Daily LInks
1. China’s consumer spending is weak. Electric vehicles and luxury goods are bright spots. “The pandemic has increased income disparities between lower and higher income earners, and the trend is visible in the consumer goods market with demand growth for high-end goods, e.g. luxury items, being stronger.” – Read More on Barron’s
2. Luxury Goods Market of South Korea Growing Rapidly: South Korea’s luxury goods market is continuing to grow regardless of COVID-19 and this growth is being led by those in their 20s and 30s. The combined sales of Hermes Korea, Louis Vuitton Korea and Chanel Korea amounted to 2.5 trillion won last year. – Read More on Business Korea
3. Flip bags $28 million to turn beauty, wellness social commerce on its head. Founder Noor Agha believes the future of e-commerce will be driven by shoppers and the experiences they have with social media, so Flip is pulling all of those experiences into one app, mixing in user-generated reviews and live shopping shows for beauty, wellness and health brands. It then adds same-day shipping and back-end logistics. – Read More on TechCrunch
4. Small tech deals keep swimming amid FTC ‘tidal wave’ of merger reviews: The FTC is on track to review about 3,000 deals this fiscal year, which ends in September, far exceeding the annual totals of the past decade. This led the agency to warn recently that companies should expect more merger reviews to exceed the standard 30 days amid the “tidal wave” of filings. – Read More on S&P Global
5. Ikea To Pilot Furniture Buyback, Secondhand Sales: Loyalty customers will be able to sell gently used Ikea furniture in exchange for store credit, with these items then available for resale in Ikea’s “as-is” section at discounted prices. Any customer can join the loyalty program for free. – Read More on PYMNTS
6. RELATED READ: Buyback Programs: The Future of the Luxury Market? Second-hand luxury can actually be seen as “a new growth driver and another high-quality, entry-level offer, such as perfumes, bags and shoes,” according to fashion consultancy Heuritech. (And those are precisely the types of high-margin offerings that enable most luxury brands – which, with their high turnover, volume-based models, are not actually based on exclusivity at all – to generate billions in revenue.) – Read More on TFL
