing of your paper should be more future-focused than looking backward. What does Stitch Fix need to do in order to stay ahead of the Personal Shopper competition? The appendix to the Case might offer some additional insights. Consider yourself to be Lake’s executive consultant and confidant when forming the answers to the questions. She needs your help with this significant challenge and the viability of Stitch Fix going forward may rest on how you address these questions, together.
Creativity in the Digital Age
Introduction
The following answers have been provided to cater to the questions that have been asked within this study. The answers have been illustrated in a precise and easily interpretable manner along with being informative to the targeted audience of this study.
Reasons for gender disparity and effective measures in this regard
Gender played a critical part in the issue of accumulating funding for Stitch Fix due to some reasons. The first in this case is that investors were not much interested to invest in women’s clothes. Another aspect in this regard is that Katrina Lake approached mainly male investors, as she perceived them to be potential investors in her business. However, most of the male investors did not want to invest in the business idea or concept of a female, as they perceived that women do not possess ideas of inaugurating and successfully operating a business enterprise. The brand awareness of Stitch Fix among women was 41 percent (Jin, Cedrola & Kim, 2019, p.19) The company concentrated mainly on women and later it focused on men. However, the gravitas of the focus was not that high in regard to boys and men. The low brand awareness among women about this company was one of the prime reasons that the company was not much successful in regard to its sales and gathering financial investments.
In order to tackle this, Lake could have concentrated more on improvising its brand reputation and awareness among the targeted segment of customers. This would have aided in raising the quotient of demand for this brand’s products. The hiring of digital and offline promotional officials should also have facilitated Stitch Fix’s brand quotient and awareness and thus the sales figures of this company would have hiked.
The lessons from the three industries and exclusion from the same
Lake loved the concept of retail. She took the quotient that retail is a very old-age industry. However, she did not prefer the aspect that this form of selling, and this industry was reluctant in utilising technological implants. The inefficiencies of retail were left behind by Lake. She had taken the aspect of personal styling into account and had incorporated various algorithmic patterns into the implemented AI technology. She believed that personal styling could be more impressive and impactful if it is conducted with the aid of AI technological implants (Hutchinson, 2020, p.634). Lake loved the quotient of surprise in the subscription boxes, as the customers were not priorly aware of what the boxes would contain.
Unique ways of Stitch Fix in offering a leap in value
Stitch Fix had renovated the whole consumer buying experience and this organization’s subscription boxes made the targeted customers try out this brand’s products. Lake can incorporate the concept of “try before you buy” and incorporate it in her business strategies in regard to Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix can provide monthly subscription schemes for the customers in this context and it would be efficient in increasing the sales quotients of this organization. The personal shopper concept of Amazon is cheap and Stitch Fix should also charge nominal money when it would be incorporating similar concepts in its business strategy.
The purchase of Finery IP and its quotients in acting as a barrier to imitation and extending blue ocean against Amazon
Finery extracts the receipts of shopping from email and thus aids in creating a “virtual wardrobe” from the shopping receipts. This aids the consumers to get acquainted with what they have purchased from Stitch Fix. Since Stitch Fix has been able to acquire intellectual property and patented technology in regard to digital wardrobe, it will be hard for other organizations to imitate it. Hence, it can be conveyed that the brand’s recent purchase of Finery IP would aid in acting as a barrier in regard to imitation and aid in extending its blue ocean. Amazon is the key competitor of Stitch Fix and Amazon would not be able to imitate its technological implants and innovative concepts, as they have been patented by Finery. This would provide Stitch Fix with a competitive advantage over Amazon in the market and help extend its blue ocean.
Stitch Fix’s key challenges to grow and preserve its blue ocean
The increasing popularity and massive global expansion of Amazon is one of the key challenges for Stitch Fix to grow. The net loss of Stitch Fix of $1.83 million and the decreasing share value of the company in the recent time frame can also be counted as a challenge for it to flourish (Hecker & Rollwagen, 2021, p.6). The increasing efficiency of the brand’s competitors such as daily look, Trunk Club, and Wantable is another prime challenge for Stitch Fix to increase its blue ocean (Hecker & Rollwagen, 2021, p.8).
Conclusion
It can be observed from the above case study and the answers provided that Stitch Fix can reach new heights of prosperity and enhance its blue ocean if it keeps on upgrading and improvising its incorporations. This would make the business quotients more strong and thus would also mitigate the issues that it had been facing.
References
Hecker, M., & Rollwagen, I. (2021). Sustainable Algorithmic Innovation-The New Digital Frontier for Entrepreneurs. In ISPIM Conference Proceedings (pp. 1-10). The International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM).
Hutchinson, P. (2020). Reinventing innovation management: the impact of self-innovating artificial intelligence. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 68(2), 628-639.
Jin, B. E., Cedrola, E., & Kim, N. L. (2019). Process innovation: Hidden secret to success and efficiency. In Process innovation in the global fashion industry (pp. 1-23). Palgrave Pivot, New York.
