2025 has been the year of the fashion app.
Fashion brands Cult Gaia and Aritzia have launched shopping apps in the last month. Ralph Lauren launched a new AI-powered app called Ask Ralph in September, and the footwear brand Dolve Vita released its version in January. Meanwhile, others, like the watch marketplace The 1916 Company, revamped and relaunched existing apps. This year also saw the app launches of several fashion marketplaces, including OneOff, Beni and Daydream.
It’s a surprising trend, especially given data from the mobile measurement company Adjust, which found that global installs of e-commerce apps are down 14% this year. So what’s motivating fashion companies?
Analysts and experts told Glossy it’s, in part, an attempt by brands to own more of the data and the relationship with their customers, rather than being forced to rely on intermediaries like Google or Shopify.
“These apps are appealing because they allow brands to own the mobile experience, drive discovery and loyalty — not just conversion, link digital and physical touchpoints, and create community,” said Melissa Gonzalez, a retail strategist and principal at the retail architecture firm MG2. “Apps may include user profiles, saved looks, friend sharing, live chats, Q&As, drop countdowns and loyalty tiers, all tailored for the Gen-Z consumer who values peer influence and identity.”
While getting consumers to install an app is hard, given the vast number of shopping options available, the upside is that once a shopper uses the app, they become far more valuable. The same report from Adjust also found that app engagement and time in sessions are up 2% this year, and marketplace apps have a retention rate of 24%. In other words, people are downloading fewer apps, but the ones they do use, they are using more actively. Shopping apps have made up more than 75% of all app installs so far this year.
Kate Sanner, the co-founder and CEO of the resale shopping platform Beni, said a mobile app is best for companies with an established user base. “Cult Gaia is probably going to get die-hard Cult Gaia fans to download the app, people who buy frequently and have a reason to have the app handy,” she said.
The most downloaded fashion shopping apps on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store tend to be from either marketplaces with vast quantities of new products added regularly, like Shein and Vinted, or brands with significant established audiences, like Nike and H&M.
Beni, which lets customers search for secondhand products across sites like eBay and The RealReal, began life as a browser extension and a website. That was followed by a barebones mobile app launched last year, the primary purpose of which was to funnel customers to the browser extension.
But at the beginning of this month, Beni relaunched the mobile app with more robust features, including a visual search option that uses a phone camera. The visual search feature itself isn’t unique to Beni — for example, Google offers it — but Beni hopes its specific focus on secondhand deals will differentiate it from other apps.
“It takes a lot to get people to download an app, so you need to have a clear ‘why,'” Sanner said. “For us, that was visual search. It’s a feature that works best on a phone and in app form.”
App development costs can vary. The Business of Apps, an app data and insights company, estimates that a simple mobile app costs $5,000-$10,000 to build, while more complex apps can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus maintenance and future updates. Beni’s app was built in-house and spun up in only a few months, thanks to the fact that it’s really just an interface to Beni’s already existing back-end database. That meant Beni could avoid some of the pitfalls of launching app-first.
“Every time you update an iOS app, you have to resubmit it to the App Store and get re-approved. It can be quite cumbersome,” Sanner said.
Cult Gaia’s app, which launched on November 24, appeals to die-hard shoppers with features like limited-time, app-only drops and promotions, and 24-hour early access to drops.
Outside of brand apps, there has been a glut of new AI-powered shopping apps, many of them with big names in fashion and media behind them. Julie Bornstein, founder of The Yes, launched the mobile app version of her AI shopping tool Daydream this month. Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, launched the AI price-tracking app Phia in May, and Google launched an outfit visualizing app Doppl in June. In October, founders Emir Talu and Bobby Maylack debuted their celebrity-look shopping app OneOff with backing from Hermès.
Maylack and Talu concurred that the barrier to downloading an app is high, but once customers do, the retention rate of a mobile app is higher than that of any other shopping channel. OneOff has been relying on partnerships with big-name celebrities like Emma Chamberlain and Emma Roberts to draw people in. But after the download, they’ve been using social features — like the ability for users to see what their friends are wearing and shopping — to keep people using the app.
“We’ve built out the social feed throughout November based on early user feedback,” Talu said. “We wanted to ignite in people the habit of opening our app and checking it, even if they’re not looking for something in particular. The social feed has been great for that.”
While most apps have an average user session time of around three minutes, an average time of eight to 12 minutes is the gold standard and puts an app in competition with juggernauts like Instagram and TikTok. OneOff is already averaging 6-minute sessions, which Maylack and Talu attribute to the social element.
“We were interested to see if people were even open to sharing,” Maylack said. “But there’s nothing more open or social than the clothes you’re wearing. It’s very natural to want to share that, and that’s helping us keep people engaged.”
