H&M Has a Plan to Save Itself

H&M is good at making amazing frocks for the Met ball, but it's less good at making money: The company's profits for the first quarter of this year were down 69 percent, and it effectively ran out of cash in 2017. The latest pitch from the fast-fashion retailer, covered as a "pivot" in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, uses lots of trendy buzzwords like A.I. and big data. The general idea is that by "using algorithms to analyze store receipts, returns and loyalty-card data," H&M will be able to "tailor merchandise in each store to local tastes, rather than take a cookie-cutter approach." Stripped of its techno buzzwords, this is the old idea of localization, as laid out in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article by Vijay Vishwanath and Darrell K. Rigby. "The era of standardization is ending," they wrote.