Daily LInks
1. UK ‘Tourist Tax’ Creates Gap with Europe, Says Burberry CEO. “Unfortunately there is a gap,” said Jonathan Akeroyd, chief executive officer of the British luxury fashion chain. This is “disappointing especially as it’s our home market,” he added, speaking ahead of London Fashion Week. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Epic Games’ new chief creative is an IP expert. At this point, gamers expect to be greeted by a cavalcade of brand and IP mashups whenever they flip on their favorite Epic Games title, making Wen, an executive who cut his teeth by helping mash different characters together into shared fictional worlds, an obvious fit. – Read More on Digiday
3. AI regulation is within sight — with an eye on preserving innovation. Regulation can make it hard for all but the biggest companies to grow, confined by industry rules that are shaped at times by incumbents. Big banks, for example, have only gotten bigger since the Dodd-Frank Act. – Read More on Axios
4. RELATED READ: Regulating Artificial Intelligence: A Running Tracker of AI Legislation. Despite such lags in regulation, a growing number of new AI-focused bills coming from lawmakers at the federal level are worth keeping an eye on. – Read More on TFL
5. Sustainability Is About Your Workforce, Too. People sustainability takes a holistic approach to corporate human capital practices, including diversity and inclusion, well-being, employee safety, and fair pay. It raises these human capital issues to the C-suite and obliges chief HR officers to work with chief sustainability officers on these programs. – Read More on HBR
6. Garment Workers Are Getting Closer to a Fair Wage. To date, 275 individuals and groups have endorsed the FABRIC Act which is being introduced in the Senate by Kirsten Gillibrand and in the House by Jerry Nadler. – Read More on the Nation
1. Luxury Sector Cut at Barclays, Deutsche Bank on China Woes. Luxury-goods companies face the risk of disappointing sales growth in China that will weigh further on their stock prices, Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG said, cutting their ratings on the industry. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Is That a Model or AI? Its hyper-realistic models don’t by default indicate that they’re AI-generated. “The responsibility to disclose that the models are AI-generated lies with the company or user.” – Read More on the WSJ
3. After a century of marrying risky artistry with commercial savvy, the fashion industry has all but abandoned design talent. European brands — even houses with a long history of producing high fashion — started to conceptualize fashion as luxury. Luxury means status and money — that $5,000 handbag with a telling logo. – Read More on The Cut
4. Four Asian nations to lose $65bn this decade as heat and flooding shock clothing industry. Brands, investors and regulators are not prioritizing in planning for climate risks in the countries that collectively represent 18 percent of global apparel export due to the industry’s focus on mitigation rather than adaptation measures. – Read More on the Independent
5. AI Regulation Takes Baby Steps on Capitol Hill. The much-hyped forum on artificial intelligence, which was closed to the press and the public, was meant to set the tone for collaboration between the world’s biggest tech companies and Congress as it seeks to pass bipartisan AI legislation within the next year. – Read More on Time
6. American Eagle sues Westfield over San Francisco mall conditions. American Eagle filed a lawsuit against shopping mall owner Westfield, accusing the company of allowing its San Francisco Centre mall to “deteriorate into disarray.” – Read More on CNN
1. U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years. The Justice Department’s case is aimed at Google search, and whether the company has used illegal agreements to sideline its rivals and harmed consumers and advertisers in the process. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be the default search engine on the Safari browser. – Read More on the WSJ
2. How Tony’s Chocolonely Created a Purpose-Driven (and Profitable) Supply Chain. The first step in shifting the paradigm, therefore, is to invest time in getting to know all actors in the end-to-end supply chain, from market proposition to sourcing raw materials. – Read More on HBR
3. $90 Barbie dress helps drives Zara growth in the inflation-hit fashion industry. The retailer is also trying to entice more aspirational shoppers with deeper pockets. For example, last week it launched a collection with celebrated fashion photographer Steven Meisel, with a campaign featuring supermodels. – Read More on Fortune
4. RETRO READ: The Evolution of Zara: How the Copycat Became a Bona Fide Fashion Destination. Zara – which boasts more sophisticated designs and quality of goods, as well as a more successful supply chain than its closest rivals, sticks out as the brand that is most prominently pioneering the move towards emulating the brands it copies. – Read More on TFL
5. Ripple says it will fight the SEC lawsuit “all the way through.” Ripple is among crypto companies such as Binance and Coinbase which are being sued by the SEC for violating laws. – Read More on CNBC
1. TikTok Popularizes Products. Can It Sell Them, Too? TikTok has cemented itself as an essential advertising venue for brands aiming to reach its young users. Now it is beginning to introduce TikTok Shop to all of the app’s users in the U.S., hoping to add a major new revenue stream. – Read More on the New York Times
2. RELATED READ: As TikTok Prepares for U.S. E-Commerce, Could it Be Looking to Luxury Resale? A number of signs suggest that TikTok might make a fully-fledged luxury resale play as part of its impending stateside e-commerce push. – Read More on TFL
3. eBay Launches Luxury Consignment. eBay has introduced a new consignment service, giving users direct access to expert sellers who will list and sell their luxury items on their behalf. Launching initially for designer handbags, the service will expand next year to include additional luxury categories, including jewelry and watches. – Read More from eBay
4. Where Should Your Company Start with GenAI? It can generate new prose, computer code, images, narration, music, and videos as well as ingest and summarize, critique, improve, and reformat almost any manner of document or analysis. – Read More on HBR
5. Adobe, others join voluntary US scheme to manage AI risks. The private commitments backed by the Biden administration are seen as a stopgap given that Congress has held discussions on potential AI legislation but little has been introduced and nothing significant has become law. – Read More on Reuters
1. TikTok is wading into South-East Asia’s e-commerce wars. TikTok, which in 2020 moved its global headquarters to Singapore, is eyeing South-East Asia’s nearly 700m consumers to bolster its fortunes. – Read More on the Economist
2. Google pledges $20 million for responsible AI fund. Google says the project will “support researchers, organize convenings and foster debate on public policy solutions to encourage the responsible development of AI.” – Read More on Axios
3. RELATED READ: How Does AI Fit into Companies’ ESG Frameworks? A Look at “Ethical” AI. In the absence of explicit legal requirements, companies, like individuals, can only do their best to make themselves aware of how AI affects people and the environment and to stay abreast of public concerns and the latest research and expert ideas. – Read More on TFL
4. What to know about Congress’s inaugural AI meeting. “We’re reviewing recent regulatory proposals to get a sense of Hill priorities,” said Solaiman, adding that they’re working with folks from their machine learning and R&D teams to prepare. – Read more on MIT Tech Review
5. Surging e-commerce imports threaten Japan’s retail sector. “Ordinary consumers have become more familiar with overseas products,” said Kazuyoshi Nakazato, CEO of Zig-Zag, a provider of cross-border e-commerce support. “Imports of inexpensive items will grow in the future.” – Read More on Nikkei
6. Why luxury brands are courting gamers. The global gaming market is forecast to generate revenue of up to $188 billion in 2023, with one in two Gen Z consumers spending money on video games. – Read More on Jing
1. Mass recycling of fabrics is how fashion cleans up its act. Central to this will be the so-called trigger technologies, such as QR codes on garments leading to digital product passports, a tool for collecting and sharing data throughout a product’s entire lifecycle. – Read More on the FT
2. Amazon loses bid to dismiss consumers’ price-fixing lawsuit. Amazon.com must face a prospective consumer class action in Seattle federal court accusing the online retail giant of a price-fixing scheme that has artificially inflated prices for numerous goods on its platform, a judge ruled. – Read More on Reuters
3. New AI products focus legal minds on privacy — and costs. All the new tools promise to tackle some of lawyers’ most laborious tasks with greater ease and speed. Their time-saving potential has raised expectations that they will transform — and also, perhaps, take away — much of lawyers’ day-to-day work. – Read More on the FT
4. Italy Defined Fashion. Then It Got Old. The smaller scale of Italian brands makes them easy targets. Swiss conglomerate Richemont, which owns Cartier, recently snapped up Gianvito Rossi. This summer Kering, the French group that has long owned Gucci, bought a 30% stake in Valentino with an option to buy the entire brand in the next five years. – Read More on the WSJ
5. Why Are Billions Of Clothes Never Even Sold? The main reason for this is fashion’s business model, which relies on buyers predicting the amount of product that they will sell ahead of time. Naturally, there will be leftover stock because of this – a problem that’s exacerbated by the potential financial losses involved in not having enough of the right garment. – Read More on Vogue
6. Mattel to Reap About $125 Million in Revenue From ‘Barbie’ Film. Kreiz has been reinventing Mattel as CEO over the past five years to focus on leveraging and monetizing its IP, a push that culminated with Barbie. But film “is not on its own. It is part of a holistic, multi-year strategy, to capture value from our intellectual property.” – Read More on Deadline
1. Derivative works are generative AI’s poison pill. While “derivative works” have specific legal treatment under copyright law, there are few precedents for laws or regulations addressing data derivatives, which are, thanks to open source LLMs, about to get a lot more prevalent. – Read More on TechCrunch
2. Expressing Passion Can Make Luxury Consumers Seem More Authentic. During economic downturns, overtly parading the expensive nature of luxury items in marketing campaigns can be viewed as tone deaf and attract backlash. Instead, luxury labels could direct their marketing efforts to engaging with their existing customers by encouraging them to express their passion for the brand and its products. – Read More on INSEAD
3. RETRO READ: How Do You Sell Luxury Amid Economic Uncertainty? You Ditch the Logos. During the decade-long recession, the drop in luxury goods sales was not a sign that consumers were not eschewing luxury but were rejecting ostentatious displays and favoring “tried-and-true stalwarts,” instead. – Read More on TFL
4. Barneys New York Was the Coolest Department Store. What Is It Now? A collaboration with fellow Authentic Brands Group-company Forever 21 marks the next chapter of the brand’s post-bankruptcy story. – Read More on the WSJ
5. How can the fashion industry scale circular solutions? “We’ve seen Chloe take steps in resale and actually making the decision to incentivize customers to deliberately re-engage with that same model rather than say reward them with money off your traditional sales for using it that’s a bit of a different decision to make.” – See More from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
6. EU attacked on textile waste prevention “failure.” Fast fashion’s exceptional growth “has been facilitated by the increasing use of cheap, synthetic fibers from fossil resources and the relocation of production to jurisdictions with poor labor and environmental standards,” the report said. It called for active government intervention at different levels to remedy this. – Read More on MRW
1. Europe Luxury Stocks Slide. Richemont Chairman Johann Rupert said inflation is starting to dent demand across the region. And LVMH, which was recently dethroned by drugmaker Novo Nordisk A/S as Europe’s largest company, fell 3.6% to its lowest since early Jan. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. India’s Digital Fashion Disruptors. The fashion and lifestyle space is India’s second largest consumer category, valued at $110B with approximately 10% online at $11B. The online fashion market overall is expected to grow to approximately $35B by financial year 2028 at a 25% CAGR. – Read More on Bain
3. Inditex’s Zara to launch its second-hand platform in France. The service, which will be available through Zara’s stores, its website and a mobile app, already exists for its British customers since October, and will be launched in Germany also this year. – Read More on Reuters
4. China’s Appetite for Luxury Is Back. Despite a sluggish increase in China’s overall retail sales in the first half of the year, Chinese consumers have been a major driving force behind growth in the global luxury goods market. – Read More on Caixin Global
5. AI and the New Digital Cold War. When it comes to AI — arguably the most decisive technology in this global contestation — we are heading toward two hermetically sealed ecosystems: one that supports open systems but is also associated with democracy, privacy, and individual rights, versus one that supports state control, information-flow restriction, and politically imposed limits on openness. – Read More on HBR
1. Luxury goods a handy alternative to getting rich. For the more limited and special watches, they simply will not allow you to purchase the watch as you don’t have a previous purchase relationship with the brand. In the world of luxury goods that’s an incredibly important distinction. – Read More on SMH
2. Affordable Luxury Sales Gets Caught in Middle-Tier Crunch. Leather goods label Tapestry saw its market share drop 2% between 2017 and 2022, with Tory Burch and Ralph Lauren dropping as well. So-called “aspirational goods,” lower-priced merchandise put out by luxury labels, are also seeing slower sales. – Read More on PYMNTS
3. What OpenAI Really Wants. Tom Rubin, an IP lawyer who officially joined OpenAI in March, is optimistic that the company will eventually find a balance that satisfies both its own needs and that of creators. One hint of OpenAI’s path: partnerships with news and photo agencies to provide content for its models without questions of who owns what. – Read More on Wired
4. What lawyers and consultants are saying about the UAE’s new e-commerce regulation. The UAE’s e-commerce law has been primed for a revamp for some time now, as the complexity of technology and the usage of e-commerce platforms has grown tremendously over the past decade. – Read More on the National News
5. Survey: Experts favor new U.S. agency to govern AI. AI experts at leading universities favor creating a federal “Department of AI” or a global regulator to govern artificial intelligence over leaving that to Congress, the White House or the private sector. – Read More on Axios
6. Shelved L’Occitane buyout is no win for Hong Kong. Reinold Geiger has given up on his tentative plan to buy out the minority of shares he doesn’t already own of L’Occitane, a move that would have delisted the European skincare group from Hong Kong in the Asian hub’s largest take-private. – Read More on Reuters
1. Fast fashion firms prepare for EU crackdown on waste mountain. Between 6 and 7 billion euros of investment will be needed by 2030 to create the scale of textile waste processing and recycling that the EU is aiming for, consultancy McKinsey estimated in a report last year. – Read More on Reuters
2. What if silent luxury was not a trend, but a symptom of a shift in the fashion industry? Taking into account the different types of capital established by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, dressing in expensive and yet boring clothes, in addition to granting cultural capital among the like-minded, also incorporates other capitals: economic (purchasing power) and social (connections). – Read More on El Pais
3. RELATED READ: What Does Quiet Luxury Mean from a Trademark Perspective? The rise of “stealth wealth” is a call for companies to lean more heavily on/develop alternative or additional trademarks. – Read More on TFL
4. Google hit with copyright lawsuit by Danish online job-search rival. This is the first lawsuit in the Danish courts under new EU copyright rules regarding platforms’ liability for content uploaded to their services that came into force in 2021. – Read More on Reuters
5. From China to Brazil, here’s how AI is regulated around the world. Some countries, including Israel and Japan, have responded to its lightning-fast growth by clarifying existing data, privacy & copyright protections — in both cases clearing the way for copyrighted content to be used to train AI. Others have taken a wait-and-see approach. – Read More on the Washington Post
6. Foreign luxury brands flock to India ahead of festive season, as big labels look to tap into growing affluence of Indians. There is an influx of new brands like French luxury retailer Galeries Lafayette, which is entering the Indian market through a partnership with the Aditya Birla Group, while Spanish luxury fashion house Balenciaga SA is planning to open stores in collaboration with Reliance Brands. – Read More on the Times of India