Photo: Simon Dawson/ Bloomberg/Getty Images.Amazon seems to be ramping up its efforts to become a big player in fashion: An in-house clothing line may be on the horizon for the e-tailer, if a series of new job postings that went up last week on the company's website are any indication.
The Seattle-based retailer is hiring a senior sourcing manager for its Amazon Fashion Private Label team "to launch new high quality products for our global customers," according to the listing, reports WWD. The online company is also looking for an inventory manager that'll oversee its stockist, interact with vendors, and use Amazon's wealth of analytics to inform its product offerings.
Amazon has been investing in the wider fashion category for a while now. It acquired Shopbop in 2006, rebranding and refocusing the site to raise its luxury credibility. The retailer later introduced flash sale site MyHabit in 2011, and then launched Shopbop's menswear branch EastDane in 2013. The push into apparel has been quite momentous: By the 2015 holiday season, Amazon listed over 30 million items in the clothing/accessories category on its site, according to Re/code— a 91% increase from the year prior.
Last summer, the company opened a 46,000-square-foot photo studio in Shoreditch, London, with the purpose of generating hundreds of thousands of original market photos for the site, TechCrunch reported. At the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit in October, Jeff Yurcisin, VP of clothing at Amazon Fashion and CEO of Shopbop, hinted at the possibility of of a private clothing label, according to BuzzFeed. “When we see gaps, when certain brands have actually decided for their own reasons not to sell with us, our customer still wants a product like that,” he explained at the summit.
We wonder what an in-house Amazon label would look like, but we'll have to stay tuned to see what's really behind those job listings.
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