Research shows that the colour of the clothes we wear significantly affect our day to day lives. For instance wearing black might help us appear powerful and authoritative at the workplace, while a red dress can make us look more attractive to a date. A yellow top might brighten up one’s day and a blue one land us a nifty bonus.

Oftentimes buyers navigating the myriad nuances of current fashion look for help from friends, popular media and retailers themselves. Retailers, for their part, try to stay ahead of fashion trends by meticulously studying trends from magazines, keeping a close eye on competitors and wading through the chatter on social media and fashion blogs.

Now that most of retail is metrics driven and becoming smarter by the day, we asked ourselves whether there is a more optimal way to analyse the influence of colors on customer buying decisions. Here’s how we went about doing it:

Method:

Thanks to the internet, a huge mine of valuable fashion data is available to us through e-commerce sites, brand Pinterest pages and fashion blogs, which regularly update their content streams with the newest fashion offerings. Data ranging from featured fashion of the current season including the complete product catalogue of brands as well as combinations of dresses that go together (even between brands) are all available for us to collect and analyse.

By crawling these sites, pages and blogs periodically we can extract the colors on each of the images shared. This data is very helpful for any online/offline merchant to visualize the current trend in the market and plan out their own product offering. It is also possible to plot monthly data to capture the timeline of trends across different fashion websites.

How is it Useful?

Let us assess the applications made possible from this data. How would color analysis assist product managers, category heads and merchandising heads?

1.Spotting current trends:

Color analysis can spot current trends across brands and various filters. This gives decision makers the ability to gauge and respond to current trends and offerings. Some filters that can be used to analyse this are price, colors, categories, subcategories etc

2.Predictive trends:

Using historical color data future trends can be spotted with greater accuracy. With this data decision makers can stay ahead of the demands and the predictions of the market and gain a foothold on the ever changing nature of fashion.

3.Assortment Analysis:

Assortment Analysis can become more in depth and insightful with color analysis. Assortment comparisons of one’s offerings v/s competitor’s offerings can give a clear cut decision pointers on both one’s color offerings present and categories one can focus on to get ahead of the competition.

4.Recommendations

A strong recommendation feature is vital in driving up sales by offering the right products to buyers at the right time. Analysis of colors helps recommendations become smarter and more relevant. For instance, the algorithm can help understand what tops go with which jeans or which shirts go with what ties.

Colours add a new dimension to current business analytics. Decision makers will be able to access enhanced analytics on existing products and compare across sources based on parameters such as price, categories, subcategories etc.

Color Analysis in retail is largely unexplored and rife with possibilities. Doing it at scale presents a number of unique challenges that we are addressing. We’re excited to bring novel techniques and the power of large scale data analytics to retail.

Color analysis will add to a retailer’s understanding of consumer buying patterns. This will help retailers sell better and improve profit margins. We are currently working on integrating this feature into PriceWeave so that our customers can do a comparative assortment analysis with color as an additional dimension.

About Priceweave:

PriceWeave provides Competitive Intelligence for retailers, brands, and manufacturers. We’re built on top of huge amounts of products data to provide features such as: pricing opportunities (and changes), assortment intelligence, gaps in catalogs, reporting and analytics, and tracking promotions, and product launches. PriceWeave lets you track any number of products across any number of categories against your competitors. If you’d like to try us out request for a demo.

Originally published at blog.priceweave.com.