Why the Fast Fashion Scene should Start Thinking about UX
Speaking from the mind of a designer who quit the fashion industry 5 years ago
I noticed that I had this sitting in my draft for 3 years, so I decided to publish it. Back in the days when I was working as a designer in the fast fashion industry, I enjoyed the thrill and endless creativity. However, I also witnessed the waste we produced, low sales and inefficiency in our communication with the factories. I switched to graphic design in the same company, but I was doing the same work and producing the same amount of waste — this time digitally. I questioned why and how we were speculating the consumer needs, and that was the time I discovered UX.
Fast forward to today — I am glad that I work as a product designer, and am truly working on products that positively impact hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.
Ever bought a pair of limited-edition shoes and felt that they were too precious to wear? Ever bought a top, a skirt, or a pair of jeans and chucked it at the bottom of your wardrobe, forgotten its existence and finally tossed it out when the season was over?
Maybe you are guilty. Maybe you aren’t that guilty. But we’ve probably all been there at least once. Well, I was there — for years. But when I left the fashion industry to pursue UX design, I looked back and saw the toxicity of the fashion industry without user experience design.
In the vast and vibrant world of fashion, we design for people who buy. People who desire. People who need clothes. But do we know who these “People” are, what they want, and most importantly, what they need?
Like all design disciplines, fashion design starts with research and planning. In an established corporate structure, a fashion product department would consist of the planning team, buying team and design team (product designs and product developers). The planners will look at budget and sales results; the buyers will look at market buying patterns and product performance. The design team looks at trends and materials. All three teams gather regularly with their findings and reach a consensus on how this season will look, what needs to be made, how much it will cost and how long everything will take before they reach the store. It applies the Waterfall method most of the time, where the products are moved from one team to another down the chain.
Sounds logical, huh? But can you tell what is missing in this cycle?
User needs.
Market research and market segmentation are useful for selling the products, but they don’t tell us how the users use the product, how long they use and how it is useful to them. Sales figures measure the desirability of a product, but not the motivation of the purchase and the longevity of it. The figures do not include human emotions and motivation for purchase, such as vanity, impulsive purchases and why why why they are buying it. Most importantly, the usage after purchase is completely immeasurable, and they usually end up in landfills after X amount of usage.
Green design in fashion is difficult and almost unattainable in most of the fast fashion business modules. With fast fashion designing, it is almost a hit-and-miss to get the product that brings the highest amount of profit. Even if you manage to get that one-hit-wonder product trending worldwide on Tiktok, you can’t repeat it several times/seasons as the desirability of the style evolves.
The big question here is, if we can’t design less, can our designs be backed with data, analysis, and user needs so that we can design responsibly?
