First Insight’s Greg Petro on the Growing Men’s Market

According to the data guy, men’s wear is a robust, growing business where retailers, vendors and brands could all be enjoying higher margins. That was the key takeaway from Greg Petro, president and chief executive officer of First Insight Inc. Petro said the men’s market presents a “complicated environment” where trends change fast, but where growth is vigorous. “Customer intimacy remains important. Consumers want to communicate. And with technology, you can engage consumers on that level,” Petro said, adding that with “predictive analytics,” men’s wear companies can also anticipate consumer behavior. The Summit’s theme of “The New Dimension” of men’s wear was fitting to Petro’s remarks, which included an overview of a market that is growing one-and-a-half times faster than women’s wear and where online sales are growing at an impressive 17 percent. More importantly, Petro said recent analytics suggest that men’s wear companies can be pricing product at significantly higher premiums. The market test was done at the Milan fashion shows earlier this year where First Insight engaged consumers using online games to gauge trend preferences for brands, designs and price points. First Insight crunched 500,000 data points in the testing, and the results revealed that the top three preferred brands were: John Varvatos,

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