“Probably the single biggest issue C-level executives are facing today is speed to market; how they can get faster,” Gribbin says. “Right now these companies are planning either spring 18 or autumn 18 [collections]. But how do they know what we want two years from now? Everyone realises the need for speed.”

“Retailers for a long time owned us, they owned the consumer. Until very recently you went to a store when that store was open, and you saw the collection of what some merchant hoped you would like, and maybe you found something that you liked, and you hoped it was in your size, and then you had to hope that size fit…and then you bought it.

“Today, we own the retailer. We decide what we want to buy, when we want to buy it, where we want to buy it, and pretty much how much we want to pay for it. That has retailers very, very scared.”

As well as this shifting of power from the retailer to the consumer, there’s a whole new generation of millennial consumers waiting in the wings.

“They’re young adults, they are the largest generation in western history: 83m in the US, 16m in the UK, and they represent 38% of all spending power at retail. And they’re just getting started,” Gribbin warns.

“The interesting thing about millennials is that they’re different, they have different sets of values, they think differently. They don’t necessarily care about ownership; they have fostered the growth of the ‘sharing economy’. They have different ways of thinking about sustainability issues.

“Yet in certain product categories they are some of the most prolific buyers of clothing: they buy almost as twice as much jeans as the other two generations out there.”