Daily LInks
1. As Alexander Wang basks in praise, has fashion shrugged off #MeToo? “Fashion’s hierarchy has gone unquestioned, with sexual exploitation being par for the course for a lot of young people. It’s still the same small cabal presiding over the industry.” – Read More on the Guardian
2. Why Garment Workers Must Be Included in the Sustainability Conversation: There’s currently a clear disconnect between brands that are now choosing to use more sustainable materials, but overlooking workers. “Clothes will not be sustainable until the makers of these clothes have a dignified job and are paid a living wage.” – Read More on British Vogue
3. Fashion industry scores poorly on its environmental report card: According to a report from Kearney, only 7% of fashion industry companies it surveyed used recycled materials to any meaningful extent. “Executives don’t really understand how circularity actually works.” – Read More on Axios
4. American Eagle is pitching a ‘frenemy network’ of vertical logistics to its retail peers — and it’s paying off: American Eagle wants to master a business function that became critical for retailers during the Covid-19 pandemic: the supply chain. – Read More on CNBC
5. Lululemon Spins Further Out of Yoga Orbit: The athletic-apparel company said in an analyst presentation this past Wednesday that it aims to double its sales from $6.3 billion in its latest fiscal year to $12.5 billion by 2026. As ambitious as that seems, it may not be too far out of reach. – Read More on the WSJ
1. Fast fashion is hot. It’s also making the world hotter: The World Bank estimates that less than 1 percent of used clothing is recycled into new garments. If the industry continues at its current pace, its greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50 percent by 2030. – Read More on the Biz of Biz
2. LVMH boss says 2022 outlook is “so far, so good.” Asked about the situation in China, Arnault said “the demand is there” but the outlook would depend on how long strict measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the country would last. – Read More on Reuters
3. Vogue Russia closes as Condé Nast stops publishing after rise in censorship: “The escalation in the severity of the censorship laws, which have significantly curtailed free speech and punished reporters simply for doing their jobs, has made our work in Russia untenable.” – Read More on the Guardian
4. Fashion-obsessed Shanghai residents living in lockdown are flaunting shopping bags: In recent weeks, it appears that paper shopping bags of luxury brands have become more coveted than the actual designer handbags themselves — and can be seen hanging outside apartment doors all across the city. – Read More on Business Insider
5. Luxury goods giant LVMH is eyeing the metaverse “very carefully.” LVMH’s latest earnings call briefly mentioned the “metaverse,” stating that the group is thinking about its gaming strategy and noting that a partnership between crypto-asset company Ledger and Hublot has seen “high demand.” – Read More on the Block
1. Nigeria’s plus-size market fights for inclusivity: Globally the plus-size market is estimated to reach close to $700 billion by 2027 with an impressive CAGR of 5.9% from 2021 to 2027. – Read More on Quartz
2. Prada CEO says first 4 months strong despite Russia, China: Russia accounts for just 2% of group sales, but China “is important and for the past 15 days we have had more than 50% of our shops closed.” – Read More on Reuters
3. L Catterton Explores Sale of Jeweler John Hardy: The LVMH-affiliated consumer-brand focused buyout firm is seeking to fetch about $200 million for the business. – Read More on Blomberg
4. RETRO READ: How Abercrombie Ended up Being Sued by 250,000 Employees. Abercrombie boasted a network of 700 dimly-lit and thoroughly fragranced stores, 22,000 strikingly attractive employees and nearly $2 billion in annual sales. – Read More on TFL
5. China Signs Forced Labor Treaties as Xinjiang Scrutiny Grows: The nation’s top legislative body decided Wednesday to sign onto the Forced Labor Convention and Abolition of Forced Labor Convention. Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to ban Xinjiang goods due to forced labor concerns – Read More on Bloomberg
1. Multinational brands must be China-specific, not rely solely on global experience to thrive on the mainland, analysts say: Consumer brands need to be agile and adapt to rapid change and keen local competition to thrive in China, and avoid the blind application of global practices. – Read More on SCMP
2. Metaverse: How retail, real estate and hospitality could benefit. “This whole concept of co-creation and co-building and having customers take more ownership of the brand itself is such a powerful construct. I think the metaverse will finally give it the reality.” – Read More on Yahoo
3. SoftBank-Backed Sandbox Said to Seek Funds at $4 Billion Value: The Sandbox, a platform that allows users to trade and monetize virtual assets in the Ethereum blockchain, is looking to raise about $400 million from both new and existing investors. – Read More on Bloomberg
4. RELATED READ: Metaverse Market Watch – A Running Timeline of Funding and M&A. Here’s a timeline of investments and M&A events to provide a broad overview of which players are raising funding, getting acquired, and what the trajectory of this segment of the market – which only appears to be gaining in steam – looks like more generally. – Read More on TFL
5. How Abercrombie & Fitch fell out of fashion: In 2003, under Jeffries, the company faced a class action racial discrimination lawsuit from California which alleged that the company turned down minorities for sales positions, relegated them to stockrooms, and had their hours reduced when their looks weren’t Abercrombie enough. – Read More on the Guardian
1. The Pandemic Was Supposed to Push All Shopping Online. It Didn’t: Data suggests consumers are finding a new balance between online and in-person shopping. In Q2 of 2020, as stay-at-home measures were in place, the share of U.S. retail sales that happened online surged more than four percentage points to 15.7%. – Read More on the WSJ
2. A retailer’s guide to the metaverse: Immersive and interactive content will become even more crucial to provide an authentic and inviting online retail environment for whoever that consumer happens to be that day in the metaverse. – Read More on Fortune
3. How 2 recessions changed what we wear: The 2007 financial crisis accelerated the rise of fast fashion among millennials much the same way that the coronavirus recession heightened a shift toward the secondhand clothing market among Gen Z. – Read More on Business Insider
4. Investing in ESG Pays Off: With the rush of money into ESG investment funds, it’s easy to think everyone clearly sees the business value of sustainability. But many leaders still see an inherent trade-off between choosing a more sustainable future and achieving business growth and profit. – Read More on HBR
5. RELATED READ: From Sustainability Accounting to ESG, What is it and Why Does it Matter? Measuring “sustainability” is where it gets tricky. Much of the information used to gauge a firm’s so-called “sustainability” is provided by the company itself, and it is not always audited (or audited without interference). – Read More on TFL
1. Retail sales rise 0.5% in March amid soaring inflation: Business at general merchandise stores was up 5.4%, while sales at clothing stores rose 2.6%. Restaurants had a 1% increase. But online sales dropped 6.4%. – Read More on AP
2. Can Fashion Designers Really Learn to Be Sustainable? Eco-conscious marketing only goes so far in an industry responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, rapid deforestation, and 60 million tons of plastic waste per year, including microplastics that get released whenever we wear or wash polyester. – Read More on The Cut
3. RETRO READ: Can the Fashion Industry Ever Really Be Sustainable? The industry is working to reduce the environmental footprint of its products. But the problem has now shifted to the consumption side: the insatiable appetite for fashion means people are buying more and more clothes. – Read More on TFL
4. Why Luxury Brands Must Control Their Own Re-Commerce Channel: Branded re-commerce is the future for luxury fashion. In fact, it’s the only way luxury brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Valentino can control their intellectual property and retain this new luxury shopper. – Read More on Forbes
5. The Trends and Disruptors E-Commerce Needs to Address: The past several years have been marked with an increased focus on consumer privacy and data ownership. One of the core tenants of Web 3.0 is ownership and control of how personal data is used. – Read More on Total Retail
1. Cartier CEO Sees Luxury Demand Withstanding Rising Prices: Cartier plans to raise prices in the next several weeks, making it the latest luxury brand to bet its customers are willing to spend more for their high-end watches, jewelry and accessories. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Paris, New York, London… Decentraland? How the metaverse became fashion’s new home: “There was a dip in consumption of big luxury brands among Gen Z. The metaverse and Web3 could open up this opportunity of how they can now relate to, and reconnect with, this young generation.” – Read More on the National
3. Spending More, Getting Less as Inflation Outpaces Retail Sales: This raises the broader question of what will happen in the months ahead if pandemic strains continue to ease. – Read More on the WSJ
4. Rent the Runway CEO sees inflation as a competitive advantage for the company: Hyman said RTR’s business correlates closely with how much consumers are spending on experiences, rather than things. So as people are traveling more, taking Uber rides around town and booking reservations at restaurants, RTR sees an uptick in users, she said. – Read More on CNBC
5. Push to reshore US manufacturing challenged by reliance on global supply chain: A tariff war, COVID-19 and now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have all strained once bullet-proof global supply chains, with delays and shortages hitting U.S. corporate revenues and helping drive inflation to its highest levels in decades. – Read More on S&P Global
1. How Keeping Quiet About Politics Helped Uniqlo Become China’s Favorite Fashion Brand: Uniqlo made about a quarter of its overall revenue, 532 billion yen ($4.2 billion), in China last fiscal year. That’s about three times its sales in North America and Europe combined. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Etsy CEO Josh Silverman Stands by Strategy of Competing With Amazon: “I think there will be fewer and fewer places online to buy things, and in order to be one of those few places that can truly stand next to Amazon, you’ve got to do something different.” – Read More on the WSJ
3. Brunello Cucinelli touts strength of luxury goods, stands by 12 percent growth expectations for 2022: “We have assumed that the Russian market will account for around 4% of total sales in 2022, a significant reduction compared to the results for 2021 and 2020.” – Read More on Yahoo
4. UBS expects 50,000 store closures in the U.S. over the next 5 years after pandemic pause: UBS is now projecting between 40,000 to 50,000 retail stores in the United States closing over the next five years, down from the 80,000 closures it previously forecasted. – Read More on CNBC
5. “The mall is not dead” despite increase in online shopping: “Consumers are still going into the malls. And they will continue to go into the stores. It’ll depend obviously on the location geographically, but we’ve seen a significant increase in movement into the brick and mortar over the last maybe six months, nine to six months.” – Read More on Yahoo
1. European cosmetics makers face supply crisis amid scarcity of Ukraine resources: Like the food industry, the $500 billion global cosmetics sector is grappling with fallout from the war because producers use alcohol derived from grains and organic beets to make perfumes, and sunflower-seed oils to make cosmetics – all key crops from Ukraine. – Read More on Reuters
2. Will Farfetch Take the Lead in Online Luxury E-commerce? Globally, online channels ballooned to an estimated €62 billion in market value in 2021, up 27% from the year prior. In China, digital sales of personal luxury goods outpaced physical sales across all categories, increasing almost 56%. – Read More on Jing
3. Goodbye, minimalism: How Gen Z is reshaping retail product design: The typeface of the moment is “expressive,” “flashy,” and “anything with super high contrast, really tight spacing, weird proportions, or flowy 70s psychedelic shapes.” – Read More on Morning Brew
4. Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will test selling virtual goods in the metaverse: “The ability to sell virtual items and access to things inside the worlds is a new part of [the] e-commerce equation overall,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re starting rolling this out with just a handful of creators.” – Read More on CNBC
5. We Need Better Carbon Accounting. Here’s How to Get There: To address this shortcoming, they introduced an E-liability accounting system, based on well-established practices from inventory and cost accounting, for accurately measuring GHG emissions across corporate supply-chains. – Read More on HBR
1. Rethinking Resale: Secondhand Retailers Are Actively Seeking Branded Partners: Whether you call it resale, reCommerce, circular economy, secondhand or some other euphemism, there’s one thing everyone can agree on in this category, and that is that it’s hot right now. – Read More on PYMNTS
2. Meta to start testing money-making tools for its metaverse: Facebook owner Meta Platforms is beginning to test commerce tools for selling digital assets within its virtual reality social platform Horizon Worlds, a key piece of its plan to build out the metaverse. – Read More on Reuters
3. Fashion Can’t Turn a Blind Eye to the Latest IPCC Report: Fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions are actually set to rise to around 2.7 billion tons a year by 2030 if no further measures are taken. – Read More on British Vogue
4. The Metaverse Could Radically Reshape Fashion: Digital designs are not yet big earners compared to physical clothing, but the fashion world certainly sees the metaverse as a potentially lucrative new market. – Read More on Wired
5. Shopify is betting on creators to fuel its next phase of growth: Shopify announced one of its biggest investments in the creator space to date. It has acquired Dovetale, a software startup that helps brands manage their influencer marketing programs. – Read More on Modern Retail