Luxury Resale Weekly Round-Up
Keeping you updated on Luxury Resale & Circularity with a weekly article best-of from November 2nd to November 8th.
The resale week in articles
1. The future of resale 🔮
As you probably now by now…Resale is booming. But it is also at its infancy, and definitely a baby when it comes to Luxury.
This means a very vast map of opportunities for everybody, but also always shifting dynamics.
The resale consumer is also different. No longer somebody craving for getting it cheaper, and more like a strategic shopper that knows how to navigate the industry.
Depop, StockX, Vestiaire, The RealReal, became true platforms and gave a voice to a new group of operators — savvy buyers and sellers. But if we look at the roots, eBay was the father of the scene but it is today the ugly duckling of the resale family.
Business of Fashion take us through a thrilling journey on what the landscape looks like in a (paid but) must read article. (https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/resale-the-realreal-poshmark-stockx)
2. Fashion & Covid, the landscape 🦠
We couldn’t get another week by without an article on Covid’s impact to the industry.
Mckinsey predicted bad news. Bad news for Fashion, an expected contraction of 30% YoY. Bad news for Luxury, an expected contraction of 39%. The supply chain is already getting hurt by the contraction. As we are already seeing unemployment and piles of unsold inventory.
But if you take a pulse on the industry, we breath positivity. The pandemic is an opportunity for the industry to reset and rebuild. To approach the market sustainably and to put quality and curation on the top of the value pyramid.
“The rules were set in the industry a century ago, and we’re still following them,” Gurung says. “This pandemic has allowed us to reimagine everything.”
Fast Company brings us a look at how the industry landscape is shifting, through the opinion of 4 industry heavyweight. (https://www.fastcompany.com/90553879/4-fashion-insiders-reveal-how-the-industry-is-being-altered-by-covid-19)
3. Resale to survive the pandemic? 🤑
Luxury Brands remain unshaken during the pandemic. But in the end, remaining unshakable, for a business means your product or service got sold regardless of the environment.
What about “dead stock”? There was less traveling and hard movement restrictions globally. Visits to stores decreased, and the shift to online wasn’t grand enough to ensure items would sell.
This means there is, and will be, a lot of items sitting on warehouses waiting for new means of distribution. Luxury has good margins, and the value of the items do not decrease like other categories — it sometimes even increases.
Items won’t sell direct — few Brands sell vintage or out of collection directly- or first-hand retailers. Enter resale! But with a twist, Brands want control over distribution, and can be immune to waste laws.
How will the Elite brands keep in the green? (https://theconversation.com/luxury-goods-why-elite-brands-are-weathering-the-pandemic-better-than-high-street-retailers-144392)
4. Fashion has a waste problem… 🤷♂️
No news here… But with the growing awareness towards a more sustainable supply chain, will we see deeper changes?
We hear a lot about circularity. Truth is, fashion is really not that circular. And what’s missing is recycling. Recycling will need to be on the agenda for 2021, as it is the only way for fashion to pay its dues.
Only 10% of clothing materials are recycled today, and this is of course a problem. The future is resell, recycle, repair. We saw some brands making moves H&M, Patagonia, Guess… Still, not enough. And not enough moves on the Luxury space, where we know the consumer is getting more and more conscious.
Sustainable Brands brings us up to speed, with a great analysis on what’s happening on the space. (https://sustainablebrands.com/read/product-service-design-innovation/designing-for-circularity-turns-fashion-waste-into-a-viable-resource)
5. Zalando is on 🔋
Zalando revealed good intentions on the path to a more sustainable strategy. Last October. Branded as ‘do.More’, the retailer set eyes on ambitious sustainable initiatives, and has been delivering.
Truth is, they’re delivering. Zalando raised their assortment on the sustainable category, from 17.000 to 60.000 items available.
And this week Zalando announced they would be partnering with Copenhagen Fashion Week. Joint initiatives will follow, but we really see that Zalando is putting their money where their mouth is. And this is good, for a change.
Fashion players want platforms to support sustainable initiatives, and vice-versa. And if Zalando was synonym with Fast-Fashion, maybe it won’t a couple of years down the line.
Fashion United brought us moreabout this partnership, and some words from Zalando’s CEO. (https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/copenhagen-fashion-week-and-zalando-announce-sustainable-partnership/2020110651806)
Thought of the week
The future is now. For the past few months we read a lot about the impacts and the shifts the industry will make. From redeeming, to rethinking, to rebuilding. Voices from the Olympus of fashion, from Abloh to Tom Ford, preached about the changes.
Good things is, the changes are in progress. October was a month of getting things in motion. Moved by Q4 results, 2021 planning, or what the industry will look like in 10 years, changes started to take place.
The value system changed, and the industry was awake enough to follow it. We will see a converging trend of initiatives speaking to a more conscious consumer.
“It will be a slower-fashion approach, which is a good thing because it lends itself to a more sustainable industry, which is something we’ve been talking about for a long time.” — Steven Kolb
This is it for this week! Stay tuned for the week ahead 😎
GG
