Are fashion trends moving too fast for retail?




With the influence of mobile and social media pushing styles in and out of fashion at a breakneck pace, some retailers are admitting that they aren’t able to catch up.
“The fact is that we’re seeing mobile technology drive shifts in consumer behavior and spending patterns at a faster pace than our industry has been able to keep up with,” said Dick Johnson, CEO of Foot Locker on his company’s August 18 second-quarter conference call. “With constant access to new influences, trends, information and ideas, consumers’ attention spans are getting shorter, and we’re seeing that they’re moving from one style to the next faster than ever before.”
Foot Locker’s second-quarter results came in well short of Wall Street’s expectations as same-store sales fell 6 percent.
The sneaker retailer is working with suppliers to significantly shorten the product development cycle, including reducing ordering and manufacturing lead times and even storytelling and marketing timelines.
“This consumer has access to an awful lot of information about products,” he said. “So while we buy on a six-month future sort of window, trying to carve off some open-to-buy that have more flexibility for in-season opportunity is just really important.”
Hibbett Sports, which also recently delivered disappointing quarterly results, is facing similar issues.
“Things don’t last as long as they used to be,” said Jeff Rosenthal, CEO, on Hibbett’s second-quarter conference call. “The vendors have to get much quicker on bringing new products faster to the marketplace because people want new.”
To react faster to trends, Urban Outfitters’ team during the past quarter shifted from buying the majority of product prior to selling time to buying a smaller percentage upfront and chasing the majority on a fast-turnaround basis.
Trish Donnelly, global CEO, Urban Outfitters Group, said on her company’s quarterly conference call, “While the introduction and adoption of the new business methodology is never perfect and this new way of working is still a work in progress, our adoption of a process for making product-related decisions closer to delivery date is a very meaningful step and we believe it will set us up for future success.”
- Foot Locker, Inc. Reports 2017 Second Quarter Results – Foot Locker
- Foot Locker’s Q2 2017 Earnings Call Transcript – Seeking Alpha
- Hibbett Reports Second Quarter Fiscal 2018 Results – Hibbett Sports
- Hibbett Sports’ Q2 2017 Earnings Call Transcript – Seeking Alpha
- URBN Reports Q2 Results – Urban Outfitters
- Urban Outfitters’ Q2 2018 Earnings Call Transcript – Seeking Alpha
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Do you support the contention that digital’s influence is causing trends to move faster than ever? What remedies do categories with traditionally long lead times, such as footwear, have in responding quicker to trends?
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20 Comments on "Are fashion trends moving too fast for retail?"
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Founder, CEO & Author, HeadCount Corporation
Digital has helped create an immediacy in consumer demand the likes of which retailing has never seen. “Fast” fashion has become “hyper-warp-speed” fashion. Trends that used to last a season now last weeks. The impact of these expectations has put significant pressure on retailers’ ability to select, source and fulfill consumer demand. Traditional approaches to product buying and supply chain need to adapt. Buying later, buying smaller and moving quickly will become a necessity for retailers to successfully compete against more nimble online and offline retailers who are able to deliver.
President, Spieckerman Retail
The need for speed is one aspect but it’s an offshoot of the bigger dynamic: retailers are no longer dictating fashion and trends, they are responding to consumers’ shifting whims. Foot Locker has the right idea by carving out open-to-buy for more spontaneous opportunities but, at the end of the day, the fashion and footwear industry is still locked into a months-long, buy-ahead model that is out of step with reality. Amazon is a factor here as well (when are they not?) as they have redefined fulfillment and convenience. The next nail has landed in the form of Amazon’s proliferating private brand offering, ensuring that all kinds of “looks” will be a click away. Married with Prime Wardrobe … well, you get the picture.
Marketing, Dor
Yes! Retail is no longer the influencer in this process. (If anyone in retail is still able to influence, it’s the store associates who embody the lifestyle the customer aspires to, and can sell it well.) Shoe retailer M. Gemi has mastered the careful balance of slow, ethical fashion delivered conveniently — their tagline is “made in Italy the old way and sold online the new way” — with new limited editions dropped once a week. When they’re gone, they’re gone. Larger brands ought to take notes on the small batch approach to reduce waste and retain their customers’ attention.
Senior Retail Writer
I completely agree. Shoppers used to look to retailers as tastemakers. Now that is no longer the case. Shoppers know exactly what they want before they even start the purchasing journey. Instead of going to your trusted retailer to discover trends, the discovery process is happening online and on social media. Shoppers then look through as many retailers as it takes to find what they want. Small batch and limited edition products are definitely a way to keep shoppers’ attention amid this shifting dynamic. Cultivating celebrity, influencer and brand partnerships is another strategy that seems to be working well.
Principal, Retailing In Focus LLC
Social media may be a factor in fashion trends going viral and moving faster. But the influence of “fast fashion” retailers (Zara, Forever 21 and others) shouldn’t be understated. They mastered their supply chain in order to bring new goods to the selling floor a lot faster and in order to react to early test orders in a big way. Most traditional retailers built their logistics around long lead times, especially on private-brand goods, and are scrambling to catch up.
The idea of “speed to market” requires a change in mindset — affecting supply chain management, the willingness to chase big ideas and the ability of retailers’ vendors to move just as fast.
Chief Executive Officer, The TSi Company
Strategy Architect – Digital Place-based Media
Time as a value unit is redefining society in every way. This asset has worth and is increasingly the element on which investment is made. So as consumers place higher value on time, the retailers’ use of it will make engaging with them and their processes more costly in the eyes of consumers. Physical retail has to provide value and return on time, supply chains must be more responsive to demands and the digital experience can add value from discovery to purchase to produce use.
Founder, CEO, Black Monk Consulting
Managing Director, GlobalData
The speed of fashion is one aspect of a wider set of issues. Among these are: a constant consumer craving for newness, more variable weather patterns, a breakdown of traditional selling seasons, a more dynamic competitive environment, boredom with fashion and the rise of a global consumer able to buy clothes from anywhere in the world.
All of this means fashion retailers have to be nimbler, faster and much more flexible. How to achieve it? Shorter production runs, open buying, closer integration of manufacturing, increased regularity of stock turns, greater use of capsule collections and more flexible global supply chains are all possible answers.
Zara is the ultimate example of getting this right, although its size and scale mean what works for Inditex will not necessarily work for other retailers.
CEO, One Door
Accelerating the buy process is only a piece of the puzzle. Getting new products into stores and on to shelves is another. Retailers are slowly re-thinking their store supply chain processes, but their efforts lack urgency. It’s almost as if they’ve either given up or don’t understand the gravity of the situation.
EVP Thought Leadership, Marketing, WD Partners
Yes, the trends are moving too fast for the product development systems most retailers have spent decades setting up. Way too fast. This is a result of the long tail of e-commerce: search anywhere for anything and get it now. That premise just sped everything up, which is why specialty retail is in such dire straits (that and too many stores of course).
No one could’ve predicted the fact that you can see a trend on the street and go home and have it shipped from anywhere in the world to your doorstep in a day or two. But it certainly looks like that’s at the core of the seismic change in retail today.
Personally, i love it.
Independent Board Member, Investor and Startup Advisor
Ubiquitous bandwidth and remarkable advances in the smartphone have completely disrupted the calculus of consumer purchase behavior. In the main, the pace of change in brands’ and stores’ systems and processes has yet to catch up with those changes.
The future will include the top-down trend setting by brands and retailers as well as an increasing share of bottom-up social media-influenced trends. What is necessary here is to stop projecting the past into future processes. Fresh ideas, people, processes and supporting technology are necessary to execute on multiple, and at times competing, dimensions. Traditional thinking about trade-offs and optimization of what has been successful in the past is detrimental to identifying future growth, let alone achieving profitable operations.
President, The Ian Percy Corporation
Retail Influencer, Speaker and Consultant
Fashion is always ahead. It takes the “regular” consumer a bit of time to catch up to trends. Having said that, retailers have a precarious spot of trying to hit the trend and capitalize on volume without holding the consumer back from their fashion tendencies.
Retailers need to cut layers off their processes and find ways to shorten the inventory they have to stay flexible. The other thing retailers should be doing that caters to a shorter, more experiential journey is finding craft brands that have smaller batches and will be more nimble than a traditional six-month supply chain.
VP of Strategy, Aptos
I’m not sure that this is the whole story. Ironically, there is a press inquiry in my inbox as I write this, from a reporter looking for commentary on how Millennials are getting more considered in their buying, looking for less but higher quality.
“Fast” has to be balanced with “sustainable.” I don’t think it’s fickleness and flocking to the next big thing that is driving the pressure to be fast. It’s that if consumers see it, they expect they won’t have to wait six months before it makes it into distribution. If they see it, and want it, they’ll find it. And if you don’t have it, you lose. But there are environmental consequences to “fast,” and ethical ones, and Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly conscious of those.
So yeah, lead times need to be shorter. But don’t think of this as disposable fashion — good for a few wears and then off to the next. I think that will turn out to be a mistake.
President, Protonik
CEO and Disruptive Retail Specialist, Gustie Creative LLC
Yes, the influence of digital marketing and social media on shopper decision making is tremendous. When you can shop with your smartphone 24/7, having to wait a month or two or six to get a desired product in your hands is asking a lot. While H&M and Zara benefit from constantly improving a fast fashion supply chain strategy, the in-season equivalent for fashion designers, “see now, buy now” has not worked so well for Tom Ford, Thakoon, Burberry and others. Smart retailers are reassessing their production methods and supply chains to determine what works best for their products and customers. Running after trends is not the answer.
CEO, GenZinsider.com
Yes absolutely. Bottom line, brick-and-mortar stores are in competition with their own websites. The stores can’t possibly carry as many things in stock as their online version nor keep up with the ever-changing stock. So most times we don’t bother going to the stores at all knowing they probably won’t have what we want and we just make the guaranteed purchase from their online store.
Chief Marketing Officer, Verve
Foot Locker’s third quarter results are ahead of expectations even though all their major numbers have declined. Probably their reorganization actions have helped them to beat The Street’s expectations. Not only Foot Locker, all the sports shoe stocks are kicking the bears. Shoe Carnival and Hibbet stocks are also having a nice surge today.