Daily LInks
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.