Fashion houses, like Burberry, are adapting to the times. Before, they used to put on fashion shows for industry insiders. Now, they are just as much for the final consumer as they are for those fashion industry insiders. Before, it used to take six months for the news to trickle down to the general public and make its way into stores. Now, it’s all streamed online with up-to-the-minute updates on social media. Fashion companies are realizing that they can no longer ask consumers to wait for fashion show items to make it to stores. In this world of instant gratification and shortened attention spans, nobody waits. If companies make customers wait, they will forget about the “latest trend” by the time that it hits the store. For this reason, Burberry and others are changed the way they do fashion shows.
Burberry pioneered the click-and-buy fashion show a little over a year ago, in September 2016. In the hopes of combating slipping sales growth, Burberry is very cleverly providing the product as soon as it raises interest for it. Besides raising revenues, this new initiative has the possibility of providing customer feedback to the company based on which items sold well. Whereas before the fashion houses would be coming out with their next line while the previous one was hitting the stores, now companies will get those statistics as soon as possible. Tommy Hilfiger is capitalizing on this possibility directly from the fashion show. It threw a party for all the guests and featured touch screen catalogs where guests could shop the runway fashion at the runway. Moreover, because the products will be available immediately, the fashion house is attempting to cut competition by rip off companies. Because it took fashion houses six months to bring the merchandise to stores, those companies were able to capitalize on the ideas of these well-known fashion houses and bring the products to market earlier, thereby eating up some of the fashion house’s revenue.
Burberry’s industry shake-up creates other losers as well. Fashion magazines will no longer be able to leverage their exclusive industry knowledge to show readers what they have to look forward to. Those readers can just make their way to the store to see for themselves. Additionally, some small fashion houses needed those extra months to mass produce the prototypes that walked the runway stage. If those small fashion houses don’t adapt, the fashion industry may become dominated by a handful of brands.
In either case, did you know of this fashion industry initiative? If you did, do you spend more than you did before on fashion show items? Did you learn of it because you’re an avid fashion show viewer or did you see the news on social media?