The world’s biggest sneaker brands are rethinking the way they make their products. As technology such as 3D printing advances, China gets more expensive, and brands look for ever-faster ways to bring customers what they want, the old rules of manufacturing are being upended.
Customization has taken off in footwear. With technology making the process increasingly simple, it’s a great selling point: Adidas now offers shoppers the option to customize the fit of their shoes through 3D printing, and Farfetch allows customers to design their own luxury sneakers online.
It’s hard to think of a greater vote of confidence in an athlete: Nike, the world’s largest sportswear brand, has signed LeBron James to a lifetime deal.
This post has been updated.
Jeans are the prototypical American garment—the uniform of cowboys and college students alike. Yet for years now the best denim has come from Japan; even classic US brands like Levi’s, J.Crew, and RRL, Ralph Lauren’s tribute label to the American West, buy from Japanese mills for their premium products. In fact, over the past 50 years, what started as a niche obsession with American style among Japanese men has turned into a successful industry: creating Americana, and selling it back to the US.
J.Crew reported its third-quarter results yesterday (Dec. 3), and the news just keeps getting worse. Revenue for the company overall declined 6% to $619.4 million, while sales at J.Crew specifically—its flagship brand—dropped 9%. Perhaps more telling, however, was the plunge in goodwill value that J.Crew reported.
Fashion designers love Star Wars, too. Sometimes references to the iconic sci-fi movie are literal, as in the printed gowns that closed out Rodarte’s fall-winter 2014 show. Sometimes they may not even be intentional, as was likely the case with Kanye West’s most recent collection.
If there’s a brand in its portfolio that Gap Inc. should feel cheerful about this holiday season, it’s Old Navy. Even while Gap and Banana Republic have flagged, the low-cost label has seen continued growth, a feat impressive enough that Ralph Lauren poached its global president to replace Lauren himself as CEO.
Racial and ethnic diversity—or lack thereof—has been a regular topic of conversation in the fashion industry for years now. But for all the talk, progress has been painfully slow on fashion’s most public fronts: runways and the covers of fashion’s biggest magazines.
Not long ago, Lululemon seemed unstoppable. As shoppers’ appetites for activewear grew, the brand was one of the few offering stylish, upmarket workout clothes that people loved to wear outside the gym, too. By 2010, its sales were growing more than 50% each quarter.
Fashion is cyclical, holiday sales are annual, and this year in the US, the two are aligning.
The end of the year is a time when retailers rake in revenue by clearing out inventory amid a holiday-induced frenzy of consumer spending. It’s tricky though: if they have too little inventory, they can miss out on profits; if they have too much, they can get stuck with unsold overstock. Year-end discounts help clear out the excess, and this year, there’s a lot of excess.
You might think the days of sex-related antics at American Apparel were over with Dov Charney, its scandalous founder, now out of the company. But you’d be wrong.
The clothing by New York-based label Behno looks perfectly at home on the racks of the upmarket stores that carry it. It’s luxurious, polished, and cool, earning it space in Selfridge’s in London and Bombay Electric in Mumbai. But what you’d never know by looking at it is that Behno’s womenswear is mostly made at a factory that doubles as a social experiment, designed to improve the lives of its workers as much as to produce beautiful clothes.
It’s been a tough stretch for a lot of US retailers, as sales slow overall and big department stores including Macy’s and Nordstrom see ongoing declines.
Americans are willing to kill each other for shoes. And while each fatal incident may seem like a freak occurrence, sneaker-motivated deaths can mount over time.
Theoretically, all you need to create a functional fitting room are some walls, and if you’re feeling generous, maybe decent lighting and a mirror.
Fast-fashion retailer Zara has found itself in the midst of controversy after a security guard denied a woman in a hijab entry into one of its French stores.
The awkward “silly shirts” photo of world leaders in the traditional clothing of their host nation has become a ritual at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Highlights over the years have included the boxy ponchos of Chile in 2004, the silky ao dai tunics in Vietnam in 2006, and last year’s rather amazing “Star Trek” conference in Beijing.
This post has been updated.
You can buy pretty much everything you need online. Brick-and-mortar stores still exist everywhere in the US, but each passing day makes them less essential, and even the people running them can’t deny it.
As if to confirm suspicions that the audience for video games and that for pornography overlap quite a bit, a popular adult video site is blaming the release of a new game for a dip in its traffic.
The last few days have been miserable for some of the largest department stores in the US. On Nov. 11, Macy’s reported quarterly revenue that didn’t meet expectations, and its stock took a nosedive. Nordstrom followed the day after, reporting a dismal 42% drop in profits, and suffered a similar battering in the market. JC Penney, which is trying for a turnaround after years of struggling, actually did better than expected, but still not great—and shares tumbled.
There are two levers a brand can pull to boost profit: Increase revenue, or decrease expenses. For Burberry, increasing revenue hasn’t been going well, so for the past few months, it’s been leaning more heavily on option two.
