Nearly every product on the amazon marketplace becomes a commodity. It's a terrible platform for discovering new brands and showcasing innovative brands.

This past week, amazon released a new fashion storefront in collaboration with Vogue titled "good threads". It's amazon latest - and certainly not first - attempt to break into fashion. Other attempts include producing 20+ fashion brands of their own, partnering with JCrew mercantile, and working with Nike. None of the attempts have proven especially successful and it's hard to see how Common Threads will play out differently.

The storefront resides on the Amazon site, which immediately reduces the value of the Vogue branding. Being on the amazon platform puts competing products just a few clicks away and makes it difficult to reinforce any perceived high value.

Amazon has trained buyers to look for products from a utilitarian and convenience perspective. Making high end fashion readily available is entirely incongruent with what makes fashion brands succeed.

The marketplace is about finding readily available products that fill a need at a great price. Everything is a commodity when those are the rules and it's difficult to escape on this in one small corner of a giant store.