Considerations: Fashion Tech and Consumer Trust: The Next Frontier
An examination of the systems and infrastructure shaping how luxury consumers discover, evaluate and buy and why their unbridled trust should be questioned
Online browsing is one of the greatest autonomous acts we can do as consumers. Left entirely to our own devices, the act is limitless. And the tools available now refine the experience, tailored to our needs. Who wants to pay full price when you can do a bit of digging, or simply add a browser extension to help you compare prices, find discount codes and offer you a personalised experience. But at what cost? And are we the consumers being exploited?
Earlier this week, Bloomberg published an investigation into fashion tech company Phia, co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, a shopping app which in practice is a browser extension that promises never to let you overpay, comparing prices across more than 220,000 retail sites, sharing discount codes at checkout. The report found that Phia’s tool was engaging in “cookie stuffing”, meaning at checkout, the extension secretly opened a hidden background tab and inserted its own referral code, in some cases overriding the retailer’s existing link, or a creator’s, or the shopper who arrived at the item organically. In essence, Phia was claiming sales it didn’t drive or legitimately earn. I’ve also seen anecdotal evidence online that some creators are questioning whether their own affiliate links had also been affected.
Phia acknowledged the issue, attributing it to a recent software release and said the problem was fixed within a day of Bloomberg’s enquiry.
This isn’t the company’s first data controversy. Last November, a Fortune investigation found the same extension logging near-complete records of the pages users visited, sometimes including personal information such as bank statements, and sharing them back to Phia’s servers. Phia described that practice as aggregate and anonymous logging, used to identify new retail sites.
Having worked in digital, data and tech in healthcare for years, I am no stranger to trust, anxiety, accountability and regulation when it comes to data sharing. Healthcare data sharing is so strictly regulated but that still hasn’t earned the universal trust of our citizens. The digital infrastructure that sits beneath is so stringently designed and requires constant investment, security and statutory safeguards. Yet in stark contrast, we’ll blindly allow AI agents to progressively learn more about us, discover products for us, part with our hard-earned cash from which they’ll take a cut, legitimately or illegitimately and not question the system or infrastructure that sits beneath it?
The recent BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion research found nearly half of established luxury clients across the US and China now use AI tools for shopping inspiration and brand evaluation. This is no longer an edge case. Discovery, the part of the client relationship luxury has always treated as sacred, the browsing, the falling in love with an object before you’ve decided to buy it, is happening inside a digital infrastructure the brand doesn’t own or have access to. If emotional connection, as the BoF-McKinsey report found, is the biggest driver of making a luxury purchase, why is the luxury market persistently diagnosing a relationship problem as a discovery problem? And why are consumers not questioning the legitimacy, safeguards and trust of these discovery practices?
McKinsey’s agentic-luxury research asked luxury merchants what trust requires as AI enters the discovery layer, and the answers were similar themes we found in healthcare: data privacy safeguards, proven reliability, transparency about the agent’s role. In essence, due diligence. And it’s precisely what Phia’s own conduct has failed to demonstrate on its own, first with what it logged and shared back to its own servers, then with what it claimed credit for and capitalised from.
For a brand considering where to plug into the shopping-agent and clienteling ecosystem, this isn’t specifically about Phia but the entire practice of agentic discovery, relationships and transactions, and its trust and legitimacy. Who is actually driving the sales your affiliate reporting says they are? What does the tool sitting in your customer’s browser see, and where does that data go? If a third party is inserting itself between your client and your storefront in the name of convenience, has anyone verified that the convenience is real, or only that the commission is being claimed?
None of this is an argument against agentic discovery, clearly the horse has bolted. McKinsey’s data on client comfort with AI-assisted discovery suggests demand is well ahead of brands’ digital infrastructure, not behind it. It’s an argument for treating the digital infrastructure with the same seriousness as the storefront in terms of relational trust and legitimacy. As a luxury consumer, I want a personalised experience, but the trade-off shouldn’t be my personal information harvested and fashion tech capitalising off my emotional connection leading to transaction. We need to reimagine the new digital luxury experience in a far more human-centred way than what the sector is currently reacting to, and design the safeguards into the digital infrastructure bringing legitimacy and trust back to the sector.
