Online fashion and apparel trading is probably one of the most hotly contested markets in the world. Creating a brand that’s differentiated clearly from its competition is a tough call in any vertical, and the clothing industry’s reputation has suffered when businesses compete purely on price.

Consumers are aware that companies offering cut-price, fast fashion have likely cut corners and abused their supply chain, with horrendous reports of manufacturers’ working conditions making headline news. Consumers increasingly vote with their wallets and deliberately make ethical choices when shopping online. Being an ethical clothing brand and doing so demonstrably is a win-win – it’s a massive competitive differentiator, consumers feel great about their chosen vendors, and workers in the supply chain don’t get exploited.

There remains another challenge, however. If a clothing brand (or indeed, any company) wants to act ethically in every aspect of its activities, it has to examine the ways it provides customer experience.

Creating a customer experience (CX) is a critical area for online companies today, and it hinges on providing personalised and helpful interactions between the seller and buyer. But for the vast majority of the world’s ethical brands, their ethical practice stops here. In previous articles here on Tech Wire Asia, we’ve discussed how many businesses collate third-party data belonging to customers and prospects and form largely inaccurate and privacy-invasive pictures of their customers and prospects. These are then used to create messaging for touch-points that are not only a waste of costly resources but actively alienate users.

Source: Wellbi

This happens when consumers feel that brands know too much about them (which is borderline creepy), are inaccurate (wasted messaging), or are accurate but irrelevant. The latter case is very common: a customer is tagged by third-party data as interested in golf, for example, and so all data-driven fashion suggestions for that customer comprise eye-watering colours.

As part of our exploration into how relevant information, given consensually by customers, can craft customer experiences and the massive advantages this offers, we spoke to Supreeth Kashyap of Wellbi, an ethical clothing brand operating in India. Wellbi carefully sources the hand-woven fabrics used in its range from artisans across the country, paying them a premium rate for their labour and guaranteeing them a consistent commission for their work.

Source: Wellbi

“Basically, I started with the with a vision of empowering rural artisans,” said Supreeth, the founder and CEO of Wellbi. “When I was criss crossing rural India, I found a group of artisans who were producing the finest fabrics, but they didn’t have a good market linkage for the product. They were earning less than three dollars [a day]. Textiles is the second largest employer in India, just after farming and agriculture. […] Before, they were getting work for only two to ten days in a month. Right now, they’re getting work for close to the entire month, 30 days. So now things have changed for them considerably.”

It’s a company that takes its ethical values into every aspect of its operations, including managing its customers’ identities, from which it can create a level of trust in the Wellbi brand that informs the customer experiences it creates.

Source: Wellbi

The concept embraced by Wellbi and many other brands that genuinely care for their customers is that of zero-party data – that’s information willingly exchanged by customers and prospects with the company in a way that ensures their privacy and security. Wellbi uses Holistic Identity Management powered by the Affinidi Trust Network (ATN). You can read more about the concepts of Holistic Identity Management and the ATN in previous articles we’ve published on this site.

By creating a customer experience based on consent-driven data, it formulates the critical description of each individual based on information relevant to the customer’s interactions with the brand. As trust and loyalty build, the picture gains detail, and the quality of CX improves in ways that are non-invasive, secure, and consensual.

Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi, told us, “It comes back to a community of like minded consumers working with like minded businesses – people who care about buying organic goods, they’re likely doing it across multiple facets of their life. They’re buying organic beauty products, they’re buying organic fashion. So I think part of [the Affinidi Trust Network] is just connecting brands and businesses that are very focused on that [ethos]. I think there’s a lot of ‘green washing’ out there in the industry for these things. So being able to have that trust network where […] you connect through, saying, ‘We’ve got consumers who want to spend money on these types of goods’. [Consumers] make a conscious decision about investing their money in these types of causes. Businesses act as a marketplace, as gateways that [provide] a discovery mechanism for these very small-batch products. I think is actually what consumers are looking for.”

The concept of zero-party data and the ATN mean that Wellbi can find new audiences that resonate with its ethical ethos and brand vision. With their permission, online shoppers whose personal preferences align with Wellbi can be offered opportunities with similar companies, safe in the knowledge that their personal data is treated ethically.

At present, it’s anomalous that companies that trade on their ethical stance still act unethically when it comes to customer information management, building ‘insights’ from data that they have no consent to use, on prospects and customers whose data is treated with little respect for the values held by the brand and the online citizen.

The poor click-through rate of ‘traditional’ platforms like Meta is around the 2-3% mark, which is indicative of how inaccurate most companies’ perceptions are of their users. With the Affinidi Trust Network, brands can develop CX according to information dictated by the customer, not privacy-invasive and inaccurate data. That promotes an immediate trust on which a meaningful CX can be created. “But there’s not many things we spend money on as businesses where a 98% failure rate is normal. […] You don’t need to shift that needle much. A 1% difference is actually a 50% improvement,” Glenn said.

To find out more about Wellbi and browse its ethical range of menswear, head over to its online store. You can read more about Affinidi Trust Network here and start to create an ethical and powerful customer experience that is truly and accurately personalised.