Digital has helped create an immediacy in consumer demand the likes of which retailing has never seen. “Fast” fashion has become “hyper-warp-speed” fashion. Trends that used to last a season now last weeks. The impact of these expectations has put significant pressure on retailers’ ability to select, source and fulfill consumer demand. Traditional approaches to product buying and supply chain need to adapt. Buying later, buying smaller and moving quickly will become a necessity for retailers to successfully compete against more nimble online and offline retailers who are able to deliver.

The need for speed is one aspect but it’s an offshoot of the bigger dynamic: retailers are no longer dictating fashion and trends, they are responding to consumers’ shifting whims. Foot Locker has the right idea by carving out open-to-buy for more spontaneous opportunities but, at the end of the day, the fashion and footwear industry is still locked into a months-long, buy-ahead model that is out of step with reality. Amazon is a factor here as well (when are they not?) as they have redefined fulfillment and convenience. The next nail has landed in the form of Amazon’s proliferating private brand offering, ensuring that all kinds of “looks” will be a click away. Married with Prime Wardrobe … well, you get the picture.

Social media may be a factor in fashion trends going viral and moving faster. But the influence of “fast fashion” retailers (Zara, Forever 21 and others) shouldn’t be understated. They mastered their supply chain in order to bring new goods to the selling floor a lot faster and in order to react to early test orders in a big way. Most traditional retailers built their logistics around long lead times, especially on private-brand goods, and are scrambling to catch up.

The idea of “speed to market” requires a change in mindset — affecting supply chain management, the willingness to chase big ideas and the ability of retailers’ vendors to move just as fast.

The speed of fashion is one aspect of a wider set of issues. Among these are: a constant consumer craving for newness, more variable weather patterns, a breakdown of traditional selling seasons, a more dynamic competitive environment, boredom with fashion and the rise of a global consumer able to buy clothes from anywhere in the world.

All of this means fashion retailers have to be nimbler, faster and much more flexible. How to achieve it? Shorter production runs, open buying, closer integration of manufacturing, increased regularity of stock turns, greater use of capsule collections and more flexible global supply chains are all possible answers.

Zara is the ultimate example of getting this right, although its size and scale mean what works for Inditex will not necessarily work for other retailers.

Accelerating the buy process is only a piece of the puzzle. Getting new products into stores and on to shelves is another. Retailers are slowly re-thinking their store supply chain processes, but their efforts lack urgency. It’s almost as if they’ve either given up or don’t understand the gravity of the situation.

Yes, the trends are moving too fast for the product development systems most retailers have spent decades setting up. Way too fast. This is a result of the long tail of e-commerce: search anywhere for anything and get it now. That premise just sped everything up, which is why specialty retail is in such dire straits (that and too many stores of course).

No one could’ve predicted the fact that you can see a trend on the street and go home and have it shipped from anywhere in the world to your doorstep in a day or two. But it certainly looks like that’s at the core of the seismic change in retail today.

Personally, i love it.

Ubiquitous bandwidth and remarkable advances in the smartphone have completely disrupted the calculus of consumer purchase behavior. In the main, the pace of change in brands’ and stores’ systems and processes has yet to catch up with those changes.

The future will include the top-down trend setting by brands and retailers as well as an increasing share of bottom-up social media-influenced trends. What is necessary here is to stop projecting the past into future processes. Fresh ideas, people, processes and supporting technology are necessary to execute on multiple, and at times competing, dimensions. Traditional thinking about trade-offs and optimization of what has been successful in the past is detrimental to identifying future growth, let alone achieving profitable operations.

Fashion is always ahead. It takes the “regular” consumer a bit of time to catch up to trends. Having said that, retailers have a precarious spot of trying to hit the trend and capitalize on volume without holding the consumer back from their fashion tendencies.

Retailers need to cut layers off their processes and find ways to shorten the inventory they have to stay flexible. The other thing retailers should be doing that caters to a shorter, more experiential journey is finding craft brands that have smaller batches and will be more nimble than a traditional six-month supply chain.

I’m not sure that this is the whole story. Ironically, there is a press inquiry in my inbox as I write this, from a reporter looking for commentary on how Millennials are getting more considered in their buying, looking for less but higher quality.

“Fast” has to be balanced with “sustainable.” I don’t think it’s fickleness and flocking to the next big thing that is driving the pressure to be fast. It’s that if consumers see it, they expect they won’t have to wait six months before it makes it into distribution. If they see it, and want it, they’ll find it. And if you don’t have it, you lose. But there are environmental consequences to “fast,” and ethical ones, and Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly conscious of those.

So yeah, lead times need to be shorter. But don’t think of this as disposable fashion — good for a few wears and then off to the next. I think that will turn out to be a mistake.

Yes, the influence of digital marketing and social media on shopper decision making is tremendous. When you can shop with your smartphone 24/7, having to wait a month or two or six to get a desired product in your hands is asking a lot. While H&M and Zara benefit from constantly improving a fast fashion supply chain strategy, the in-season equivalent for fashion designers, “see now, buy now” has not worked so well for Tom Ford, Thakoon, Burberry and others. Smart retailers are reassessing their production methods and supply chains to determine what works best for their products and customers. Running after trends is not the answer.

Yes absolutely. Bottom line, brick-and-mortar stores are in competition with their own websites. The stores can’t possibly carry as many things in stock as their online version nor keep up with the ever-changing stock. So most times we don’t bother going to the stores at all knowing they probably won’t have what we want and we just make the guaranteed purchase from their online store.