We human beings are visually wired. We cannot help it: it’s simple evolution and our brains work that way. And we in the fashion world are just not visually wired…we are image wired.

Our brains just aren’t geared to process text, spreadsheets and tables very well. Representing data graphically is a step up but it is not exactly visual. To answer “what’s trending?” is hard – with only a spreadsheet or even a nice graph – but show a picture and we immediately get it. We recognize the underlying features and patterns and it makes sense.

Our world is getting more and more challenging. More drops, burgeoning SKUs, mass customization and yet the need to take quality decisions rapidly is more important than ever. So where are the images in our number crunching?

Someone, let’s call him “Joe”, runs a large fashion and lifestyle brand. He’s grown the company from scratch and has established his brands as regional leaders.

But he’s frustrated. When he wants to review product performance he gets an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of SKU codes. Unless a lot of effort goes into it, running into days, he can’t get a pictorial understanding of his brands’ performance. Recently his analysts have added attractive graphs, but they don’t help him make distinctions to take decisions with quality.

He gets vexed, pointing at the spreadsheet he demands to know:

The problem is Joe’s using only half his brain: the left hemisphere. Not having images in the analysis ignores the faster and more visual right hemisphere of his brain. And this part of the brain works fast. Really fast: a recent MIT study found that it takes only 13 milliseconds to process images and make associations. Joe can accelerate and improve his decision making if he can work with images and underlying data simultaneously and seamlessly. Kanvas helps him do that exactly.

Kanvas mashes up images with spreadsheet or ERP data to provide a platform on which he can manipulate images and data at the same time and create the right kind of analyses to reach quality decisions.

Using Kanvas Joe can filter, group and sort data on any number of attributes to analyse the performance of his collection. In addition he can create new data on the fly by tagging collections and perform analysis on the subset he has tagged.

Kanvas provides him the platform to take quality decisions – which he can than communicate by generating reports by using Kanvas layout feature or collaborate with other users via the cloud.

Now he can see the shoe as well as the spreadsheet!!