Today, companies driven by technology and big data that impact our lifestyles overall are growing at record speed.
In December 2016, Amazon opened an unmanned store called Amazon Go on the first floor of its headquarters located in Seattle, the U.S., changing the concept of offline stores once again. This led to the birth of the concept 'Online for Offline' (or O4O), moving beyond the 'Online to Offline' (or O2O) concept that pursued organic integration of online and offline. And many online stores started to enter the sphere of offline.

 Along with such changes, many started to seek the value of diversification, breaking away from the era where a handful of big trends dominated the times. Information asymmetry faded away, while a culture of respect for different tastes and preferences changed our way of thinking leading to the creation of many different micro-trends. There is an increase in the number of distinct select shops in line with the change in social phenomenon. Let's take a look at a few growing online select shops that are receiving good reviews in the market.

 MR PORTER is a British online select shop, turning men's lifestyle into content with a unique perspective and securing customers with high loyalty. It provides not only collections of clothing for men, but also suggestions on men's lifestyle. MR PORTER's thoughtful services, such as putting the customer's name on a label inside the white packaging box, which gives the customers a sense of experiencing a service of an offline premium store, and its online counselling service providing styling advice, are gaining much attention.

 MR PORTER became well-known in Korea when it participated in designing items for the Kingsman collaboration in 2015. Items like the umbrella, watches and suits that were worn by the actors of the movie made headlines. The point we must take note of the most is the Editorial section of MR PORTER. The section asks the question of 'shouldn't this be the way to live as a man?' through various articles on different topics. And these articles casually nudge the reader to buy items sold on the MR PORTER website.

 There is a similar curation service in Korea called 'Howdy'. Howdy also operates an offline flagship store located in Starfield where, by combining with a large vending machine, customers can make their purchases using a kiosk.

 Hong Kong's famous webzine that offers fashion and culture-related content, HYPEBEAST, grew into an influential platform amid the popularity of streetwear. It evolved into a company worth 270million dollars as of April 2017 by combining good-quality content with the online shop when many magazines discontinued publication one after the other due to weak sales and decline in ad sales. HYPEBEAST Korea is also loved by many since its launch in Korea.

 HBX, where customers can easily purchase the products of the brands carefully selected by HYPEBEAST, also continues to grow through the influence of HYPEBEAST. HBX offers its own various collaboration collections that appeal to the sentiment of consumers who are sensitive to trends, offering from streetwear to contemporary brands.

 What beauty items are actually used in Hollywood? You can find out at Violet Grey. Violet Grey was born in the process of testing the best eyelash curler for makeup artists who work on Hollywood stars for red carpet events or films. This test process was called 'The Violet Code' and started to become famous. It gained its popularity by offering various products carefully selected by the best experts in the beauty industry. Violet Grey holds many exclusive brands worldwide, which are not even known in Korea. The founder, Cassandra Grey, said in an interview with Forbes in 2014 that the Internet created the environment where anyone can have access to luxury items. Violet Grey selects and offers the best of the best products of Hollywood. It also publishes its own content in a column format called 'The Violet Files'.

 Farfetch started from an altruistic (?) idea to create an online platform to boom up high-end boutiques that were struggling in the face of crisis. Unlike most online shopping malls, it provides a service of connecting consumers directly with boutiques through the website and app without a distribution center that stores products. Boutiques that have a partnership with Farfetch are provided with self-made software for free and can use this software to manage the inventory of their items in real-time. If a customer places an order, Farfetch's partner logistics company visits the store and makes the delivery to the customer. This means that boutiques don't have to manage their own separate website or handle delivery and consumers can receive their items via direct delivery from the offline boutique, enabling a reliable purchase of items. In addition, Farfetch itself carefully manages the quality of content by selecting various design boutiques across the world and shooting pictures of products at a specialized studio.

 In April 2017, Farfetch also announced its plans to open an offline store similar to Amazon Go. It announced to include ways to enable individualized service driven by customer information by scanning QR codes using the mobile app when customers visit the store and automatically adding items chosen by customers to their wishlist using RFID chips tagged on clothes hangers. The plan is an expression of Farfetch's commitment to actively pursue an omni-channel business model based on the digital experience at the offline store.

 There are many consumer goods in this world. So, it takes a lot of time to choose one item to buy. There are so many factors to consider in buying just one item such as, 'is the price right', 'would I be able to use this for a long time', and 'does this item suit me'.

 The development of technology is contributing to lessening the agony of having to consider all of these factors. It enables services that recommend or suggest products we want by using data such as recommending items by crawling information from purchasing patterns or conducting surveys.

 And along with the development of technology, consumers are also paying more attention on what they really like, rather than following and getting excited about the mainstream trend. Put simply, there is a trend of the so-called 'standardized trend' disappearing. This seems to be the reason behind online select shops putting more effort in offering good-quality service by specifying their target consumer. Especially in today's world where boundaries between industries have blurred, different types of industries such as IT, retail and manufacturing are converging to create a new paradigm. It is no longer an era of simply selling good products. The purpose of consumption now reflects the consumer's desire of what kind of life he or she wants to lead. We must also face the challenge of offering services to our customers by carefully observing different lifestyles and think about in what way should we offer such services.