What Breaks The Customer Experience in Fashion Retail?

The Customer Experience in fashion retail isn’t broken because of bad tools. It’s broken because of a language gap. As we’ve been integrating Dressipi with Mapp, we’ve spoken to over 30 fashion retail leaders (across all spectrums). If you gave us your time, thank you. You know who you are. There’s much more to share, but one theme has emerged loud and clear, and it’s surprisingly consistent.Fashion retail isn’t short on creativity.

It isn’t short on tech. And it certainly isn’t short on data.

Many retailers have replatformed. They’ve bought best-of-breed solutions, for search & merch, for CDPs, for PIMs, for attribution. And on paper, the stack looks impressive. But despite all that investment, eCommerce KPIs are eerily flat. In fact, they haven’t moved much since we started Dressipi over a decade ago.

So What’s Going On?

What we’re seeing is a classic case of optimisation without integration.

• Merchandising teams classify products by material and end-use.
• CDPs segment customers by recency and frequency (useful for reporting — less so for experience).
• Product attributes are entered manually by junior teams with no consistent logic.

Each system solves its own problem.But none of them speak the same language. And the result? A customer journey that feels stitched together, and not in a good way.

Click Around Any Major Fashion Site Today and you'll likely see:

• Rows of products ranked by stock or warehouse logic
• Search that collapses under anything remotely specific
• Recommendations that feel more “what other people bought” than “this gets me”

Discovery isn’t delightful. It’s often overwhelming. A dead end. The real problem? We’ve forgotten how people actually buy fashion. In-store, you can walk up to a store assistant and say “I need something glamorous (but not too sexy) for a wedding in London this June.”
And chances are, they’ll know just the thing. But online? That natural, emotional language gets lost in translation. Shoppers don’t think in stock codes. They think in moods, moments, and style cues. They want to feel understood not filtered and funnelled. Instead, they get hit with drop-downs, filters, and guesswork.

And the impact is starting to bite:

• Return rates are up 13% since 2021
• Conversion are stuck at around 2–3%
• Full-price sell-through struggles to break 60% (if you’re lucky)

Our Working Theory

The Customer Experience is broken because of a foundational linguistic problem. Most product data is still built for logistics, not for style. It’s missing nuance. It’s disconnected from how real people shop. This isn’t about replatforming (again). It’s about rethinking the logic beneath your stack. What fashion needs is a semantic layer. A shared fashion taxonomy – not for the merchandisers, not for the CDP providers, but for the customer.

Not just category, colour, size, neckline, but also: occasion, vibe, fit, flow, feeling.

When your data is fluent in the fashion the customer speaks, everything starts to fit:

• Search works
• Recommendations feel personal
• CRM journeys convert
• Returns drop

One of the most common reflections we heard in the past months is: “We already have the right products. We just haven’t described them in a way the customer understands.”

This Is the Conversation the Industry Has Been Avoiding

At the upcoming Drapers fireside chat, we’re asking the question that nobody’s dared ask:

What if your most powerful lever for personalisation, conversion, and loyalty isn’t in your CRM, but in your product data?

If your CX feels like a maze of missed signals, join us to rethink it from the inside out.

Save your spot | Fixing The Customer Experience: Making Your Tech Stack Speak The Language of Fashion With AI. An unfiltered conversation hosted by Drapers with speakers from ASOS, Lulu Guinness, For The Creators & Mapp.