In 10 Years, Every “Relevant” Company Will Be A Tech Company, Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake Says
Americans currently buy 80 percent of their clothes in physical retail stores. That’s going to change, and soon, says Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake. “If you want to be relevant 10 years from now, every company is going to be a tech company,” Lake said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “Airbnb is a hospitality company and Uber’s a transportation company and we are a retail company. But if you want to still exist in a decade, I think everybody’s going to have to be a tech company and figure out what is the thing that is going to be lasting about their company.” The simplest way to describe Stitch Fix is probably as a “clothing recommendation company”; the company sends you a box of clothes and accessories you might like, and you pay to keep whatever items you don’t send back. Lake said that if retail stores want to compete with her company and others such as Rent the Runway, Revolve, and the RealReal (and, oh yeah, Amazon), they will need to think of the store as one part of a larger business. Read more at Vox.
In a similar vein, I will never forget being told by Roy Colton and Harry Bernard 20 years ago that “Nike is a marketing company that makes apparel”; how right they were!