Daily LInks
1. “Throwaway fashion is the worst imaginable concept.” According to Giorgio Armani, “The industry has been due for a reckoning for a while now,” he continues. “Concerns like waste, too much product of poor quality and a marketing-driven approach can lead to a disconnection with what the consumer really wants.” – Read More on the Telegraph
2. Levi’s CEO Says Baggy Jeans Are Making a Comeback: Following two decades of skinny jeans, Levi Strauss & Co. Chief Executive Officer Chip Bergh said baggy jeans are back. Jeans with more relaxed fits are selling well as shoppers stuck at home lean toward more comfy clothes. – Read More on Bloomberg
3. As Godiva reveals that it will close or sell all of its brick-and-mortar stores in North America as part of its strategy to boost global online sales, a look back at this piece from AdWeek: How a Naked Woman, a Horse and a Family in Belgium Created Godiva Chocolate. – Read More on AdWeek
4. The Luxury Goods Market Needs to Accelerate its Digital Transition: A recent study shows that e-commerce has been steadily growing for years. The study projects that by 2022, global online sales will have amounted to $6.54 trillion. That’s nearly twice what was recorded in 2019. – Read More on Entrepreneur
5. Americans won’t be rushing to retail stores to shop after getting Covid vaccine, survey finds: Forty-four percent of respondents said they’ll visit stores the same or less to buy footwear post-vaccination, while 45% said they would visit stores the same or less for beauty products, 41% said this about luxury items, and 43% for electronics. – Read More on CNBC
1. H&M is one of fashion’s biggest polluters. Now its foundation is on a $100 million quest to save the planet. Can the brand that pioneered fast fashion undo the environmental devastation its business model has caused? “When you actually look at the numbers, the answer is a resounding ‘no.’” – Read More on Fast Co.
2. Only the Best Luxury Brands Can Hike Prices: “Most years, luxury brands use price increases to offset inflation in input and labor costs as well as currency moves. But 2020 has been exceptional. “Recent price increases have been pretty aggressive.” – Read More on the WSJ
3. RELATED READ: What Do Luxury Brands’ Inflating Prices Mean for Them & for the Industry at Large? In terms of the potential for price increases going forward, brands like Hermès, Dior and even Cartier lead the pack in terms of “unrealized pricing upside,” which Bernstein measures by combining high consumer demand, vibrant organic growth, and limited price increases in the recent past. On the other hand, Bulgari, Prada and Longines show limited potential. – Read More on TFL
4. Female-backed SPAC, Powered Brands, aims to create new beauty conglomerate after public listing: By reimagining what a global beauty conglomerate can be, it will compete with some of the biggest, including Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Shiseido and Coty. – Read More on CNBC
5. ESG Impact Is Hard to Measure — But It’s Not Impossible: To grasp underlying processes, companies should focus on deeply understanding a handful of issues most germane to their core activities. Through this, they stand a greater chance of deeply understanding the causal threads that enable improved impact, and ultimately directing sufficient resources to act on these. Nike is a good example. – Read More on HBR
6. RELATED READ: As Fashion Embraces ESG, There Are Some Critical Legal Issues at Play. “The anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws apply not only to SEC filings, but also extend to less formal communications, such as citizenship reports, press releases and websites.” All the while, potential liability could arise from other statutes and regulations, such as federal and state consumer protection laws. – Read More on TFL
1. Fashion Trends Are Often Recycled. Now More Clothing Can Be, Too: “You can do some great design thinking and great production, but if you’re not set up to actively collect product, it’s a little bit in vain, said Stuart Ahlum, the company’s co-founder. To that end, in November, Thousand Fell teamed up with UPS to provide consumers with an easier way to recycle their worn-out footwear. – Read More on the New York Times
2. A gaggle of disruptive brands is deftly targeting consumers born between 1997 and 2012: In most commercial respects, adorkables are a subset of “blands” — those direct-to-consumer upstart startups (Quip, Away, Warby Parker, Casper) that claim to be “unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.” – Read More on Bloomberg
3. RETRO READ: Blanding … What Is It, How Did We Get Here and What Does it Mean Going Forward? It could be argued that brands actually stand to increase the strength of – and the scope of protection for – their marks by adopting this less-is-more approach. As London-based intellectual property lawyer Birgit Clark told TFL, a brand “should always try to register a plain word trademark.” That way, she says, the distinctiveness of the mark “will rest on the word(s) rather than any stylization of those words.” – Read More on TFL
4. Fifth Avenue Retailers See Signs of Budding Revival: Luxury watch and jewelry maker Chopard recently signed a new lease for the Crown Building opposite the Tiffany & Co. store. Toy maker Lego AS moved to a bigger store on Fifth Avenue, where it will occupy 10,000 square feet, or more than double its previous space. Harry Winston signed a deal to nearly double its space on Fifth Avenue. – Read More on the WSJ
5. RELATED READS: Saks Fifth Avenue is Getting the Boot From Bal Habour for Failing to Pay $1.9 Million in Rent, Per Lawsuit … and in other COVID-centric real estate lawsuits: Suffering from COVID-19 Setbacks, Valentino Wants Out of its Fifth Avenue Lease, According to Lawsuit.
6. The Future Of Fashion: Hello, sweatpants. With scaled-down Fashion Weeks, department stores hurting, and more and more people opting for loungewear rather than workplace attire… where does that leave the fashion business in 2021? – Hear More on NPR
1. Billionaires Get Bested in Fast Fashion’s Survival of the Fittest: For a relatively small sum, Boohoo gets a successful website that expands its operations beyond young fashion to an older demographic. Debenhams also brings a premium beauty business, which can complement Boohoo’s apparel sales. However, there is a question mark over whether the big beauty groups will continue to sell through the site. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. RETRO READ: As Fast Fashion Gets Faster and Cheaper, the Giants Behind it Are Facing Scrutiny. Beyond the practical elements of the supply chain that make such prices possible, years of widespread marketing by way of advertising campaigns boasting inexpensive H&M and Zara garments, for instance, or Instagram ads touting dirt-cheap Fashion Nova looks have led to a collective belief among consumers that these prices are how much clothing should cost, and anything above these prices reflects an unnecessary markup. – Read More on TFL
3. Chinese brands are gaining popularity at home: Social media and e-commerce have shaken up the retail industry and raised the stakes for companies trying to sell to the increasingly price-conscious Chinese consumer. “The entire infrastructure for brands has undergone a big change, and there are now more and more new brands emerging (in China).” – Read More on CNBC
4. Is the European Luxury Stock Rise Real or a Mirage? Unsurprisingly, some investors are bullish about these luxury stocks. “We view European luxury companies as the European stock market equivalent of US tech: businesses that are unrivaled in their global dominance,” said Giles Rothbarth, the manager of the Blackrock European Dynamic Fund, to Bloomberg. – Read More on Jing
5. Facebook to soar 26% on e-commerce, advertising strength: A BoA analysts says that lauded Facebook’s new eCommerce push – including Instagram’s new shopping centric redesign – is the solution to revenue woes in the near term in a Monday note to clients, but also warned that antitrust complaints and section 230 related changes might slow growth in the second half of 2021. – Read More on Business Insider
6. The Future of Fashion: Apparel and Luxury Brand Marketing in Post-Corona Times. “More to the point, apparel is a necessity, but the fashion industry is very fast-lived, and customers are not as willing to buy the latest product offerings if they have to contend with monetary uncertainty. Not to mention, that today, due to the pandemic, consumers can barely wear the clothing out on the town.” – Read More on Forbes
1. ‘Unstoppable’ Luxury Stocks Remind Some Investors of U.S. Tech: Companies such as LVMH, which just acquired the U.S. jeweler Tiffany & Co., are considered high-quality, cash-generating assets that will continue benefiting from long-term structural trends such as the emergence of the Chinese middle class and from diversified, best-in-class brand portfolios that help reduce risks. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Stella McCartney, Burberry, and Kering Forge a New Kind of Sustainable Partnership: Informally called “The Italy Project,” it’s focused on improving the environmental footprint of Italy’s luxury fashion supply chain. The top-line goal is to “establish a platform for manufacturers to coordinate, fund, and scale environmental programs with measurable impact” following AII’s scientific guidelines. – Read More on Vogue
3. Saks Fifth chief says luxury retail has been ‘comfort food’ for some shoppers during the pandemic: Luxury retailers including the high-end department store chain Neiman Marcus and jeweler Tiffany have reported a similar trend over the past year: Wealthy shoppers looking to splurge even more on themselves during hard times. – Read More on CNBC
4. Sephora’s Deborah Yeh: Unconscious Bias in Retail and Marketing. “Retail is a system. And so in terms of approaching our work, we’ve been thinking a lot about, ‘All right, what can we do to make the system more equitable and inclusive for all?’ It is not just about a marketing campaign … I think a much deeper digging into the decisions that we’re making as leaders at all levels of the company.” – Hear More on HBR
5. Understanding the Power of Luxury’s Iconic Products: “The game to please both newcomers and loyal consumers is thus to re-interpret icons on a very regular basis (see the endless versions of the Chanel jacket season after season), so newcomers are thrilled but repeat purchasers remain entertained.” – Read More on Jing
1. Mytheresa IPO is Less Fashion-Forward Than it Looks: Around one-fifth of Mytheresa’s parent company, MYT Netherlands was sold to investors at a $2.2 billion valuation. Mytheresa is one of the few profitable luxury e-commerce players around. Peers Farfetch, The RealReal and Yoox-Net-a-Porter are deep in the red. – Read More on the WSJ
2. A.I. in the beauty industry: How the pandemic finally made consumers care about it. “It’s made people more curious and knowledgeable about the space, and there’s been earlier adoption and connection/ We’ve also seen how people are wanting to interact with products at home, so we’ve accelerated aspects of our strategy to keep up with how the world is moving.” – Read More on Fortune
3. What Rejoining the Paris Agreement Signals to Fashion: “I think when you see the administration signing back on, [fashion companies] realize that at some point there will be some accountability, so they need to start considering [sustainability], and considering it beyond just a marketing plan — but from the scientific perspective.” – Read More on Yahoo
4. Luxury Stocks Rise as Burberry and Richemont Show Signs of Recovery. But it Won’t Be Smooth: The sector’s recovery won’t be smooth, particularly with new virus variants and the prospect of intermittent lockdowns until Covid-19 vaccines take full effect, but those with the luxury of a greater exposure to Asia are likely to fare better in the coming months. – Read More on Barron’s
5. RELATED READ: Richemont sales rise on strong demand in Asia. The biggest luxury companies are faring better than smaller ones in the crisis given the tight control they keep over distribution and their deeper pockets to invest in ecommerce. They have cut costs quickly, held virtual fashion shows, and catered to their best clients by selling over video and text chats. – Read More on the FT
1. Fashion apparel makes a comeback, focus on digital deepens, and other 2021 predictions: Following a year when fashion dropped 25% to 40%, B. Riley team expects “fashion to make a comeback in 2021 as consumers get out,” with Revolve, Guess, Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle Outfitters as reaping the most benefit among the companies they cover. – Read More on Retail Dive
2. Asian garment makers fashion united front to pressure Western brands: Manufacturers from the six nations that make most of the world’s clothes have forged a common front to negotiate better terms with Western fashion brands, whose cancelled orders devastated Asian garment workers early in the pandemic. – Read More on Reuters
3. China’s new fashion hubs rising as luxury brands look to cities like Chengdu and Hangzhou for millennials growing in wealth: With China’s top-tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing becoming saturated, luxury brands are increasingly targeting second- and third-tier cities for growth. Repeating the same strategies, however, won’t work – instead they need to do a deep dive into understanding local consumer culture. – Read More on SCMP
4. Retailers are exiting malls — and changing their store strategies: Retailers have been in the process of opening more off-mall stores for the past couple of years, trying to attract more regular customers, who are less interested in browsing the store and instead want to get in and out as quickly as possible. – Read More on Modern Retail
5. Lockdown, and a Crackdown on Discounting, Hurt Burberry’s Q3 Sales: The no-markdowns strategy is nothing new for Burberry, and has been a pillar of chief executive officer Marco Gobbetti’s strategy for the brand as he looks to cement Burberry in the luxury space. – Read More on WWD
6. Fashion at Biden-Harris Inauguration Showcases Commitment to American Designers: At Tuesday’s ceremony, the work of American designers ruled supreme, from President Joe Biden’s Ralph Lauren suit to Vice President Kamala Harris’s Christopher John Rogers purple outfit. Lady Gaga and J. Lo performed in more extravagant fashions from Schiaparelli Couture and Chanel. – Read More on the WSJ
1. Consumer sector M&A poised to rebound after 2020 slump: Large consumer companies armed with big cash stockpiles could propel a surge in M&A over the next 12 months as favorable monetary and fiscal policies and vaccine deployments increase the likelihood of an economic recovery. – Read More on S&P Global
2. How Shopify became the new retail empire: Shopify has been slowly growing, describing itself as a quiet no-nonsense back-end tool to help merchants grow their businesses. And over the last year it became an empire. – Read More on Modern Retail
3. Are ‘Luxury Mystery Boxes’ the Future of Discount Shopping? Upstart luxury liquidators like Heat and Scarce are offloading surplus clothing from labels like Off-White and Saint Laurent with a twist: The customers have no idea what they’re actually buying. But that’s not necessarily a problem since young shoppers often value a brand name even more than the item itself. – Read More on the WSJ
4. Peloton, Lululemon, Apple and others are betting the fitness-at-home shift is here to stay: Sales of health and fitness equipment more than doubled, to $2.3 billion, from March to October. Treadmill sales skyrocketed a whopping 135%, the group said, while sales of stationary bikes almost tripled. – Read More on CNBC
5. Personal Shopping Goes Mainstream, and Luxury Retailers Rejoice: “Four out of five times, a new appointment is for special occasions, but not in this environment,” Lisa Bruni Vene, managing director for luxury services at Saks, says. “The majority of our business comes from clients doing new wardrobes.” – Read More on Bloomberg
6. China’s rich spent $54 billion at home on luxury goods last year with coronavirus halting overseas trips: Sales of luxury goods in China soared 48 per cent last year to $53.5 billion with overseas travel virtually impossible due to the coronavirus. China’s 1.58 million high net worth families had an average annual household expenditure of $270,000 last year. – Read More on SCMP
7. Poshmark’s explosive IPO bodes well for the resale industry, but how sustainable is secondhand? There’s no evidence that people are replacing their new purchases with secondhand ones. They’re just buying more of both. – Read More on Fast Co.
1. Top 10 Global Consumer Trends for 2021: Some consumers will simultaneously identify with the trends of revenge spending and thoughtful frugality, trading down on some items in order to be able to spend more on others. This “trading down to trade up” is an accelerating trend during the pandemic. – Read More on the WSJ
2. How Lingerie Became China’s Favorite Fashion Investment: Lingerie startups targeting China’s millennials and Gen Zers had an exceptional year in 2020. Digital bra labels have been the darlings of the Chinese fashion investment capital set these past few years. In 2018 alone, over $30.5 million of growth capital was poured into China’s digital bra startups. – Read More on Jing Daily
3. Birkenstock explores sale to private equity group CVC: CVC hopes to grow sales in new markets while capitalizing on the brand’s loyal customer base. Birkenstock made €721.5m in revenues and €129m in net income in the year to September 2019, a corporate filing shows. Net revenue was up 40% on the previous year. – Read More on the FT
4. China’s new fashion hubs rising as luxury brands look to cities like Chengdu and Hangzhou for millennials growing in wealth. “Legacy luxury brands will likely take the lead since their growth in top-tier markets is more or less saturated, but trendy luxury streetwear labels have huge potential too. Consumers in smaller cities sometimes feel less obligated to conform to the traditional perceptions and more likely to embrace new trends.” – Read More on SCMP
5. “There are no environmentally friendly companies.” Retailers are built on the concept of consumption, which makes positive impacts, especially on the environment, difficult to accomplish. – Read More on Retail Dive
6. Apparel Retailers Must Embrace Change in 2021: Retail supply chains need to be ready for sustained increases in digital demand. That means continuing to invest in streamlined and connected digital capabilities across the whole value chain, right through to fulfillment operations. It also means rethinking traditional “linear” approaches to the supply chain, evolving it into a more flexible supplier network that will increase the organization’s resilience to future disruption. – Read More on Yahoo
1. Barneys at Saks: Resurrecting a Luxury Legend: Tracy Margolies, chief merchant of Saks, characterized the Barneys project as part of the strategy of the past five years to elevate Saks, in her words, into the “fashion authority delivering the best choices and the best edit, any way customers want to get it.” – Read More on WWD
2. Sephora has a sweeping new plan for combating racism. But will it work? Sephora conducted a yearlong study measuring systemic racism in U.S. retail environments, and created an action plan that includes reducing third-party security in stores, doubling the number of Black-owned brands that it carries, and creating a zero-tolerance policy when employees discriminate. – Read More on Fast Co.
3. These Fashion Influencers Say “Don’t Buy Anything.” During a year when women have been the hardest hit by the financial crisis triggered by the pandemic—accounting for all 140,000 of the U.S. jobs lost in December, big-name influencers’ lavish content appears increasingly out-of-touch. Enter: a new breed who are presenting a more realistic approach to fashion. – Read More on the WSJ
4. Redefining sustainability for 2021: The new priorities. “No amount of ‘circular economy’ or other techno-fixes will be able to sustain the current volumes without sustained damage to Earth’s systems. The next years — maybe a decade, maybe less — will determine which brands fit into this new world in which we will produce and consume radically less.” – Read More on Vogue Biz
5. Stilettos out, sneakers in: luxury designer shoes continue to pivot as pandemic accelerates trends. “Brands such as Louboutin, Sergio Rossi, Jimmy Choo and Stuart Weitzman saw their sales for elegant shoes decrease” in 2020. “They’ve had to adapt to the market and develop sneakers and lower heels.” – Read More on SCMP
6. From skinheads to the stock market: how Dr. Martens went mainstream. Six decades after its chunky, lace-up boots were first sold, the British company is preparing to walk on to the London Stock Exchange early this year. Its valuation could hit £3 to £4 billion. – Read More on the FT