So it launched “Tommy Now”, its “see now, buy now” initiative, where clothes shown on the runway are available to buy right away, doing so in a world where technology means consumers want instant shopping satisfaction.
“The fashion industry (is) competing, not with itself but expectations set and met by other industries, real-time expectations. Getting anything this big and complicated in such a short period of time would be a massive undertaking … We would have to move faster than we have ever in our history,” she said.
Baker was open about how hard it is for large companies to change: “Even with the best intentions, corporate inertia can overwhelm the most innovative of thinking.” It tackled this by encouraging staff to “unlock our inner entrepreneur,” and put forward ideas, regardless of whether they might fail.
“As leaders, we have to commit to that old cliché of giving our people really the freedom to fail,” she added, and rather than outsourcing the problem to experts, all decisions were made in-house.
