What Fashion’s E-Commerce and Tech Professionals Need to Know Today

Discover the most relevant industry news and insights for fashion’s e-commerce and technology professionals, updated each month to enable you to excel in job interviews, promotion conversations or perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distils business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events — to deliver key takeaways and learnings tailored to your job function, listed alongside a selection of the most exciting live jobs advertised by BoF Careers partners.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for e-commerce and technology professionals today:

1. How AI Could Change Online Product Search and Discovery

Apple announced that its newest phone, the iPhone 16, will incorporate generative AI models that power what it calls Apple Intelligence. (Getty Images)

A strength of the AI models underlying tools like ChatGPT is their ability to ingest large amounts of data and summarise it. The technology isn’t flawless. It doesn’t understand and retrieve information but rather uses probabilities to predict the next word in a sequence. Like any predictions, they’re not always correct. But with more data, the predictions can get better, and companies are training their models on just about the entire internet.

The result is that users can ask a question and get an answer without having to do any searching themselves. “Let Google do the searching for you,” is how Google put it when it began rolling out AI overviews for search results to all US users earlier this year. When it comes to shopping, that may be a service consumers welcome — if it ever becomes widespread.

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E-Commerce Manager, AWWG — Madrid, Spain

Digital Product Manager, Chico’s — Fort Myers, United States

Commercial IT Manager, Burberry — Hong Kong

2. Case Study | How to Create the Perfect E-Commerce Site

Introducing BoF's latest case study: How to Create the Perfect E-Commerce Site. (Balenciaga, J. Crew, Gap)

Ideally, a brand’s website should tell their story while maximising e-commerce revenue with a convenient and intuitive product-discovery and checkout process. Often, fashion e-commerce sites lean too heavily in one direction or the other: Lush graphics, videos and immersive storytelling might captivate and inspire one customer while alienating another who wants to quickly find and purchase a dress to wear to their sister’s wedding. Swing too far in the other direction and brands risk limiting their digital homes to Amazon-style online experiences with little in the way of personality.

To further muddy the waters, where brands once viewed their site as the centre of their online world, today they are far more likely to make their deepest connections with consumers on social media. Rather than being where customers start to learn about a label, the site is now the end of their journey through a brand’s universe. This case study will break down the two site missions — storytelling and commerce — into their components and explore how an organisation can achieve success on each front, focusing on the customer journey up until checkout.

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E-Commerce Assistant, Métier — London, United Kingdom

Omnichannel Operations Specialist, Moncler — Milan, Italy

E-Commerce Manager, Chalhoub Group — Cairo, Egypt

3. Social Media’s Unsavoury Upside for Luxury Brands

Social media is causing feelings of inadequacy that consumers try to make up for with luxury purchases, Bernstein analysts argued in a recent research note. (Getty Images)

In the near term, luxury is staring down a hard road. Consumers in China and now the US are pulling back on high-end spending. Aspirational shoppers who went on stimulus-fueled splurges after the pandemic are back to budgeting their dollars. And some critics say the industry has become stagnant creatively as brands churn out formulaic, logo-heavy merch that’s failing to excite customers. But Bernstein analyst Luca Solca predicts luxury can count on at least one big tailwind.

The insecurity and alienation social media is fueling in young people will push them to buy luxury goods in hopes their new purchases will somehow elevate them to better versions of themselves, Solca wrote in a recent research note. While the evidence that social media and smartphones are responsible for the crisis isn’t so straightforward, the Bernstein team believes that online clout-chasing and other structural shifts in society play to luxury’s advantage.

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Peak E-Commerce Operations Analyst, Deckers Brands — London, United Kingdom

IT Senior Support Analyst, Tiffany & Co. — New York, United Kingdom

Backend Engineer, On — Zurich, Switzerland

4. How Running Went High Tech

Running a race — 24-year-old Elliot Johnson uses an Oura ring and a Garmin smartwatch during his training for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in New Zealand later this year. (Elliot Johnson)

Running was historically one of the most stripped-down sports there was. It required no field, no teammates and no special equipment beyond gym clothes and a basic pair of running shoes. But today, even casual runners routinely outfit themselves in the latest technical apparel, footwear designed in a high-tech lab and any number of gadgets to track their health. These wearables themselves have evolved from the Fitbits of the 2010s used for daily step counts to products like Whoop and the Oura Ring as awareness grows that factors like sleep, hormonal cycles and stress can have as much impact on your performance as the gear you wear.

Companies like Oura and Whoop have savvily marketed their products as indispensable items to people like elite athletes, celebrities and CEOs, cementing them as part of the daily routines of high-performing figures. Oura’s Rings, for instance, have been used by Real Madrid, the England national football team and organisations such as the NBA, NASCAR and UFC. They are also worn by figures like Kim Kardashian and Prince Harry.

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Graphic Designer, Press Health Foods — London, United Kingdom

E-Commerce & Testing Analytics Engineer, Chico’s — Fort Myers, United States

Technical Representative Specialist, On — Shanghai, China

5. US Crackdown on Cheap Chinese Goods Takes Aim at Temu, Shein

Shein and Temu — Plans to begin taxing US imports worth less than $800 would shut a loophole that that has helped fuel the Chinese-linked e-commerce players’ growth. (Shutterstock/Shutterstock)

Washington’s envisioned clampdown on the tax-free import of Chinese goods imposes one more layer of uncertainty on consumer-sector mavens from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Temu who are already struggling to cope with a consumer crisis back home. Alibaba and smaller rival JD.com Inc. sagged about 2 percent in Hong Kong this month as investors parsed the potential fallout from US plans to begin taxing packages worth less than $800.

That all but slams shut a loophole that PDD Holdings Inc.’s Temu and fashion-focused competitor Shein have employed for years, to ship hundreds of millions of packages into the US annually, carving out a market at the expense of Amazon.com Inc. The move threatens to reshape parts of the US retail arena and deflate the excitement that’s accompanied the meteoric ascent of bargain bazaars like Temu, Shein and Alibaba’s AliExpress. Analysts expect Shein and Temu to take the brunt of the crackdown, depending on the extent and size of tariffs set.

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Head of E-Commerce, Omnes — London, United Kingdom

Digital Tech Product Management Lead, Gucci — Milan, Italy

ESB Tech Lead Engineer, Ralph Lauren — New York, United States

6. What Condé Nast’s Embrace of AI Means for Fashion Media

Magazines sprawled over a table — Magazines (Shutterstock)

From the moment ChatGPT was released nearly two years ago, media watchers conjured up similar visions of AI-generated content replacing traditional journalism (not to mention traditional marketing, traditional social media and countless other fields). While the internet is now awash in robot-written articles, Instagram ads and tweets, much of that content is error-ridden clutter. That is changing fast. Google’s AI overview, for instance, scrapes text from a publication’s website and condenses it into a bite-sized summary that displays on their results page.

Teaming up with OpenAI could help Condé Nast get ahead of the curve. Supporters would argue that AI isn’t going anywhere, it’s better to figure out how to use it for your advantage — and nab a share of the revenue pie — early on. Critics, however, might argue Condé Nast’s new partnership is akin to getting into bed with the devil; they see deals with AI search engines as the pivot to video of the 2020s. Notably, The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in December.

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Logistics Coordinator, 16 Arlington — London, United Kingdom

Global E-Commerce Marketing Intern, Hugo Boss — Metzingen, Germany

E-Commerce Coordinator, Dôen — Los Angeles, United States

7. Beauty Brands’ New Method for Driving Loyalty

TYB and Kiki World are among the start-ups calling themselves "community commerce" platforms. (Courtesy)

Part loyalty programme, part fan club, “community commerce” platforms are the latest tech trend gaining traction with beauty’s biggest players. The benefits, brands argue, are worth it. The concept of creating a brand “community” has become paramount in beauty marketing, and both TYB and Kiki World allow brands to award loyalty points for purchases and brand-related social interactions. TYB also offers group chat functionality, where brands can send updates and communicate back and forth with members.

These platforms’ rise comes as beauty brands, facing stubbornly high ad and customer acquisition costs, are shifting their focus to customer retention. Though still in their early stages — TYB has been around for two years and Kiki World for one — they offer brands a way to experiment with new loyalty and communication formats to stay relevant with a Gen-Z audience, as well as ways to increase user-generated social content as it grows in importance compared to influencer marketing.

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CRM Project Manager, Maison Margiela — Paris, France

CRM Manager, Aesop — New York, United States

CRM Associate, Tapestry — Singapore, Singapore

8. Mytheresa Grows Sales Amid Continued Focus on Top Clients

An image of a model holding a Mytheresa box. — Mytheresa remains an exception in an otherwise dreary luxury e-commerce sector. (Mytheresa)

As the global luxury industry flounders amid tepid consumer demand this year, Mytheresa continues to buck the trend. The luxury e-tailer finished its fiscal year, which ended in June, with sales up 10 percent to €841 million ($927 million) and €26 million in adjusted earnings before interests, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, it announced in its full year earnings call on Thursday.

Mytheresa also generated 20 percent of sales in the US in 2024, a region many luxury brands and retailers are underperforming in. In the US, “there’s a market opportunity for customers that want to shop high-end luxury at a very elevated level,” said Michael Kliger, Mytheresa’s chief executive. “The size of the offer at department stores, online and physical, seems not to capture this audience well enough.”

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Engineering Manager, Primark — Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Production Quality Controller, Moncler — Milan, Italy

Warehouse Software Systems & Processes Senior Manager, Eileen Fisher — New Jersey, United States