"Only Fast Does Not Break" Failure, Fast Fashion Brand Began To Plan How Slow Down?

Nowadays, market demand and consumption concept are changing rapidly. Fierce market competition forces fast fashion brands to bid farewell to the "golden age".

Britain's fast fashion brand New Look, once threatened to open 500 stores in China and has entered the Chinese market, has now withdrawn from the Chinese market and closed all 130 stores in the Chinese market.

Similarly, Topshop, a fast fashion brand from the UK, has shut down Tmall shops and its agent channels in China due to the adjustment of international business strategy.

Looking at the world, the American fast fashion brand GAP withdrew from New York CBD in 2018.

Zara, Spain's fast fashion brand, closed its first store in New York.

Sweden's fast fashion giant H&M closes its Cheap Monday and reclaims its new brand Nyden.

The US brand Forever 21 completely withdrew from the French market.

This surge of "wave" can not help but sigh, once the scenery of the fast fashion brand, why is the collective cold?

Failure is fast but not broken.

He is also defeated.

The fast fashion industry has only been used for more than ten years from birth to growth. It is a product of the great changes in the apparel industry and consumer demand. Its uniqueness lies in "fast".

With the increasingly close design and consumption terminals, "fast fashion" has evolved into a fast response of fashion enterprises to fashion design.

The traditional clothing brand releases the trend from the T platform, designs the product, and through the channel to put the clothing on the market, usually takes several months, the high-grade brand even needs half a year.

But fast fashion brands can pform the concept of products into consumer goods in a very short time. One garment is from design drawings to consumers. H & M needs 2 weeks ~5 weeks, while ZARA only takes 15 days.

But everything has two sides.

Fast fashion brands attack the world in a global way, but their quality is "soft rib" to a certain extent.

Due to the shortening of the production time, the quality and details of the products are more prone to problems. Many incidents such as "suspected plagiarism" and "unqualified quality" have led to the abandoning of some rational consumers.

At the same time, the consumption pattern shows the characteristics of diversification, individuation and niche. Consumers are more and more concerned about the sense of quality and design.

Mature consumers are concerned about designer brand, light luxury or even luxury brand. After 90 and 00, consumers prefer personalized, fashionable and prominent brand design concepts, such as Supreme, Off-White and Champion, which are more popular with young people pursuing individuality and unique brand.

More importantly, the preferences of the new generation of consumers are capricious and have no strong brand loyalty, which also leads to fast fashion brands quickly rising and falling quickly.

Therefore, after the rapid expansion of the bonus period, fast fashion brands have encountered development bottlenecks.

Once the "horse racing enclosure", the old method of expanding the scale of expansion to expand the space has gradually failed, the light and luxurious brand, tide brand, sports fashion brand and other front and rear attacks, so that the market of fast fashion brand has been gradually divided and occupied.

Overweight new retail concept

In order to reverse the decline and restore the market, fast fashion brands will aim at the new retail concept.

As the "originator of fast fashion", Zara has selected the first new retail concept store in Shanghai in Times Square, which is also the third concept store of Zara. It has been shown in the form of flash store in Tokyo, Japan and London.

Unlike previous stores, the concept store with the theme of "WEAR FUTURE to the future" has two storehouses. Different sizes of LED screens are installed inside and outside the store. The store is full of high-tech interactive experience devices, creating immersive shopping experience and building new retail concepts.

C&A, a fashion retailer in Holland, has also chosen to launch a brand new C&A new concept store in Hongyang Plaza, Nanjing.

The store mainly focuses on black technology to highlight its personality.

The store can manage all screens and sound systems of the store through a unified cloud background. There is also a burying burglar system based on magnetic field, and embedded RFID chips in the anti-theft buckle to meet more business needs, such as collecting data that customers are more interested in, and providing data support for R & D products, and also facilitate inventory management of products.

In addition, through the application of Beacon technology + WeChat shake, it can detect the customer's moving line in the store, and get the user's OPEN ID. It can connect with the CRM and POS payment environment, and understand the customer portrait in the shop.

UNIQLO, which has always been famous for its quality, has also boldly tried and opened a global concept store in Shenzhen.

It has an area of about 2600 square meters and is the largest shop in Shenzhen now.

For the first time, the shop launched a fusion of offline and offline entities and virtual "digital experience houses".

Combined with Shenzhen's unique urban characteristics of technology and innovation, UNIQLO launched the 4 costumes scene experience of "classic quality Wardrobe", "healthy life gas station", "Chao Yi Wen Chuang Museum" and "24 hours living space".

Not only that, UNIQLO held a large-scale installation art exhibition in Paris fashion week in 2018, but Liu well, President of fast retailing group of UNIQLO's parent company, stressed repeatedly that it would draw a clear line with the fast fashion and would use "high quality basic" to meet the fashion trend.

It has to be said that in order to get rid of the old image more quickly, fast fashion enterprises are not trying to pform their mentality, but to digitalization and technology as the main force in the future.

This mode of "product plus technology" double drive will help enterprises rebuild brand image in the course of consumption change.

Cross boundary layout and market competition

In addition to efforts to pform the brand image and slow growth in the main business, fast fashion brand is also trying to add new product lines to try to maintain its competitiveness in young consumer groups.

In 2018, two new MUJI HOTEL; GAP set up a three month POP KIT cosmetics store in Shanghai; Zara released the first lipstick series Zara Ultimate, officially entered the make-up market; H&M joint Moschino test water pet clothing.

This year, C & A will also enter the wedding market, targeting the mid end market.

Not only is C&A, but many fast fashion brands are also targeting the wedding market.

Hsu Chi chose H&M's environmental conscious action limited series dress when she took the wedding photo. The fast fashion brand ASOS launched the wedding dress series in 2016, and TOPSHOP, the fast fashion brand of Britain, launched its wedding series in 2017, including wedding dresses, bridesmaids, underwear, headwear, wedding shoes and so on.

According to the Global Industry Analysts forecast, the global wedding market will reach US $80 billion in 2020 (about 551 billion 900 million yuan). From the data, the wedding market is undoubtedly a big cake worth trying.

But some analysts say that fast fashion brands are not yet able to boost their performance by increasing their wedding dress series.

For fast fashion brands, the addition of new business segments across borders will undoubtedly spread risks and help brands seek and cultivate new growth points as far as possible.

But in order to really get a foothold in the market and share a slice of the cake, in addition to relying on its own channel advantages, we need to carefully consider how to enrich the product line, enhance the quality and create the brand image. It is the most urgent task for the fast fashion brand to recognize the new market changes and adjust the direction in time.

In fact, whether the fast fashion brand or the popular clothing brand, after the brand effect and the market scale have reached a certain degree, they need more deep tillage and meticulous work. Therefore, "slow down" is the inevitable result, which is also a reflection of the change of the market driven by consumption upgrading.

When the market tends to be rational, smart consumers will be more concerned about the products themselves. The diversity of online and offline channels will also stimulate consumers to have higher requirements for consumption experience.

In the face of these changes, it is an important issue for fast fashion brands to find their own positioning, find their own development path and attract young consumers continuously.