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Stitch Fix CEO: Consumers are looking for a 'wardrobe refresh'

In a new interview with Yahoo Finance's Sibile Marcellus, Sitch Fix CEO Elizabeth Spaulding explains how wardrobe habits are rapidly shifting as more people return to the office and go out socially.

Video transcript

SIBILE MARCELLUS: As people navigate all this, what kind of clothes have they been picking for work? Are men still wearing the same suits they were going for prior to the pandemic?

ELIZABETH SPAULDING: One of the great aspects of our model is the amount of data and insight we get on consumer preference and what people are wearing. So at the beginning of COVID, Sibile, what we saw, not surprisingly, was this huge increase in work from home and comfortable clothes. We saw a 10x increase in our stylists' notes of comfortable clothing.

And now that we're entering this moving back to work, hybrid work era, what we saw over the summer months, we saw button-downs trending in our men's items. We saw a desire to go out again, and bright, bold colors. We saw the desire for more going out clothing. And a wardrobe refresh was up 50% in our client request notes.

But I think undoubtedly, consumers want to be comfortable. You know, we talk about this next chapter of shopping as business comfort when people are going back to work. Our athleisure business was up over 300% year on year over the summer, even though that had already characterized the beginning of COVID. So we think that's a trend that's here to stay. So as men and women go back to work, often in a hybrid mode, they might be looking for blazers again, but it's knit, comfortable clothing, rather than maybe the level of structure that they were wearing pre-COVID.