Daily LInks
1. Consumers Still Have ‘Appetite to Spend’ as Omicron Dip Seen as Temporary: “There’s an appetite to spend. There’s still a lot of money that people have, and personal balance sheets are still pretty strong.” – Read More on PYMNTS
2. Hermes Shares Fall Out of Favor: As the most highly rated major luxury stock, trading at 59 times estimated earnings, Hermes has fallen more steeply than lower-rated peers. Its 15% drop in 2022 compares with declines of 6.3% for LVMH and 5.1% for Kering, both of which trade on multiples about half that of their smaller peer. – Read More on Bloomberg
3. Ralph Lauren CEO says metaverse is way to tap into younger generation of shoppers: “One of our strategies is to win over a new generation and the new generation is there. So, we have to be there.” – Read More on CNBC
4. Fashion industry looks to online metaverse as test lab for developing new products, blurring the line between virtual and real: “In the end, it’s about desirability,” said Berg. “If it is desirable in that (virtual) space, why wouldn’t it be desirable in another space?” – Read More on SCMP
5. Rolls-Royce, Bentley, BMW Sales Surge as Cheaper Brands Lag Behind: Rolls-Royce will remain a small, intimate luxury brand focused on creating experiences for its customers. To appeal to younger customers, it is connecting owners through an app called Whispers, which you can only access if you actually own a Rolls-Royce. – Read More on the WSJ
1. Lacoste Snaps Back at M&S in Lawsuit Over Crocodile Trademark Spat: Lacoste is suing M&S for trademark infringement, accusing the retailer of infringing seven of its trademarks by way of goods ranging from bedding to bucket hats. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Inside the metaverse economy, jobs and infrastructure projects are becoming real: The focus for brands at this point isn’t to win but simply to get involved. So far, brand engagement with blockchain projects has been about building community and staying relevant. The Nike and Adidas NFT drops, for example, generated more buzz than cash, but they lent legitimacy to a still-nascent space. – Read More on CNBC
3. ‘Made in China, sold on Amazon’ community grew in 2021 despite crackdown on fake reviews, US e-commerce giant says: The number of new Chinese sellers added to the Amazon platform recorded double-digit growth last year, Cindy Tai, Amazon.com’s vice-president for Asia Global Selling, said in a video for the company’s seller conference. – Read More on SCMP
4. RETRO READ: In an Already-Crowded Trademark Landscape, Amazon Sellers Are Changing Game. A growing number of Chinese sellers on Amazon are actively “challenging what it means to be a brand,” as the branding of “commodity goods, or types of products where shoppers don’t have much brand loyalty in the first place” is not necessarily important, certainly not in the way a cult skincare brand’s name is or the way a goodwill-soaked luxury logo is. – Read More on TFL
5. Gen Z investors shift focus from ‘meme-stocks’ to the metaverse, report shows: “There’s a lot more interest in metaverse,” Apex Chief Executive Officer Bill Capuzzi said in an interview. “As more NFT companies become public, we’ll probably see them move in to the top 100.” – Read More on Reuters
1. Fashion is about to get more expensive – but by just how much? Clothing costs are set to rise by 10 percent this year as a result of higher cotton and shipping costs coupled with inflation, and brands are worried that these inevitable price increases will make their regular customers pause before making impulse purchases. – Read More on the Telegraph
2. The Myth of Sustainable Fashion: Despite high-profile attempts at innovation, fashion has failed to reduce its planetary impact in the past 25 years. Most items are still produced using non-biodegradable petroleum-based synthetics and end up in a landfill. – Read More on HBR
3. How Afterpay Transformed the Fashion Industry: Though the installment payment model is not an entirely new concept, its resurgence has not come without criticism, with some users reporting overdraft fees and late charges. “It sounds too good to be true, and it is, in many ways, because there are perils for people who use it.” – Read More on Elle
4. Gap taps NFT craze by taking classic hoodies digital: Gap Inc on Thursday launched NFTs of its iconic hoodies, sending the apparel maker’s shares about 5% higher as it became the latest major retailer to dive into the world of speculative crypto assets. – Read More on Reuters
5. Brand Mashups in Fashion: Benefits in Consumer Engagement, Access to New Markets and More. In 2021, we saw a strong recovery in consumer demand worldwide—especially in the apparel and footwear category. In this context, we continue to see companies turn to brand mashups, whereby two brands collaborate with each other to launch new projects and products. – Read More on Coresight Research
1. China tech crackdown: E-commerce and online advertising to contend with weak spending in 2022, UBS analyst says. Regulatory pressure and weak economic growth is expected to continue to create uncertainty for internet businesses for another year. – Read More on SCMP
2. Four Elements of a Successful Brand Refresh: To successfully reinvent your brand, you must rethink your approach to product, story, culture, and customer. Brand rebounds often seem simple, logical, and inevitable, but few revival attempts are successful, and in the uncommon event that they do succeed, they usually take years or decades to yield significant results. – Read More on HBR
3. Covid E-Commerce Boom Sees U.S. Retailers Hunt for Warehouses: E-commerce sales surged to a record 15.7% of total U.S. retail receipts in mid-2020, and while they’ve come slightly off that peak as shoppers return to brick-and-mortar stores, they remain elevated, Commerce Department data shows. – Read More on Bloomberg
4. RETRO READ: What Does an In-Store Sale Really Entail in an Omnichannel Retail World? “The push to include online sales in lease agreements has loomed for some time,” but it is “swiftly accelerating” now as brands are being forced to embrace an omnichannel retail model – and fast – in order to stay afloat. – Read More on TFL
5. Global digital sales topped $1 trillion during 2021 holidays: Luxury handbags, home furniture, fastest growing categories online, highest year-over-year growth in handbags, specifically 45% online sales increased there. Home furniture and general footwear, that’s what trailed closely behind. – Read More on Yahoo Finance
6. Alibaba’s Tsai-Backed Africa E-Commerce Firm Gets Funds to Grow: An Africa-focused e-commerce platform backed by Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. co-founder Joe Tsai, has raised $6.2 million to expand into more markets and products. – Read More on Bloomberg
1. The Resale Market Boom—What Sellers and Brands Need to Know: The luxury market—historically a re-commerce hold-out—has even embraced the resale boom. For example, Kering, acquired a 5% stake in French resale platform Vestiaire Collective in early 2021. Meanwhile, sites like The RealReal helped to elevate public perception of resale. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Retailers Face Taxing Start to the Year: Tax-refund season typically gives retailers a separate uplift because consumers tend to spend the windfall on big-ticket items. This year, that isn’t a sure thing. – Read More on the WSJ
3. How Apple gets to $4 trillion; how Microsoft gets to $3 trillion: “Apple’s ecosystem is a key asset that keeps users locked in as they accumulate content including pictures, videos, movies and other content. It will continue to leverage its massive user base to cross-sell other products and services to diversify revenues away from just the iPhone franchise.” – Read More on S&P Global
4. RETRO READ: Is Apple a Luxury Brand? Well, That Depends on Your Definition of Luxury. “If change is happening at Apple, it seems like it’s moving from high-end electronics company to something more like a luxury fashion brand, moving away from focusing on user experience and magnificent industrial engineering as driving forces, and moving toward a company that offers trendiness, status, and individuality first, then nailing down the mechanics of the things.” – Read More on TFL
5. How Amazon’s battle with Reliance for India retail supremacy became a legal jungle: In 2019, Amazon and Future, number two player in India behind market leader Reliance, became business partners. That deal, Amazon argues, came with certain non-compete clauses that prohibited Future from selling retail assets to certain rivals. – Read More on Reuters
1. What If You Could Read a Fashion Label Like a Food Label? Prince Charles’s Sustainable Markets Initiative Fashion Taskforce presented its “Digital ID,” which can trace a fashion item from production through sale and even resale. And the British start-up Provenance developed software to trace the supply chain of pieces from field to finished garment. – Read More on the New York Times
2. Resurgent M&S takes retail crown back from upstart online rivals: M&S is worth comfortably more than Boohoo and its online rival Asos combined. It has upgraded profit forecasts twice over the past year its share price rose by three-quarters in 2021. – Read More on the FT
3. Yeezy, Gap, Balenciaga pact reflects reality that designer partnerships are in style right now: For Gap, the 50+ year-old diversified apparel retailer, the new partnership marks the latest milestone in a growing list of joint ventures that are bringing fresh products into its own online portfolio and 4,000 stores as well as those of its partners. – Read More on PYMNTS
4. Hermès and Chanel limit bag purchases to keep them exclusive and stoke desire for their products: “Very desirable luxury brands can largely do what they want,” says Anita Balchandani, the head of luxury analysis at consultancy McKinsey. “If they want to increase prices to recoup the cost of the pandemic, they can – unlike mid-market or even mass luxury brands.” – Read More on SCMP
5. How VCs Can Help Startups Set (and Meet) ESG Goals: The complex challenges the world faces today — climate change, the energy transition, and growing inequality just to name a few — have forced large, incumbent companies to take action, reinventing their business models in some cases or radically re-engineering their products, services, and operations in others. – Read More on HBR
1. Why zoomer green is the new millennial pink: In fashion, the green does have a name already. This is Bottega green – some call it Zoomer green to reference the generation who wear it. It’s the green that is everywhere. – Read More on the Guardian
2. RELATED READ: Bottega Veneta Green May Be the Brand’s Biggest New Asset. “The fact that the Bottega green color is not a shade one encounters on these particular items every day, combined with how often that color-product-source cluster is repeated, tends to make me think more than a few people are already making [a] cognitive connection” between the color and the brand.” – Read More on TFL
3. Luxury brands study personas as they try to stay relevant: Luxury buyers are getting younger, not only in Korea but globally. The proportion of luxury consumers born in the late 1990s and 2000s, otherwise known as Gen Z, doubled last year and came in at 17 percent, up 9 percentage points from 2019. – Read More on JoongAng
4. The Role of Regulation in Ensuring Circular Fashion: A new study published in Sustainability has investigated the potential role regulation will play in moving the fashion industry toward a circular economy model which will solve its problems with sustainability whilst making it a fairer industry for all who work in it. – Read More on AZO
5. Carousell, L Catterton Said in $1.5 Billion SPAC Deal Talks: Carousell Pte, a Singapore-based online classifieds marketplace operator, is in talks to go public through a merger with LVMH-affiliated blank-check company L Catterton Asia Acquisition Corp. – Read More on Bloomberg
1. Inflation trap looms for British retailers: Rising inflation is the big cloud on the horizon for the global economy, as supply chain disruption, higher energy costs, labor shortages and post-lockdown demand pushes up prices at rates not seen for decades. – Read More on Reuters
2. Omicron variant likely to fuel inflation, as Americans keep shopping rather than dining out and traveling: “People who stay at home because of the variant are more likely to spend their money on retail goods rather than services. That would put further pressure on inflation since supply chains are already overloaded across the globe.” – Read More on CNBC
3. At CES 2022, metaverse is built by small players, but Meta’s influence looms: On the convention floor, metaverse technologies — such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 5G and blockchain — have played a major role and will continue to do so in the years to come. But a generalized consensus of what the metaverse is has yet to be fully realized. – Read More on S&P Global
4. How Secondhand Luxury Platforms Can Win in China in 2022: Global players are poised to benefit even more in China as its collector class grows in size and influence. StockX CEO Scott Cutler noted “strong synergies between our core sneaker enthusiasts and those customers who are passionate about apparel, accessories, collectibles, and gaming.” – Read More on Jing Daily
5. RELATED READ: China’s Luxury Resale Segment is Expected to Grow into a $154 Billion Market. Accounting for just 5 percent of its overall market for luxury goods as of 2020, China’s luxury resale segment may be in its infancy – and still in the process of shedding a largescale consumer aversion to pre-owned products – but the University of International Business and Economics and Isheyipai report foresees that changing, with the industry ultimately expected to scale to 1 trillion yuan ($154.6 billion). – Read More on TFL
6. Flush With Q4 Cash, Retailers are About to Embark on Inventory IT Spending Spree: Where talk in the past focused on integration and omnichannel cohesion between stores and eCommerce, retailers are said to now be expressing a much more urgent need to have a “universal set of capabilities” that can deliver a good consumer experience no matter what the channel. – Read More on PYMNTS
1. Boards Face Rising Complexity of ESG Oversight Role: Over and over again, in virtually all sectors, we’re seeing a lack of ESG credentials. It isn’t that somebody on the board needs to be a climate change scientist, but board members need to understand the material issues for their company, the questions they need to ask, and where they can get expertise. – Read More on the WSJ
2. The Renaissance of Coded Luxury: “Part of the allure attached to coded luxury brands is that knowing about them, (and owning them), enters you into a sort of elite club. Of course, it’s human nature to want what we can’t have, or seek out what we’re told we cannot know.” – Read More on W
3. How Jessica Simpson Almost Lost Her Name: Simpson’s formula not only worked, it outlasted the fashion lines started by many other celebrities. Eventually, the brand did $1 billion at retail, with Simpson appearing on the cover of New York magazine as “The $1 Billion Girl.” – Read More on Bloomberg
Note: This is an interesting article, but it is worth noting that selling an eponymous label (and the corresponding assets) or licensing the trademarks for an eponymous label is not the same as “losing” your name. Speaking of eponymous labels … Thinking About Naming Your Brand After Yourself? Think Again.
4. Retailers’ Many Unhappy Returns: Products and gifts valued at $112 billion to $114 billion could be returned to U.S. retailers after the holiday season, up from $100 billion in 2020 and $95 billion in 2019. The percentage of merchandise returned has edged higher during the Covid-19 pandemic. – Read More on the WSJ
5. No Slowdown in Sight for Surging BNPL as Consumers Want it, Retailers Need It: While the budding BNPL business is only starting to get on the regulatory radar, its path forward looks otherwise unimpeded, with plenty of headroom to grow amongst payment methods, and the twin tailwinds of consumer demand and retail need also helping to get it there. – Read More on PYMNTS
1. Why Rihanna’s Fenty Stands Out From the Pack Among Celebrity Beauty Brands: Fenty Beauty was the most-known brand among both women (36 percent) and men (25 percent), as well as among Gen Zers (46 percent) and millennials (49 percent). Gen Xers (31 percent) were most aware of Lopez’s JLo Beauty. – Read More on Morning Consult
2. Four trends that will define e-commerce in 2022: Thanks to a combination of faster internet, the boom in live video and the rise of influencers, live shopping is becoming a major (if not a primary) channel for avid shoppers. – Read More on TechCrunch
3. As Omicron Bears Down on Retailers, Landlords Get Creative to Fill Space: The resulting rash of storefront vacancies taught landlords to be more flexible with retail tenants, real estate experts say. Some cut longtime tenants slack, waiving rents or entering into revenue-sharing agreements. To entice new tenants, they reduced rates, offered free rent and agreed to customize spaces. – Read More on the New York Times
4. RELATED READ: From Malls to Madison Avenue, Real Estate is Getting a COVID Makeover. “Corporations want the ability to react to a host of unknowns brought on by the coronavirus and economic pressures, so they will continue to pursue options that provide them with enhanced flexibility for the foreseeable future. Whittling down lease terms is certainly part of that effort. – Read More on TFL
5. A patent filed by Shopify shows it edging closer to brick-and-mortar retail with a type of tech also used by Amazon: The patent application, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office on May 25, 2020, describes a system of sensors that could measure the density and behavior of shoppers in specific areas of a retail store. – Read More on Business Insider