With consumers stuck at home during Covid-19 lockdowns, the retail industry saw a downfall in physical stores and a boom in the online space. In a saturated and fast-paced digital landscape, speed and precision provide retailers with an upper hand against their competitors.
Being able to spot opportunities and react to market changes before others were instrumental in helping the e-commerce brand Off Duty Label grow during turbulent times. We recently sat down with the brand’s founder, Yihui Chua to discuss the crucial role of data in Off Duty Label’s fashion journey.
Off Duty Label
Founded by Yihui Chua, Off Duty Label was born to serve the niche of affordable, casual womenswear with a refreshing take on everyday essentials. True to its name, the Singaporean brand offers wardrobe classics with thoughtful details that mark off-duty hours.
With an audience of working women aged 21 to 35, Yihui defines Off Duty Label as a brand that “speaks to the stylish and independent women that have an interest in exploring refreshed wardrobe concepts without breaking the bank.”
With its digital nature and tech-savvy consumers, social media has been a key part of Off Duty Label’s outreach. The brand utilises social media platforms to engage with their customers and keep active conversations with them, opening the doors to online expansion. As Covid-19 made pop-up events impossible, Off Duty Label pivoted to focus its efforts on virtual platforms.
The pandemic accelerated the brand’s digitalisation efforts, which is now in full swing.
When Off Duty Label first started, its first collection consisted of a classic pair of linen trousers, a long jumpsuit with a signature cut, and a basic linen top with ruffled sleeves. While the designs were well-received by consumers, there were limited quantities and sizes produced as the brand did not have a firm understanding of demand.
Looking back, if we can do things a little differently, we would dive deeper into understanding consumer demand in order to help us plan our inventory effectively. - Yihui Chua
With retail insights at its fingertips, Off Duty Label can accurately predict trade performance and produce the right quantities to maximise margins instead of losing out in the guessing game.
Where Omnilytics Fits in the Fashion Journey
Prior to using Omnilytics, Off Duty Label went the traditional route of gathering and consolidating data - a cumbersome process that requires manual crawling to pull together information. Yihui elaborated that not only is this process time-consuming, it is also prone to human errors and oversight.
Omnilytics plays a crucial role in our current processes. It all started with the intention of making decisions backed by data to reduce the uncertainty from guesswork. - Yihui Chua
Manual processes are kept to a minimum with the Omnilytics dashboard, which surfaces millions of data tracked and updated daily to help retailers save time and improve efficiency. Yihui credits Omnilytics’s accurate datasets and easy to digest chart visualisations for empowering her brand to track patterns and trends and spot opportunities and risks in no time.
By removing manual data collection from their day to day and improving accuracy, Off Duty Label has more time for informed decision making to effectively drive growth.
Optimise Resources with Validated Ideas
After establishing a robust assortment of wardrobe classics, Off Duty Label wished to incorporate more unique trends into its collection to draw in fashion-forward customers. However, the sporadic nature of fashion trends and the forces that influence trend lifecycles are difficult to track without complete visibility into the market.
Access to performance metrics for styles, colours, patterns, sizes and categories allowed Off Duty Label to build a demand-led assortment. Before integrating new products into its collection, Off Duty Label observes how the trend is performing in the market to validate its commercial value before acting. Yihui remarked that her brand had particular success with linen shorts, which the brand had tracked through Omnilytics and incorporated into the assortment.
Aside from tracking trends, Off Duty Label also uses Omnilytics to understand how its competitors price their items and how consumers react to different prices. Pricing is a critical part of merchandising and is the key to boosting conversions ahead of the competition.
With retail market insights, Off Duty Label is able to take a demand-driven approach to designing and assortment planning, capturing opportunities and leveraging best-sellers to create winning collections that their customers are looking for.
All in all, we now have a better understanding of consumer demand and the fashion retail landscape in Singapore with Omnilytics. Changing our stance to a demand-driven supply chain guarantees a higher purchase rate and helps us optimise our resources to focus more on the products, sizes, and colours that are in high demand. - Yihui Chua
Off Duty Label strives towards becoming the to-go label for casual wear in Singapore and the APAC region, with data to power every retail decision.
Want to grow your business with retail insights? If you are a Singaporean brand, you can connect with our retail experts here to find out if you are eligible for the DRB payout (worth $5000) and a chance to become an Omnilytics user at no cost.
Alternatively, you can sign up for a free 14-day dashboard trial here and try Omnilytics in action.
