Fast fashion retailers keep pace with the online apparel and accessories category

Our data indicates that 67 percent of fast fashion buyers are female. This is considerably higher than the rest of the the online apparel and accessories category, which is 53.7 percent female. Forever 21 online buyers skew the most female at 76.9 percent. And H&M online buyers are the most evenly dispersed out of all the fast fashion brands we looked into, at 62.1 percent female and 37.9 percent male.

While male fast fashion shoppers are fewer in number, the male shopper growth in fast fashion did increase since last year by 12.9 percent, outpacing purchases by men in the online apparel and accessories category, where revenue from men grew 8.7 percent.

Women in the the 25-34 year old group, to be exact, make up the highest percentage of fast fashion shoppers at 20.7 percent. That’s more than twice the amount of 25-34 year old male shoppers. This 25-34 year old female segment also makes up the highest percentage of online apparel and accessories category shoppers at 11.4 percent.

More people are buying from fast fashion merchants, but not spending as much or as frequently as they are with luxury brands. For luxury brands, we focused primarily on: Nordstroms, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Net-A-Porter, and Bergdorf Goodman. Fast fashion shoppers spend 12.1 percent of their total apparel and accessories dollars on luxury retailers, versus an average of 13.1 percent across all category buyers.

“The idea that fashion shoppers live in just one neat, easily defined fashion bucket does not hold up to scrutiny," said Ken Cassar, principal analyst, Slice Intelligence. "Online fashion shoppers curate their wardrobes from a wide variety of retailers, settling for lower quality at lower prices in some cases and ponying up larger dollars where they see real value.”

With a panel of over 5.5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world.