Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy and product at Aptos, said the dot-com boom had profound impacts on society, shaping the way people interact with technology and the internet as part of daily life and culture. Understandably, the ripple effects across retail were extreme. As the industry reflects on 25 years since the peak of the dot-com boom, Baird shares her views on how fashion retail, including the store experience and technology investments, has been transformed.

This is part one of a two-part series.

WWD: Take us for a walk down memory lane. What were the hallmarks of a standout store experience for a fashion retailer in 2000? What were retailers’ top priorities that year from a technology investment standpoint?

Nikki Baird: Retailers were very focused on trying to create high-touch, high-value in-store experiences, not unlike today. However, at that time there was no consideration for integrated experiences. Online was treated as a “store,” and assuming the retailer had a commerce site, e-commerce had the sales volume of a midsize store or less.

Retailers were struggling with figuring out how to ship packages in a supply chain that was wholly organized to deliver products to stores. In the store, they were concerned about needing “retailtainment” in order to keep customers coming back. And there was a lot of concern about how to extract customer information that was in store associates’ heads. In 2000, store associates knew much more about customers than anyone else in the company, even marketers — a sharp contrast to the present-day reality.

Inventory visibility was as much a challenge then as it is today, though with fewer tools available to address it. Retailers struggled with holdback strategies in fashion — for example, how much inventory to send to stores in the first distribution versus holding back items for more targeted replenishment deeper into the season.

Retailers still struggle with this, but it’s complicated by how much to allocate to the e-commerce DC [distribution center] versus sending to stores. Retailers want perfect inventory to meet all demand online, with DC inventory and perfect inventory to meet all demand that shows up in stores. However, it’s never perfect, so omnichannel capabilities become a safety valve for avoiding having inventory “stuck” in any location. I wish I could say that retailers do fewer store-to-store transfers today than they did 25 years ago, but that is probably not the case.

WWD: How has the internet transformed the store experience? A Wall Street Journal article earlier this year had the headline “How the Internet Made In-store Shopping Miserable.” Did you agree with the points made in that article? Why or why not?

N.B.: That article made the rounds; I do agree. I think it goes back to trying to figure out the right balance of inventory across online and in stores. If you follow the data and deal with averages rather than understand the range and the outliers, then you are going to create a minimal, boring assortment in stores. Rather than treating the store as a showroom, retailers are just cutting out whole swaths of assortment.

Back to 2000, the rise of tools to assist in assortment planning had the same problem. You have big stores and small stores, and if you’re planning a range, you have to make sure that the small stores don’t end up with just black and white and you drop all the colors. It may be hard to have a deep assortment that covers both color/size in a small store, but just because you sell a lot of black and white, you shouldn’t allow that to crowd out all the other colors in a small store — that looks awful and doesn’t serve customers well.

WWD: Between 2000 and now, what do you feel are the top three technological milestones that transformed the fashion retail industry? During this time, did consumer tech adoption always outpace retailers’ technology progress?

N.B.: Consumer mobile — a huge milestone that changed the way consumers shop and completely put the information-as-power equation into their hands. This is by far number one, at the top of the list. And you can even pin it down specifically to the launch of the iPhone in 2007. By 2008, retailers were already starting to see mobile traffic hitting their websites, which created its own issues for website rendering and led to advances in responsive design.

After that, cloud is probably the next-most impactful. The expectation of always-on access to rich experiences came out of that and continues to shape the expectation of both customers and retail frontline workers.

I don’t know if this is double-counting. Still, I would say the rise of apps and the explosion of consumer-facing software that has come from mobile app stores has been the third-most impactful in that it has shaped worker expectations for how any software works. So they had less tolerance for desktop-based, traditional n-tier architecture with Windows-based UIs.

Almost always, consumer adoption of technology has outpaced retailers’ progress. The only place where retailer tech adoption has outpaced it has been when it’s the kinds of things that consumers don’t particularly appreciate, like camera-based footpath tracking and facial recognition.

WWD: Internet connectivity — believe it or not — is still something that retailers struggle with in some store locations and/or in some areas of their stores. How important is connectivity to retailers’ in-store strategies today? What in-store capabilities rely on connectivity?

N.B.: I believe it. We hear it all the time. I think part of the reason why internet connectivity is still a challenge is because it’s not a homogeneous level of service across the entire store estate. Even in one country, you might not be able to leverage one provider. That means different levels of service across different providers and even different costs for the same level of service. And if you’re, you know, doing a pop-up on a beach, you have choices for how to deliver connectivity, but it will differ depending on the beach.

Connectivity is critical today. While retailers always want to be able to transact — even if the power is down, forget about the internet — they are defining a bare minimum of acceptable offline capabilities that they are willing to survive on. But most of the investments they are making in customer experience rely on connectivity and real-time interactions to be effective.

WWD: It can be challenging for retailers to balance their digital and physical retail investments. Any advice for retailers in this regard?

N.B.: Retailers need to consider not just the short-term investment but also the longer-term value that can be delivered. Yes, it’s a lot easier to get an immediate ROI on a digital investment, but I think retailers are learning more and more that digital doesn’t scale nearly as well as investments in stores. So you might get a short-term benefit from an online change, but the more sales it drives, the more it drives costs. I liken it to eating a donut versus an apple. Yes, the donut tastes sweeter, but a moment on the lips…whereas the apple doesn’t have as big a payoff in immediate comparison but is much more beneficial in the long term.