Success in today’s competitive fashion retail landscape is dependent on a brand’s ability to quickly identify, respond, and adapt to changing dynamics. According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion Report, 2025 is a year fraught with uncertainty for the fashion industry.

The report mentions that a mere 20 percent of retailers interviewed expect improvements in consumer sentiment this year, compared to the 39 percent who think industry conditions will worsen.

Rapidly changing consumer preferences, competitor activities, and market trends mean that retailers must innovate and improve their customer experience – both online and offline - to capture shoppers.

To do so, retailers need insights that strategically guide customer experience decisions. Initiating continuous experience evaluations act as an “early warning system” retailers need to stay ahead of competitors and market trends.

Let’s explore this approach further and see how retailers can benefit from it.

Near-Time Feedback Helps Retailers Tackle Key Challenges

The fashion retail industry is constantly changing, fast-moving, and volume driven. The sooner a retailer’s teams can detect issues, the faster they can respond and resolve them.

That said, teams are always confronted with several challenges. Many struggle to identify emerging issues within the ecosystem before this influences revenue. Teams also have limited visibility into competitor activities and evolving consumer expectations.

If these challenges are not addressed quickly, teams end up becoming reactive, which severely impacts strategic decision-making. For example, teams that don’t track competitor pricing, product launches, and other initiatives could risk implementing poorly timed and ineffective promotions. They need to think differently to tackle these issues head-on.

Hoka is a pertinent example of a new “challenger” fashion brand that quickly gained traction between 2020 and 2024, and outmaneuvered larger, established competitors like Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Under Armour.

They achieved remarkable growth by implementing targeted category specialization, product innovations, expanding into specialty stores, and effectively leveraging wholesale distribution.

Near-Time Feedback Empowers Retailers with Continuous, Real-World Insights

To stay competitive, retailers should consider implementing continuous experience evaluations across their ecosystems.

The “boots on the ground” intelligence and frequent evaluations deliver several key benefits to teams such as:

Near-time, actionable insights that allow teams to spot service gaps

Insights into competitor activities and changing consumer trends before they impact the business

Improvement in participation and response accuracy that delivers more trustworthy insights

Empowering teams to resolve challenges faster, leading to greater customer loyalty

As an example, Zara store managers send customer feedback directly to designers daily. Not only has this allowed Zara to adjust its product range quickly, but it has also contributed to a 12% annual sales increase over the past 15 years.

Competitive Benchmarking Delivers Strategic Advantages

Retailers who conduct frequent assessments of their stores and competitors uncover market trends, pricing shifts, and promotional strategies as they occur. This gives teams a strategic edge, as these evaluation activities help them recognize underperforming factors and inconsistencies in the brand experience.

Research shows that fashion retailers who have ongoing evaluation initiatives can improve several facets of their business. For example, brands with well-designed loyalty programs experience multiple purchases from customers – around 53% of customers who return for a second purchase will subsequently make a third. Loyal customers also have a 67% higher average order value.

Proactive Adaptation to Market Change is Key

Retailers who implement regular assessments allow for early detection of competitor promotions, identify shifts in pricing strategies, and the leveraging of new technologies. Scorecards and detailed reports from these evaluations enable quick and efficient rollout of improvements across retail departments.

Teams can learn from the mistakes of competitors and use ongoing experience evaluations to find new initiatives and rapidly tweak their offerings or programs while ensuring they are true to the brand.

Shopper insights are complementary to in-house data, as they provide external and qualitative perspectives that internal sales or operational data alone cannot reveal. These insights also explain customer behavior throughout the customer experience at different touchpoints.

Listen Fast to Stay Ahead through Continuous Experience Evaluations

Continuous experience evaluations are not just a measurement tool – they are instrumental in enabling your retail brand to elevate the customer experience and outpace your competitors.

Implementing continuous experience evaluations and competitive benchmarking empowers teams to identify service gaps, monitor competitor activities, and detect changes in consumer trends and preferences.

They provide teams with the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to market changes with near-time feedback and real-world insights, giving them a competitive advantage.

Make customer experience evaluations your early warning system and keep your brand ahead of the curve.

If you have any questions or are looking for a partner to help strategically transform your retail customer experience, drop us a line.

Why Near-Time Feedback is Critical for Top-Performing Retailers