Fashion Turns to Partnerships to Connect to Consumers At Home
Another “The Business Behind” segment in your feed (and the first here in Medium). Exciting! This time, we touch on the world of fashion in the middle of a global pandemic: partnerships, consumer engagement, and creative efforts to stay afloat.
Most industries have been hard-hit by the pandemic, with millions of layoffs and store closures debilitating the economy’s landscape. Fashion isn’t an exception: small brands, suppliers, local retailers, wholesale partners and millions of artisan families are suffering from the domino-like effect of disruptions in the system. In an industry where the ecosystem is literally composed of interdependent relationships, a disruption on one end can see the entire system crash.
Fashion companies have leveraged this knowledge to their advantage, partnering both within and outside the industry to 1) help themselves and their industry net, and 2) to deliver meaningful content to consumers at home. In the EU, 3.2 billion euros in retail sales were lost due to factors brought on by COVID-19. With dire predictions for the future, brands have had little choice but to close stores to protect employees and consumers, and turn to the online space to reach their customers.
However, this has been another issue in itself: how to talk to consumers who have been equally affected by rising unemployment and layoffs? Should you talk to them about your newest bikini collection, and if so, how do you frame that conversation?
For many brands, the answer lies in refraining from treating consumer relationships as purely transactional. Now more than ever, consumers are not about a tone-deaf ad showing the newest resort-wear you’ve launched. Fashion companies need to cultivate meaningful relationships with their customers by providing other ways of connecting that don’t revolve around a credit card and a shipping address.
Fashion x Music
And they’ve done so by getting creative. Luxury fashion, for instance, has turned to the music industry for help in crafting quarantine-friendly spaces to engage with their customers. Alexander McQueen came up with a Spotify channel full of playlists with the brand’s runway show music. Similarly, Marc Jacobs created Monday Mixtapes, where they say they’ll”share a curated @Spotify playlist from a friend of the brand to help get you through this time as we all #StayHome.”
Business of Fashion interviewed fashion’s resident sound expert Michael Gaubert (who’s currently putting together playlists for chanel) about the power of music as a form of engagement during these times. Gaubert’s stance? “Playlists make the brand more accesssible” (BOF). Another sound guru hard at work right now is Arman Naféei, whose brand has curated playlists for Giorgio Armani and other giants. Naféei says:
Are people hungry to buy something right now? No, but they are hungry to consume entertainment and are open to being engaged, so now is the time to use music as a tool to connect.
If you’re anything like us, you agree. While we turn retail therapy and online browsing once in a while, many of us are not in the place to be shopping like crazy — nor do we want to. We do, however, want to listen to bomb playlists that reflect the vibes we get from the brands we love.
Amazon to the Rescue?
Another huge partnership within the fashion world was that of the Vogue, the CFDA and Amazon Fashion. So technically, Anna Wintour and Jeff Bezos joined forces to help the most vulnerable in the industry, inviting small brands and independent designers. Together, they launched an online storefront with more than 20 brands, including Alejandra Alonso Rojas; Derek Lam, Hunting Season (A Colombian brand!!), 3.1 Phillip Lim, Rebecca De Ravene, Tabitha Simmons and more. The idea emerged as a way to give small brands a new medium to sell their inventory after their own stores and retail partners closed due to the pandemic. By leveraging Amazon’s giant fulfillment capabilities and huge online customer base, the idea is that these designers will be able to recover some lost sales and survive until an eventual reopening.
Before, a partnership between fashion (an industry based on select pieces, small ranges and limited collections) and Amazon (the one-stop shop for anything and everything) seemed unlikely. According to the NYT, LVMH’s CFO Jean-Jacques Guionysaid in 2016that “the existing business of Amazon doesn’t fit our luxury, full stop, but also doesn’t fit with our brands…with the existing business model, there is no way we can do business with them for the time being.”
Dire times call for dire measures, though, and independent designers have said that this is truly the only option they have if they want to stay afloat. With the logistics of Amazon Fashion and the ready-to-go platform known by consumers, the partnership’s goal is to facilitate things for struggling brands. Check out more of Hunting Season on TLL.
The Landscape in Colombia: We’re One for Artisans!
In Colombia, the local fashion system is powered by literally thousands of artisan families. One of the pillars of Colombian fashion is craftsmanship, and that know-how that results in high-quality, sustainable and luxurious items is passed from generation to generation. With cancelled orders and disrupted supply chains, it’s these artisans and their small-business employers that are suffering the most. For these reasons, a group of local brands have come together to launch a campaign called “#SomosUno x Artesanos Colombianos” which translates to #WeAreOne x Colombian Artisans. The collective has launched different initiatives including online auctions where each brand offers one of their signature pieces (think: Verdi’s Beliza bag or a Maison Alma’s coat) and 100% of the proceeds go to 800+ artisan families. These partnerships have been all about lifting each other up and continuing to feed the local fashion system during the crisis. Brands that have joined the initiative include Maison Alma, Verdi, Hunting Season, MAZ Manuela Álvarez, Najash, Olga Piedrahita, Wonder for people, Tucurinca, Si Collective, Esteban Cortázar and more. You can donate here, where the Aid Live Foundation (a non-profit) is spearheading the campaign and aiding in the logistics of giving 820 artisan families kits and groceries with people’s donations and the brands’ collective contributions.
Clearly, the fashion industry has been hit by the current health crisis all over the world. Small brands are especially vulnerable to closures, but even luxury houses have felt the impact on sales, foot traffic, and consumer attitudes. However, it is interesting to see the industry come to a halt and see a slow-down that has given companies time to reconsider their ways of doing business. The pandemic has forced fashion brands to reevaluate and get creative in engaging their consumers and providing meaningful content.
Hopefully, this is something that will continue in the future, as consumers increasingly want to buy from brands that appeal to their human side and are not too obviously focused on the transactional nature of their relationship.
We’ll see what the future holds … for now, we’ll be listening to Marc Jacob’s Quarantine Mixtapes!
That’s all for this week’s Business Behind. Let us know what you think — we love hearing from you!
With love,
Isabel
