来源：《大西洋月刊》2021年3月号
In 2006, Mahmud Kamani and his business partner, Carol Kane, began selling cheap clothes directly to consumers through Boohoo.com. Without the burden of retail stores, the company’s costs were relatively low, except when it came to marketing. Young girls who went on YouTube were swamped with microtargeted ads for Boohoo bodysuits and minidresses. Boohoo’s founders understood that social media could be leveraged to make new brands quickly seem ubiquitous to their target audience. “If you have that imagery out there you are perceived as a much larger business than you actually are,” Kane told the trade publication Drapers.
2006年，马哈茂德•卡马尼和他的商业伙伴卡罗尔•凯恩开始通过Boohoo.com直接向消费者销售廉价服装。没有零售店的负担，公司除了营销外，其他成本相对较低。上YouTube的年轻女孩们总是能看到Boohoo紧身衣和超短裙的微目标广告。Boohoo的创始人明白，可以利用社交媒体，让新品牌在目标受众面前迅速变得无处不在。“如果你有这样的形象，你就会被视为一个比实际规模大得多的企业，”凯恩对行业出版物Drapers说。
Social media wasn’t just a convenient place to advertise—it was also changing how we think about our clothes. Fashion brands have always played on our aspirations and insecurities, and on the seemingly innate desire to express ourselves through our clothing. Now those companies had access to their target shoppers not just when they stood below a billboard in SoHo or saw an ad on prime-time TV, but in more intimate spaces and at all hours of the day.
社交媒体不仅仅是一个方便的广告场所，它还改变了我们对服装的看法。时尚品牌总是利用我们的渴望和不安全感，以及通过服装来表达自我的看似与生俱来的欲望。现在，这些公司不仅可以使消费者站在SoHo区的广告牌下时，或者在黄金时段的电视上看到广告，还可以在更私密的空间里，在一天的任何时间触及目标消费者。
The more we began documenting our own lives, meanwhile, the more we became aware of ourselves being seen. Young people, and young women in particular, came to feel an unspoken obligation not to repeat an #outfitoftheday; according to a 2017 poll, 41 percent of women ages 18 to 25 felt pressure to wear a different outfit every time they went out.
与此同时，我们越是在社交媒体上记录自己的生活，就越意识到自己被人看到了。年轻人，尤其是年轻女性，开始感到有一种不言而喻的义务，那就是不要重复着装；根据2017年的一项民意调查，18岁至25岁的女性中有41%的人感到压力，每次出门都要穿不同的衣服。
Boohoo’s founders understood that the company had to keep customers’ attention—to “be fresh all the time,” as Kane has put it. “A traditional retailer might buy three or four styles, but we’ll buy 25,” Kane told The Guardian in 2014. Not having to keep hundreds of stores stocked meant Boohoo could be flexible about inventory management. In 2018, H&M was sitting on $4.3 billion worth of unsold items. Boohoo, by contrast, could order as few as 300 or 500 units of a given style—just enough to see whether it would catch on. Only about a quarter of the initial styles were reordered, according to Kane.
Boohoo的创始人明白，公司必须努力保持客户的注意力——正如凯恩所说，“时刻保持新鲜感”。“传统零售商可能会购进三到四个款式，但我们会购进25款，”凯恩在2014年告诉《卫报》。Boohoo无需保持数百家门店的库存，这意味着它可以灵活地进行库存管理。2018年，H&M的未售出商品价值43亿美元。相比之下，Boohoo只需要订购300或500件特定款式的产品，就足以看看它是否会流行起来。据凯恩说，只有大约四分之一的最初款式被再次购进。
Over time, Boohoo accumulated rich data about online consumer behavior, and further tailored the shopping experience to its shoppers’ tastes. “They know that first-time customers like to see this product category, or customers from this geographic area like this color palette,” Matt Katz, a managing partner at the consulting firm SSA & Company, said.
随着时间的推移，Boohoo积累了关于在线消费者行为的丰富数据，并进一步根据购物者的品味定制购物体验。咨询公司SSA&Company的管理合伙人马特·卡茨说，“他们知道，初次客户喜欢看到这个产品类别，或者来自这个地理区域的客户喜欢这个色调。”