80 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SPRING 2020 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
DISRUPTION 2020: FOCUSING ON THE CUSTOMER
This is also happening at Stitch Fix, an online per-
sonal styling company based in San Francisco. The
company offers customized clothing selection for
customers and also sells the outfits. When Stitch Fix
first got started, individual stylists recommended
combinations of apparel solely on the basis of
lengthy profiles completed by customers about
their style preferences and specific measurements.
But Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake knew the value
of data to deepen the accuracy of stylists’ recom-
mendations and to give scale to the business. Today,
in addition to the initial customer profile, the com-
pany uses direct feedback from customers on their
purchases, mountains of data from across all its
customers about which items were purchased to-
gether and which were rejected and returned, and
fastidious details from its merchandise team about
the precise measurements, textures, and aesthetics
of each clothing option. All this arms Stitch Fix
with an opportunity to base recommendations on
much more than just “customers who bought this
also bought that” logic.^3
The company’s algorithm helps generate rec-
ommendations that have progressively led to
increased purchases over returns, and more addi-
tional purchases by repeat customers. It’s working:
Stitch Fix, which went public in 2017, has a market
cap of $2.4 billion.
Netflix and Stitch Fix are playing the same game:
They use lots and lots of data to highly personalize
your experience with them. How they sell is why
they win.They Get Customers
to Sell for Them
The fourth adaptation is that while the incumbents
know how to sell to their customers, the experience
disrupters are very good at selling through their
customers. One of my favorite examples is Emily
Weiss, founder of the cosmetics company Glossier.
She started off as a blogger — she’s a fabulous
content creator, and her blog, Into the Gloss, was
blowing up with beauty tips. And then she started
developing beauty products.
Where Weiss is next-level and a bona fide expe-
rience disrupter is her ability to not just create her
own content but also encourage and enable her
customers to create content. Glossier makes itsproducts available to popular video bloggers,
known as vloggers, sometimes even prior to public
release to build buzz. For instance, Glossier worked
with Jackie Aina, a Top 20 YouTube beauty vlogger
who has more than 3 million YouTube subscribers,
to review a product when it was still unannounced.
Thousands of wannabes and micro influencers
who may have a few thousand followers each imi-
tate the most popular vloggers with their own
video reviews. The result is hundreds of thousands
of pieces of content out there about Weiss’s prod-
ucts — all created by her customers. Some of those
individual videos have more than a million views.
Glossier is still a private company, but its estimated
valuation is $1.2 billion.
Warby Parker, the eyeglasses company, is an-
other classic experience disrupter for similar
reasons. Neil Blumenthal, the cofounder and co-
CEO, thought the old process of buying glasses was
a pain. And it was. You had to schedule going down
to the store, and the scheduling was a bear because
you had to bring your most judgy friend with you.
Blumenthal said, “I’m going to rethink that. I’m
going to mail you the glasses so you try them on,
you can post photos on Instagram, and you can
then ask all your judgy friends which one they like.”
Again: How they sell is why they win.They Empower Employees to Make
Things Right for Customers
This brings us to the fifth adaption: Experience dis-
rupters enable customer-facing employees to fix
things when they need to.
Traditionally, companies woo customers to
make a purchase, but the second that purchase
is made, it becomes the customer’s hassle to get
service on it or return or exchange it if there’s a
problem. Lots of companies offer free shipping, for
example, but customers have to pay for the ship-
ping to make a return, they have to have kept the
receipts, and they have to pay attention to how
long ago the purchase was made.
Experience disrupters make all these details
much more customer-friendly. I was surprised at
how powerful this play was. By rethinking some-
thing as mundane as terms and conditions, they are
able to bust through those their industry models in
effective ways.