Daily LInks
1. LVMH flirts with Ralph Lauren merger: Luxury giant LVMH has held exploratory discussions with Ralph Lauren over the past couple of years about a possible acquisition of the U.S. fashion brand, according to several sources familiar with the situation. – Read More on Axios
2. After expanding in 2021, fast fashion may be squeezed again: High-end labels are relatively immune to economic turmoil. People who can afford their frocks may take a knock in a recession but seldom end up shirtless. The same cannot be said of less luxurious fashion houses, but they, too, have had a good run of late. – Read More on the Economist
3. Macy’s earnings top estimates, retailer says it won’t spin off e-commerce from stores: Digital sales rose 12% year over year and increased 36% on a two-year basis. E-commerce represented 39% of net sales. The company cited strong performance in categories including home, fragrances, jewelry, watches and sleepwear. – Read More on CNBC
4. Louis Vuitton Blends Products and Politics at Workshop Opening: A throng of 70 visitors toured the two facilities, where Louis Vuitton will be making a variety of bags and eventually create 400 jobs. – Read More on Bloomberg
5. Chinese beauty brands woo Southeast Asian customers on TikTok and Shopee as saturated home market stagnates: Over the last two years, Chinese cosmetics companies that sell online have been eyeing neighboring markets like Japan and Southeast Asia for expansion before trying their luck in more competitive Western markets. – Read More on SCMP
1. Inside the Luxury Fashion Industry’s Big Sustainability Push: What was needed was “a reframing of the entire economic growth model and the relationship between company and society. We wanted to instill purpose into the company at every level. – Read More on Vogue
2. Amazon is planning to open its first fashion storefront: According to the company’s announcement, the store will focus on apparel, shoes and accessories selected by “fashion curators and feedback provided by millions of customers.” – Read More on CNBC
3. China objects to U.S. inclusion of Chinese e-commerce firms in ‘notorious markets’ list. China does not agree with the U.S. government’s decision to include some e-commerce sites in its “notorious markets” list, calling the action “irresponsible,” the Chinese ministry of commerce says. – Read More on Reuters
4. RELATED READ: Amazon Escapes “Notorious Markets” List, AliExpress, WeChat Added. The Notorious Markets list highlights online and physical markets that “reportedly engage in or facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy,” and this year, identifies 42 online markets and 35 physical markets. – Read More on TFL
5. NFTs, Cryptocurrencies and Web3 Are Multilevel Marketing Schemes for a New Generation: “It’s a siren song as old as the promise of attaining financial freedom by selling herbal supplements, cosmetics or leggings from the comfort of your home, enhanced and refined by the ways in which modern communications systems can rapidly elevate ideas and movements from the fringe to the center of national and global conversation.” – Read More on the WSJ
6. Meta tells advertisers mixed reality could be a few years away: Technology that merges the virtual and physical worlds could start to become a reality for consumers in a few years, Facebook owner Meta has told advertising agencies, giving more details of its vision for the creation of the metaverse. – Read More on Reuters
1. Luxury’s Top Stocks Share Parisian Glamour but Little Else: Slower growth at Hermès is more a reflection of its unusual business model than shaky demand. The company can’t expand rapidly as popular products like its Birkin purse are fully handmade, unlike at most other brands. – Read More on the WSJ
2. Fashion’s new generation puts upcycled and digital clothes on the catwalk: “Lateral design is a promising business model, because there are so many clothes in the world already. It’s a different way of doing things, and the only way to figure out if we can scale this business is to try.” – Read More on the Guardian
3. The fashion industry generates tons of waste. These companies are helping brands change that: “Previously, brands had no control over the experience or revenue from their products circulating online.” Resale initiatives are helping to change that. – Read More on B2
4. How Farfetch Is Ramping up Their Bets in China: When it comes to observing the share of the online business, China continues to grow strongly with brands and platforms investing in the online field, expecting to reach 30 percent of the China market in 2022 with a growth rate of about 56 percent. – Read More on Jing
5. E-Commerce Lost Market Share in 2021: U.S. e-commerce penetration decreased in 2021 because offline retail grew faster than e-commerce for the first time in history, and the online shopping boost from the Covid-19 pandemic cooled off. – Read More on Marketplace Pulse
1. Livestreaming: The Sales Driver That Hard Luxury Brands Are Missing in China. 73 percent of China’s active livestream shoppers are millennials and Gen Zers (between the ages of 20 and 40), and China’s livestreaming market is poised to surpass RMB 80 billion ($12.5 billion) in 2021 and RMB 100 billion ($15.7 billion) by 2023. – Read More on Jing Daily
2. Luxury Brands Raise Prices, Betting Wealthy Won’t Mind: With affluent customers who accept—and in some cases seek—hefty price tags, luxury brands are typically able to raise prices without affecting demand. That is in contrast with many mass-market consumer brands, which face tricky decisions about whether to pass costs on to price-sensitive customers. – Read More on the WSJ
3. Walmart Says Business Is Increasingly Digital: “The business model is changing. I think that’s the headline. We’ve got a business that is becoming increasingly digital, the eCommerce business, first party, third party, is growing and it gives us the opportunity to grow things like advertising income.” – Read More on PYMNTS
4. There’s still a lot of pent-up demand for fashion and apparel, says analyst of bullish Macy’s call: Evercore ISI’s Omar Saad says the Street is underestimating the retail giant. – See More on CNBC
5. Does Your Company Need a Chief ESG Officer? CEOs and boards of directors are under increasing pressure to address ESG issues. To support them, companies like C.H. Robinson, Royal Caribbean, and Verizon have recently appointed chief ESG officers. – Read More on HBR
1. Americans Shrug Off Inflation with Some Retail Therapy: retail sales surged 3.8% in January, the most in 10 months and well above the 2% median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Looking good in the metaverse. Fashion brands bet on digital clothing: “There’s only one metaverse, but there are many metaworlds just like within the internet you have many websites. And it’s not only virtual, it also encompasses the physical world. It’s the convergence of the physical and the digital.” – Read More on NPR
3. Hasbro and Mattel have very different visions for the future: Mattel is projecting that consumers will accept new price increases and continue to buy at the same volume and velocity that they have been doing during the pandemic. – Read More on CNBC
4. Saks Shows up Fashionably Late to Raging TikTok Party: After an initial drop of nine videos fronted by four content creators, the Saks TikTok page had collected about 1,500 followers, received 1,300 likes and had nearly 20,000 views in its first day. – Read More on PYMNTS
5. China adds more companies to an industry body designed to develop the country’s metaverse: On Wednesday, the state-backed China Mobile Communications Association’s metaverse committee added another 17 companies. A total of 112 companies or individuals are in the industry body. – Read More on CNBC
1. We Need Universal ESG Accounting Standards: ESG accounting is a mess. Competing initiatives mean there’s no uniform set of standards for measuring a company’s progress on sustainability. – Read More on HBR
2. RELATED READ: As New York Lawmakers Unveil the Fashion Act, is Larger Reform on The Way? One of the most pressing roadblocks to implementing regulation in the fashion and apparel space (and every other industry when it comes to monitoring environmental and social factors) is the current lack of uniform ESG data standards. – Read More on TFL
3. Why Couldn’t Anybody Cancel Dolce & Gabbana? D&G’s survival despite social-media opprobrium is something of a case study in corporate crisis management. It shows how D&G has been able to leverage its semi-outlaw status to invite people who otherwise might not be considered by the fashion insiders as worthy of attention into its influencer fold. – Read More on the Cut
4. As e-commerce gets cool, brands need smart shoppable strategies: The e-commerce market is due to keep ballooning (by another $10.87tn in the next few years) and consumers are more open to buying on channels outside established shopping platforms, especially social media. – Read More on the Drum
5. Disney names executive to oversee metaverse strategy: Mike White has been named to the new role of senior vice president of Next Generation Storytelling and Consumer Experiences, where he will help define how consumers experience Disney’s coming metaverse. – Read More on Reuters
6. Which luxury products do US shoppers buy in-store? While luxury shopping is very much still an in-person activity, 2 in 5 US adults who had bought luxury items in the past year did so online. – Read More on eMarketer
1. Luxury Brand Turf Wars Boost Retail Rents in Upscale Tokyo Areas: Even in an absence of overseas shoppers, Japan’s luxury boutiques are seeing a surge in demand that’s lifting rents in Tokyo’s most high-class neighborhoods. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Why Your Airport May No Longer Resemble a Luxury Mall: Chinese shoppers will probably never buy as much in overseas airports as they did before Covid-19. China’s government has encouraged consumers to spend at home by tripling their domestic duty-free allowances. – Read More on the WSJ
3. Investors, Merchants and Consumers Have Drastically Different Views of Affirm: It is irrefutable that the concept of BNPL is becoming a more popular choice for consumers who prefer to have more options on how to pay for their purchases, and Affirm is one of many breakout pure play providers that have benefitted from this shift, including Klarna, PayPal, Sezzle, and Afterpay. – Read More on PYMNTS
4. That Organic Cotton T-Shirt May Not Be as Organic as You Think: At the heart of the problem is an opaque certification system rife with opportunities for fraud. Official stamps of approval from external organizations rely on reports from opaque local inspection agencies that base their conclusions on a single planned yearly inspection of facilities or a few random farm visits. – Read More on the New York Times
5. Selling Snoopy: How Peanuts Fashion Became Big Business. Which brings us to today: a churning, global business with licensing agencies that represent Peanuts in different parts of the world. No matter the season, you can find anything from low-priced mass-market screen-printed T-shirts and pajamas to more sophisticated fashion collaborations. – Read More on the WSJ
1. Under Armour’s D2C Business Sees Shift From Web to Stores: Under Armour said Friday (Feb 11) that its direct-to-consumer (D2C) revenues rose 10% in the fourth quarter, as consumers went back to shopping in-stores again compared to widespread closures a year ago. – Read More on PYMNTS
2. Is the Metaverse Just Marketing? The metaverse is currently stalled by a lack of infrastructure (the hardware/software isn’t ready yet), a monopolistic approach to platform development (the metaverse is likely to require more openness and collaboration) and a lack of clear governance standards. – Read More on the New York Times
3. OOOOO wants to create a $400 billion live e-commerce market in the U.S.: Live e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024—not bad until that number is stacked against China, which is on track to hit $423 billion by this year alone. – Read More on Fast Co.
4. The death of the department store: The closure of John Lewis’s store in Sheffield after almost 60 years was a bitter blow. As debate rages over what to do with the huge empty site, the city is becoming a test case for where Britain’s urban centers may be heading. – Read More on the Guardian
5. Eileen Gu Is Dominating the Beijing Olympics—in Skiing and Sponsorships: China has long limited the commercial activities of national team athletes. Until early 2020, China’s General Administration of Sports required athletes to seek approval before taking on any brand endorsements, even offering templates for contracts. – Read More on the WSJ
6. Indian supplier to UK fashion brands agrees to pay £3m in unpaid wages: India’s largest garment company has paid out an estimated £3m in unpaid wages to tens of thousands of workers, after two years of refusing to pay the legal minimum wage. – Read More on the Guardian
1. Justin Bieber’s NFT ape sure looks like monkey business: “The relevant questions include whether the celebrity is actually endorsing a product or service on behalf of a marketer, whether any connection is expected by the endorser’s followers, and would knowing about the connection affect what the followers think about the endorsement.” – Read More on the Verge
2. Why OpenSea’s NFT Marketplace Can’t Win: Its phenomenal growth has brought it more revenue, partnerships, and funding, but at the same time, security issues and endless copycat listings are rife. – Read More on Wired
3. RELATED READ: As NFT Marketplaces Race to Meet Demand, What Are the Legal Issues? Issuers of NFTs and NFT marketplaces would be smart to avoid falling into the same potholes as their ICO predecessors. Wishful thinking will not prevail over securities regulators, particularly if retail investors lose all or a material part of their investment. – Read More on TFL
4. How Neiman Marcus CEO is riding the luxury pandemic boom to rebuild post-bankruptcy: The upscale department store is focusing more intently on splashy, premium products both in stores and online. This pivot comes at a time when some of its rivals are casting a wider net for customers in pursuit of growth. – Read More on Fortune
5. Canada Goose’s Omicron-induced forecast cut sends shares tumbling: U.S. and Canada shares of the company plunged to their lowest in more than a year, clearly reflecting the market’s concerns of intensifying weakness in China and a downbeat fourth-quarter guidance. – Read More on Reuters
1. Facebook, Instagram are hot spots for fake Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel: Online commerce is a key priority for Meta, which has pushed new shopping features that could help grow its revenue as it faces pressures like ads tracking changes and sputtering user growth, and has signaled a hard stance against counterfeiters. – Read More on Reuters
2. How an Old U.S. Antitrust Law Could Foster a Fairer Retail Sector: The Robinson-Patman Act helped level the playing field, allowing consumers to gain the benefits of operational efficiencies and economies of scale while preventing chain stores from using power and exploitation of suppliers alone to win market share. – Read More on HBR
3. Consumer demand for Black brands is rising: Nearly half (45%) of consumers in the U.S. agree that companies should pledge to support Black-owned brands, suppliers, and vendors. Sixty-eight percent say their social values shape their shopping choices. – Read More on WE Forum
4. What China’s Covid-Zero Policy Means for World Supply Chains and Inflation: If consumers and businesses want to continue to buy goods made in China without having to endure shortages and further price hikes, they should want China to stick with its “Covid-zero” policy, as President Xi Jinping does. – Read More on Bloomberg
5. In the battle for luxury goods, secondhand sellers see success: The secondhand market was 20 trillion won in 2020 according to Statistica, with luxury transactions making up for some 40% of the total. The market is expected to rise 25% on year to 25 trillion won in 2021, and big-name companies are also entering the growing market. – Read More on Korea JoongAng Daily