We spoke at Coterie this week. Almost nobody in the room could answer one question.
At the Javits Center on Wednesday, we asked a room full of buyers and brand teams whether they knew what AI assistants were already saying about their products. Most didn't.
On Wednesday afternoon we stood on the Fashionology stage at Coterie in the Javits Center and asked a room of buyers and brand teams a simple question: has anyone here actually checked what ChatGPT says about your brand? A few hands went up. In a room built for buyers, manufacturers, and press, that’s not a small gap. It’s the whole talk in one show of hands.
Coterie draws a decision-heavy crowd on purpose. The people in that room aren’t scrolling for inspiration, they’re the ones who decide what gets ordered, stocked, and pushed for spring. And even they hadn’t thought to ask whether an AI assistant would recommend the brands they were about to walk the floor for.
The trade show room and the AI answer are two different rooms
A trade show works because people show up in person, look at the product, and make a call on the spot. That’s the whole point of Coterie: buyers walk a floor, touch fabric, hear a pitch, decide. It’s a format built entirely around a human in the room.
An AI assistant never walks that floor. When a shopper asks ChatGPT what to wear to a fall wedding, or which handbag brand is actually built to last, the model isn’t in the room either. It’s reading whatever text exists about your products and reasoning from that alone. No fabric in hand, no pitch, no booth conversation. Just data.
That mismatch is exactly why we were on that stage. The brands walking the Javits Center floor this week have spent real budget on being seen by buyers in person. Almost none of them have spent five minutes checking whether they’re seen by the assistant a shopper opens on their phone an hour later.
What we actually told the room
We kept the workshop short and practical, thirty minutes, because that’s the format Fashionology gives every speaker. Three things came up more than anything else once questions started:
- Most brands have never typed their own product into ChatGPT. Not once. They’d know within a minute whether they show up, and whether the answer is even accurate.
- A great product photo doesn’t teach a model anything. The AI can’t see the stitching or feel the fabric. It only knows what’s written down, and most catalogs write down category, size, and price, nothing about who the piece is for or why it beats the alternative.
- Nobody in the room had a plan for this, not because it isn’t a priority, but because almost no one had framed it as something with a plan. It read more like a blind spot than a decision.
That third point is the one worth sitting with. Buyers in that room make merchandising decisions based on trend data, sell-through, and margin every day. Almost none of them had a comparable read on how their brands perform in AI answers, because until recently there hasn’t been an easy way to get one.
Why we keep showing up to rooms like this
We could write this same post from behind a desk. We don’t, because the gap is easier to see in person. Watching a buyer’s face when they ask a phone for a recommendation and get a competitor’s name instead of their own brand tells you more than any slide can.
It also tells us where the actual confusion lives. It’s not that brands don’t care about AI visibility. It’s that most of them have no idea what their current visibility even is, so there’s nothing to act on yet. That’s a data problem before it’s a strategy problem, and it’s the same one we’ve been writing about all year: fashion month, back-to-school, wedding season, gifting. Different calendar moment, same underlying question. Does your product data say enough for an AI assistant to recommend you over the brand next to you on the rack?
Check it yourself before your next show
You don’t need a stage or a booth to find out where you stand. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini and ask it the question a real customer would ask about your category: what’s the best raincoat for a rainy commute, which brand makes the most durable leather tote, who should I buy from for a wedding guest dress. See if you show up. See if the answer is even right.
If the room at Coterie was any indication, most brands haven’t done this yet. That’s the easiest fix on this list, and it takes less time than walking one aisle of the show floor.