Data driven lingerie=Better products

But before that, allow me to digress a bit. Almost 78% of Consumers think it is hard to trust companies when it comes to use of their personal data (Orange, The Future of Digital Trust, 2014). And yet Personal data has become a currency today. All of us are leaving our data behind in a digital exhaust that has begun to worry us as consumers.

And yet, the World Economic Forum is calling personal data a ‘new asset class’: “a valuable resource for the 21^st century that will touch all aspects of society”. But companies will need to understand how they can gather customer information without compromising the customer’s trust!

A recent PEW report had this to say:

“While enthusiasts see great potential for using Big Data, privacy advocates are worried as more and more data is collected about people – both as they knowingly disclose things in such things as their postings through social media and as they unknowingly share digital details about themselves as they march through life. Not only do the advocates worry about profiling, they also worry that those who crunch Big Data with algorithms might draw the wrong conclusions about who someone is, how she might behave in the future, and how to apply the correlations that will emerge in the data analysis.”

True & co is this interesting company that combines data & design to create an opportunity for consumers to share data with the company thereby improving the appropriateness of the product to the customer. True & co claims to be the first company to fit women into their favourite bra with a fit quiz – no fitting rooms, no measuring tape, no photos – and to recognize that there’s so much more to fit than her band and cup size. The data they collect allows them to match the customer to over 6000 body types on their database.

Research suggests that women loathe the bra shopping experience and the massive $14B intimate apparel industry is dominated by one primarily brick-and-mortar player. So True & co uses big data to make shopping online for lingerie easier & better. They collect over Half a million data points from users to help customize the experience. Since the company launched in 2012, True & Co has collected some 7 million data points They used this data to launch products designed using this data. Body type, implicit explicit preferences etc all mashed together to create a personalized recommendation engine.

Do have a look at this video telling their story:

http://bit.ly/1tiQitb

So consumers are happy to share personal information as long as they see a “value add” for themselves. And organizations with trust-based information sharing relationships with customers will have a significant competitive advantage over those with traditional data gathering relationships.

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