Episode 47 – Jessica Couch • Fashion Tech Directory | Why Fashion Brands are Buying the Wrong AI Tools

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Jessica Couch, Founder of Fashion Tech Directory, about why fashion brands keep struggling to adopt the technology built to help them.

Jessica spent 13 years watching fashion brands and technology providers try to communicate and mostly fail. Solution providers pitch in dense, data-first language built for other industries, while brands operate on a mix of quantitative numbers and qualitative, emotional signals that most tech vendors never account for. The result is a market where good tools go unused, brands get intimidated before they even evaluate a solution, and teams often end up defaulting to whichever vendor spent the most on ads rather than the one that actually solves their problem.

From translating vendor jargon into plain operational language to mapping where money is leaking inside a brand’s own workflows before buying anything new, the conversation highlights how fashion’s technology gap is less about a shortage of tools and more about an lack of clarity around choosing them.

Fashion technology adoption keeps failing at the same step: brands reach for a solution before they’ve understood their own operational workflow, so the fix that gets purchased rarely matches the gap that actually exists. Jessica’s approach starts underneath the tool, in the siloed data and disconnected departments that create problems like dead stock in the first place, and treats trust, not features, as the thing that ultimately gets a solution implemented.

Guest: 👤 Jessica Couch 🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_jessicaveronica_/ 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicavcouch/

Brand: 🌐 https://www.fashiontechdirectory.com/ 🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fashiontechdirectory/ 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fashion-tech-directory/

✨ Connect with Claire Lys to explore how AI, systems, and innovation can support fashion brands — or to be featured on The Fashion Translator: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-lys-bastien-wald/

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