What should Apple, Google and Samsung do next- Make clothes!!!

IoT has the potential to impact most if not all industries, some may become victim of IoT and others may get reinvented.  This idea did not even seem feasible a couple of years ago when most pundits thought IoT was another FAD.  In this edition of "predicting the future" we explore how IoT could take down the shopping malls, cotton farmers, nylon factories and century old fashion brands from Channel to Prada.

If this got your attention – great, because the students at Kellogg School of Management got mine.  Using the IoT Impact Framework we speculated on the future of retail driven by smart & dynamic clothes (IoT enabled) and its impact on our would.  Such clothes would not just impact the clothing manufacturers and the associated ecosystem of suppliers and retailers but us too as individuals.  They could even have far reaching implication on healthcare and fashion industry.

So what are these smart clothes or fabrics.  Rebecca Gaddis did a fantastic article in Forbes explaining what smart fabrics are?  For the purpose of our discussion - they exits, and are evolving fast to become mainstream.  Per Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, an adjunct associate professor at Pratt Institute,

“what makes smart fabrics revolutionary is that they have the ability to do many things that traditional fabrics cannot, including communicate, transform, conduct energy and even grow.” 

For our discussion we will stick with clothes that can change color, have thermal properties and are connected.

Imagine, a world where you buy a pair of jeans and it changes its color at your command (or probably from your smart phone, that just seems to be becoming the receptacle for all things IoT esp. consumer).  Why would you buy three shades or many colors of jeans, you just reduced jeans production by 75% - you just disrupted the whole jeans value chain from cotton farmer to the retailer.

Imagine, a world where the jeans can conduct energy, you just eliminated the need for fleece lined jeans in winter.  Warm weather people won’t know, but some of us have different set of jeans for winters. 

Imagine, your clothes can monitor your body – temperature, moisture, nutrients, blood pressure, etc. – the skin is the biggest organ in the body and clothes have serious access to this organ.  Now there is data on your body not once in a while when you visit your physician but continuous.  This data could be communicated to your physician or health monitoring services (like ADT does for homes).  Any anomaly will generate alerts and allow proactive management of health.  Now you just reduced the need for healthcare. 

And the list goes on, I leave it to your imagination and entrepreneurial visionaries who will find means to utilize these sophisticated clothes.  If you feel excited about such a world, now think about what else will it do to the world as we know it today.

Using the IoT Impact Framework, we speculated the impact on the economic benefits and business model dimensions.

Short Term Benefits:
Say in five years from now, you buy your first set of dynamic connected clothes. 

• You will soon realize that you don’t need a whole lot of clothes leading to reduction in spend on clothes both amount and frequency
• Your connected clothes will monitor your body and the data will be used to proactively address and coordinate care. An industry that consumes one-sixth of our GDP in US, could definitely use some help from such clothes

Long Term Benefits:
With reduced need for quantity of clothes, several industries will be impacted.  This could be a step in the direction of what Herbert Simon called "designing a sustainable future".    

• Even if we reduced the production of clothes by say 50% over the next few decades, reduction in manufacturing and transporting will definitely reduce the environmental burden. Beyond the environment impact, some industries may either get consolidated or become niche / novelty.  Beyond the clothes makers, the most impact could be felt by freight / inventory management industries and retailers
• Consumers will not need large closets to store all shades of clothes, for those not living in North America (we have something called a walk-in closet – think a small enclosure to a big room for our clothes). Our homes would probably be architected differently.  What would airlines do, if not one checked bags – they collected over $3.5B in baggage fees
• Connected / sensory features of such clothes will enable manufacturers to better understand the usage and change their processes accordingly for efficient production (it is a foregone conclusion that one of the actions connected products will do is to call home and let the mother ship know how they are performing in the field)

Unintended Benefits / Consequences:
To me this is the most important aspect of any industrial revolution, things that we do not go out to achieve but end up happening 

• The demand for cotton would fall significantly, either we will have to find alternate use for cotton or farmers will have to find alternate crops to grow
• Given the amount of technology involved in such clothes it would be fair to make an assertion that such clothes will be brought to you by a very different set of companies - could it be Apple, Google and Samsung
• Medication dispensation from such clothes could solve one of the biggest challenge to patient care - adherence to medication regimen. Prescription adherence is estimated to be a $300B problem in US per Prescriptions of Healthy America.  If these clothes could administer medication, pharmaceutical companies may need to rethink their supply chain.  Walgreens and CVS will need to rethink their strategy – there may not be any pills or drops to sell

Business Model Changes:
Any technological disruption leads to changes or creation of new business models.  It will be no different with IoT.

• The biggest risk would be to the fashion brands - now they will have to adapt from being masters of fabric and taste to masters of technology too. Its huge gap and the Pradas and Burberrys of the world be challenged, now from recruiting at art institutes, one may see them hiring at electrical and computer schools too (Revenge of the Nerds comes to mind).  Be ready for a Victoria Secrets show being run by nerds
• Fashion brands may end up becoming the Ideos & TEAMS Designs of the world, i.e. ideation partners’ / design consultants to the Apples and Googles or the companies making dynamic clothes
• The future of malls could be very different than what we grew up with. Most stores today cater to clothes sales as fulfillment centers, could they end up becoming experience centers than fulfillment centers?
• And finally, the health insurance industry could get disrupted, could these dynamic clothing companies offer health insurance or become the source for pricing health insurance

I leave it to you to speculate what else could happen!!! 

Other relevant publications:

• Could IoT wreck the CPG & Retail marriage?
• Lessons for IoT from Trump's Presidential Run
• Industrial Internet’s Impact – Drunk driving, Vanishing regional airlines & Shared cars
• A $5 Raspberry Pi Zero - A leap towards IIoT's Smart Dust horizon
• Could Garden Lamps show light to the Industrial Internet of Things?

Be a part of the discussions on IIoT—join the LinkedIn group“Industrial Internet / Internet of Things”