Muge Erdirik Dogan: The Dr. Is In at Amazon Fashion
So exactly what kind of fancy background does one need to rise to the top of the biggest fashion business in the U.S.?
Judging from the career of Muge Erdirik Dogan, president of Amazon Fashion, the answer is to start with a PhD in optimizing supply chains in chemical plants.
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Huh?
“It’s a lot of operations research and mathematical modeling,” Erdirik Dogan, who received the degree from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, told WWD in an interview.
It’s an unusual path to the top in fashion — but it’s an education that is very much in keeping with Amazon’s own “test and iterate and iterate again” approach.
Where fashion brands in general tend to lean on their emotional side, the e-commerce giant has always been more analytical.
“In this role and in all the previous roles at Amazon, I’m able to bring my background, my deep roots in science and technology into what we’re doing and transforming the shopping experience,” said Erdirik Dogan, who has spent 16 years working her way up the ranks at Amazon.
While Amazon’s exact place in the fashion industry has been long been debated — Is it a brand? A merchant? A kind of online landlord? A competitor? All of the above? — it’s hard to argue with the company’s success.
Wells Fargo analyst Ike Boruchow estimates that Amazon’s apparel and footwear business rakes in $67 billion in sales in the U.S., including third-party sales on the company’s marketplace. That gives Amazon about 14 percent of the U.S. apparel market and roughly 44 percent of online apparel sales, he said.
Walmart — the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer — comes in at a distant second with roughly $30 billion in annual softlines sales, Boruchow said.
Erdirik Dogan oversees apparel, shoes, sports, outdoors, exercise equipment, luxury fashion and jewelry as well as the Shopbop and Zappos subsidiaries.
That puts her at a major crossroads at the Everything Store and in fashion, using analytics and technology to cater to both buyers and sellers.
And while brands have long been wary of Amazon — of how they’ll be presented on the site, of what it will do to their image to be sold alongside garden rakes and so on — more brands are becoming more comfortable with Amazon. (Or they’ve resigned themselves to an If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em strategy and signed up).
Last week, Amazon added Coach to its site, with a brand storefront that offers a “View in 3D” that allows customers to pinch, zoom and rotate a 3D model of a Coach product as well as virtual try-on for shoes and eyewear.
“We’re always evolving, always listening to the customers and brands and making changes,” Erdirik Dogan said. “I personally find that communication incredibly helpful, constantly seeking feedback. And as a result of it, we influence our roadmap to make sure that we can reflect, ‘What do the brands need’?
“We made some good progress,” she said. “Gap has been a fantastic addition. Victoria’s Secret is a relatively recent launch and it is now within top selling brands on Amazon Fashion.”
While the company’s Amazon Luxury Stores push has yet to attract the always-wary megawatt designer powerhouses, Erdirik Dogan cited the effort as another area of progress, pointing to an exclusive bridal collection with Rodarte and the launch of Rosie Assoulin, which was celebrated at New York Fashion Week.
“We have brand managers, we have engineers, we have scientists,” Erdirik Dogan said. “And so the way we think at Amazon in general, not just Amazon Fashion, is we always start with the customer and work backwards… adding more and more brands is really the right thing to do for our customers.”
Amazon can seem restless, trying one approach to fashion — a host of private label apparel brands for instance — only to pivot and then double down on what works, for instance, the larger umbrella Amazon Essentials, which sells cargo shorts, tank tops, socks, underwear, fleece, jeggings and more.
Tests come and go. Sometimes they stick.
One example is The Drop, which Erdirik Dogan said “jibes very well to our mission statement on constantly coming up with different innovations.”
Started in 2019, The Drop offers street-style collections and curations from brands and influencers.
Customers sign up for text alerts so they can order from limited-edition drops in 30-hour windows. Looks are then made to order in extended sizing, eliminating inventory and delivering some sense of scarcity.
Other collections in the program are focused on staples that are always available or trendy items curated by brands or celebrities.
“We wanted to create a destination for fashion authorities and trendsetters to engage with their fans and for Amazon customers to discover unique collections that reflect the latest trends in fashion,” Erdirik Dogan said. “We now have around half a million SMS [text] subscribers and half a million followers on The Drop’s Instagram feed. And we’re going to continue to find different ideas to continue to engage …. customers as well as influencers and brands, like giving brands yet another way to interact with our really engaged fashion customer.”
Amazon is also using its unique scale and technological chops to bring other innovations to fashion.
“We heard from our customers in the past that fit is a pain point in shopping in our stores,” Erdirik Dogan said. “So we said, OK, we need to act on this feedback and make this a much more delightful experience. And so we heavily invested in that area.
“One example is by using machine learning models, we’re now able to recommend to the customer what size we think they should purchase in a given brand during their shopping journey,” she said. “And our recommendation might be different from brand A to brand B because we’ve developed that intelligence using science and technology.”
The tech giant is also using its streaming business to cross-pollinate, selling fan gear for Thursday Night Football or Sergio Hudson looks inspired from the Prime Video spy show “Citadel,” starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
And that’s a good part of the Amazon playbook — start with the customer, not convention, be willing to making unusual connections and be willing to test and iterate.
“It’s a mix of different things, but certainly building up listening, getting the feedback, double-downing on what works, pivoting away from what doesn’t work, being open to experimentation and testing different ideas and as a result of it, building a complete experience,” Erdirik Dogan said.
“Both myself and my team, we wake up every day with that mission of making Amazon fashion the most loved fashion destination, both for customers, every customer, and every brand out there,” she said. “We’re going to continue to keep bringing new and exciting brands to Amazon Fashion. We’re going to continue to grow the engagement with our existing brands, partnering with them and leaning more into technology. And it’s always Day One and we’re going to continue working on it.”
There may be some debate still in fashion over just what Amazon represents — but it just might not matter any more. Amazon has not only arrived, it’s taken over in some very real ways, in fashion and beyond.
And that, of course, has been noticed. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general recently sued Amazon at large, alleging that the tech giant uses “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.”
While that case drags on, competitors like Walmart or Shein will use their own scale to try to grab the web giant’s market share for their own.
In the meantime, Amazon Fashion and Erdirik Dogan are going to press forward, scientifically approaching the future of fashion.
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