This is an episode of the Glossy Fashion Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the fashion industry. More from the series →
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On the Glossy Podcast, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska break down some of the biggest fashion news of the week.
This week, we discuss three big news stories: Kering has hired its new CEO, Luca de Meo, who comes from the automotive world, rather than the fashion or luxury sector. It’s an inspired choice at a time when Kering desperately needs a new direction.
We also talk about FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, announcing the launch of its own luxury fashion brand. And we discuss a bill passed in the French Senate that would curtail fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu, requiring them to pay extra taxes and banning them from advertising.
Later in the episode, our editor-in-chief Jill Manoff sits down with Warby Parker’s chief product and supply chain officer Kim Nemser. The conversation was recorded at our annual Glossy E-Commerce Summit, held this year in Miami in early June. Nemser spoke about Warby Parker’s omnichannel strategies, with a particular focus on how it’s integrating AI into many of its back-end operations. Below are a few highlights, lightly edited for clarity.
On Warby Parker’s use of AI
“AI can be overwhelming if you don’t chop it up into what problems you’re actually trying to solve. In retail, the ones that come to mind are enhancing customer service, customer experience and personalization. For customer service, we’re always thinking about how to use tech to improve. We have an in-house proprietary system that we call our point of everything. It includes all customer information in one place, and we put it in the hands of our advisors. It has everything from glasses you’ve bought in the past to what you liked and didn’t like when engaging with our other digital tools.”
“Seeing what our customers are engaging with in real time is massively helpful to our merchandising team. If there’s a style that keeps coming up, that people keep engaging with, it helps our team be that much faster and not have to wait on only sales data to start taking action.”
On managing tariffs
“Tariffs are changing on the daily. What we focus on is what we need to do right now. One thing that has become clear to us is the importance of vendor relationships. We keep our portfolio base manageable. Our vendor base is across countries of origin, so we’re not overexposed in one area. We’ve been good to our vendors, and they’ve been good to us. We lean into them, and we’ve been transparent with them. We give them forecasts with as much information as we have, but we also tell them when we just don’t know what will happen tomorrow. That’s been really helpful in managing this, along with just being open to change.”
