Rethink Digital Fashion - The Problems Retail Still Doesn’t Solve for Customers

Flat websites. Frustrating Size Guides. Endless scrolling. Overwhelmed customers.

While it seems everything else has evolved around us, in 2025, online hopping still hasn’t caught up with consumer needs. To kick off our Rethink series, we speak to Olivia Lee. Olivia is the founder of LIVVIUM, a digital fashion and Web3 consultancy helping brands create more immersive, human-centered experiences online. Named one of the Top 100 Global Women in Emerging Tech, she works at the intersection of digital fashion, consumer experience, and the future of the metaverse. In this episode, Olivia challenges the assumptions digital fashion and retail need to rethink and shows us what a better future could look like.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why online shopping is overdue for a radical redesign
• How digital fashion is moving from novelty to purpose: reducing waste, building communities, and changing how we express ourselves online
• Why the future of shopping won’t be about search bars, it’ll be about experiences that anticipate your needs
• How small businesses can rethink without needing massive budgets - and the free tools already available
• What it means to build shopping experiences for people, not just for brands

If you’d like to skip along to key moments that work best for you, here you go: 

00:00:00 - Olivia Lee: Speaking on Retail & Reinvention

04:00 - Career Journey &Coming across the Metaverse

07:40 - Metaverse Career Path

11:13 - Human-Centric Digital Fashion

15:05 - Digital Fashion: Moving from Novelty to Community

18:32 - Digital Fashion's Evolution

22:16 - Digital Fashion: Innovation

26:01 - Brand Loyalty Through Data

30:05 - Metaverse Shopping Revolution

37:10 - The Future of Fashion & AI Agents

About The Forward Podcast: Rethink- When the old answers don’t fit, it’s time for new questions.

Rethink is a new season of the award-winning Forward Podcast built around slowing down, questioning assumptions, and sitting longer in the problem stage -  before rushing to solutions.

Too often, businesses cling to what they know, hiding behind the old “this is how we’ve always done it” line. It's the fastest way to kill diversity of thinking, new ideas, and meaningful change.

This series is about rethinking what's broken: outdated products, workplaces stuck in the past, leadership resisting change, and tech that no longer serves the people using it. 

In each episode, we sit with rethinkers:  founders, creators, strategists, and innovators, who are challenging norms and building better ways forward. From redesigning shopping experiences to making digital finance more accessible, we explore how slowing down to ask better questions leads to stronger, more human-centered futures. Because solving yesterday’s problems with yesterday’s solutions won’t get us where we need to go.

Slow down. Look closer. Build better.