The two paths of fashion innovation - with and without friction
Will I ever get less obsessed with the role of friction in e-commerce? I doubt it.
I’ve opened up another way of categorizing friction lately, as the antithesis of the refinements happening in search and targeted discovery. Start-ups like Daydream and Plush aim to bring you the right item at the right time, to optimize your time and digitally reduce friction using AI. Google wants you to buy dresses that go on sale agentically, e.g. without any human interference.
But there’s another, equally interesting path. That’s introducing digital friction to SLOW DOWN the buying cycle BUT upgrade your joy. We can categorize good friction introductions into 3 buckets – narcissism, friction exchange, and dopamine friction. Each of these is a different opportunity to slow down the buying cycle, but provide a different type of enjoyment between that first awareness moment and the actual moment of conversion.
Narcissism friction
Mirror, mirror, but make it AI
You can now stare at your synthetic self! Doji is a digital styling app for your avatar -basically paper dolls for grown-ups. You make an avatar, a synthetic you that’s a bit creepy and yet also very attractive. And you can mix and match his/her outfits. For now the curation is very much of a specific POV style that isn’t exactly my jam, but the experience is fun, and the meta-experience of staring at my face that is not my face felt very futuristic (and creepy and cool at the same time).
This is self-styling, playing around in the sandbox of your vibe, staring at yourself, then sharing with friends and/or hitting buy. It taps into the joy of paper dolls and playing, but with this very AI-future narcissism where you can see this idealized, perfectly symmetrical, skinny version of you pouting like an SSENSE model and think, am I that girl? (no, I am not)
Friction exchange
You swap mindless scrolling for a one-on-one style chat that actually sparks joy.
One way to make friction better is to exchange friction you don’t like for friction you do—no more endless browsing; let a professional stylist or influencer handle it. Two new apps have come across my radar recently: Indyx and Ask Dress Code (shout-out to my IRL friend @lyndseychild). Both connect your average woman (or man, I assume) with a professional influencer stylist, someone who can help them find the perfect item. This isn’t going to make the process go faster per se—it still takes time to find the best dress for your brother’s wedding—but it takes the friction of browsing off you and gives you a fun opportunity to interact with someone cool and offload the pain of browsing onto someone else. There’s new friction introduced—cost and time—but these are more pleasurable than the pain of browsing, and ideally the results from the influencers will be better.
Dopamine friction – Pretty things make your brain go pop.
A sensory jolt from glossy visuals or live auctions that turns shopping into an event
Originally when writing this I had the idea that Roblox or live shopping (e.g. Whatnot/QVC/Poshmark Liveshows) were the best examples of making your brain go pop. Especially when there’s live bidding involved, this is the ne plus ultra of making your brain go ZING in the purchasing process, even if the friction introduced is that you have to log in at a specific time and pay attention - absolutely crazy in a post-Netflix-binge world.
Upon reflection, I think that perhaps the original dopamine hit was magazines, and now newsletters. We love looking at pretty pictures of models or Leandra Medine or Becky Malinsky, wondering, could I pull off a bathing suit as a top (short answer, no, but I digress). These images and the attendant fantasies about dressing as the woman I want to be are a little like the precursor to Doji’s digital paper dolls. What would I look like in that outfit/identity?
In summary, as I’m always saying, like a boring, broken record (as I type that line, maybe I’m boring on this topic? I’ll try something new next time) friction is good some of the time. And in a world where seamless shopping perfection is on the horizon, will we gravitate in some instances to the opposite to maintain our feelings of agency in an ever-more-AI-driven world?
I think you're onto something when we talk about friction. So much of buying clothes has become a frictionless process. In some ways, we are foregoing the fun, exploration part of fashion for convenience. Kate Sanner's spoken about slowing down the process of shopping. Becoming more conscious of our patterns. Whether that is simply putting something away in a locker or closet until the price is just right, or waiting to buy new and instead opting for secondhand. As shoppers, I think there is a real price to pay for completely frictionless shopping.