After spending years as keen observers of the fashion ecosystem, Allison Collins and Jessica Ramírez have rolled up their sleeves and are ready to help brands, technology companies and investors connect with The Consumer Collective.
The Brooklyn-based consultancy starts off with a big Rolodex, plenty of media and trend forecasting experience and a tailored, boutique approach to help clients break through.
Collins spent 15 years as a business journalist, including nine years at WWD, where she covered beauty, mergers and acquisitions as a reporter before rising to become executive managing editor.
Over the same time period, Ramírez focused on trend research, consumer insights, e-commerce, digital, retail analytics and store management with jobs at WGSN, Burberry and Ted Baker. Most recently, she was senior retail research analyst at Jane Hali & Associates, where she advised mutual funds and hedge funds.
The pair bring complementary skills to the market.
Collins has had a close-up view of the red-hot beauty sector, where countless brands and products have come and gone.
“Being someone who watched everything that was happening so closely in the consumer space for 15-ish years, I started to develop a real, educated gut instinct for what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, both in terms of brand concepts but also in terms of product,” Collins said. “Is this a good product you were putting out there or is this something you should just not go with? And in terms of marketing, I feel like I just ended up with so much exposure to that over time.
“I would see brands launch or I would interact with product and be like, this one is going to be good and I can feel it in my core,” she said.
The idea is to bring all that gut instinct to bear while helping brands, investors and retail tech companies sync up.
“There was a gap between what these really smart tech people were offering and how they spoke about it and what retailers and brands need to start doing and their understanding from the tech side,” Collins said.
Already, The Consumer Collective is helping Deda Stealth, which just bought control of artificial intelligence-pricing platform Competitoor, enter the U.S. Together, the two companies already work with more than 1,000 fashion clients, including Bottega Veneta and Golden Goose.
Even though fashion has become enamored with technology, there’s still a divide between brands and the tech providers, who are great at producing the next whiz-bang capability, but can’t always tell their story.
“There’s miscommunication almost on both ends,” Ramírez said of technology and retail companies. “They don’t connect the dots very well.”
And now is a time when fashion needs to connect the dots.
“A lot of the retail industry has been in a tough spot and they’re navigating, but operationally, it can be done better,” said Ramírez, who added that companies at the same time need to be keeping up with how consumers are evolving.
“It’s just kind of marrying all of that together — we’re using the skills of consumer interest and trend forecasting” to help retailers, she said.
“It’s extremely volatile right now given everything that is going on on the macroeconomic part and geopolitical part,” Ramírez said. “So it is just tough overall. Companies do have to be very well prepared in the way that they’re running their operations, but also be extremely consumer-focused on how we get there.”
