Last Week's Fashion News Worth a Look | Vanity Daily
We've picked out the most important fashion news from last week.
We've picked out the most important fashion news from last week.
Big-company news
Kering reports first-quarter revenue up 27.1% year on year.
The luxury group Kering has published its first-quarter results for this year. Group revenue rose 27.1% year on year to €3.17 billion. Sales at Gucci, the group's biggest brand, jumped 48.7% to €1.87 billion — a fifth straight quarter of growth above 35%. Sales at Yves Saint Laurent rose 12% to €408 million. The company did not break out Balenciaga, but sales of the "other brands" that include it also surged, up 31% year on year.
LVMH sets up its first eyewear factory. LVMH has teamed up with the eyewear maker Marcolin to open Thélios, its first eyewear production site, in northern Italy. For now Thélios will make eyewear only for the group's Celine brand; Loewe and Fendi will follow later.
L'Occitane's annual sales reach €1.3 billion, and China still looks strong.
L'Occitane reported annual sales of €1.3 billion. Unfavorable exchange rates pushed sales down 0.3% from a year earlier, but at constant currency they rose 4.6%. By region, mainland China still looks strong: revenue there grew 20.5% in local currency and same-store sales grew 15.1%. The U.S. market turned positive, helped by the group's makeup brand LimeLight. In Latin America, sales in Brazil grew 11.3% in local currency. Over the past year L'Occitane opened 41 stores, most of them in Brazil, and refitted another 153.
The fashion and luxury e-commerce group Yoox Net-A-Porter reshuffles its board.
On April 20, at the annual shareholders' meeting of Yoox, the group that owns the fashion e-commerce site Net-A-Porter, the company disclosed its 2017 accounts: operating revenue of €173 million and net revenue of €2.1 billion. The meeting also reshuffled the board and named Federico Marchetti chairman of the group.
Swatch's CEO says the Swiss watch market looks good.
Last week Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, said publicly that the recent weakening of the Swiss franc has given Swiss watchmakers a good start to the year. According to last month's industry report, Swiss watch exports rose 4.8% year on year in March, and the whole Swiss watch market grew at double digits. Hayek added that he sees growth in every regional market, China included.
Converse's chief marketing officer jumps to Supreme.
According to Bloomberg, Julien Cahn, chief marketing officer of the Nike-owned brand Converse, has left for the streetwear label Supreme. Sources say his departure has nothing to do with the recent upheaval among Nike's senior executives.
Puma posts first-quarter results, with sales growing at double digits.
Puma has released its first earnings report of the year. For the quarter ended March 31, sales rose 12.5% year on year to €1.13 billion, gross margin widened by more than 110 basis points to 48.2%, and net profit jumped 35.8% to €67.4 million. The report credits a strong Asia-Pacific performance for much of the sales growth, with sales in China up 34.8%. Puma also gave an outlook for fiscal 2018, saying its direction will not change much. It expects currency-adjusted full-year sales to grow 10% to 12%, and operating profit to land between €310 million and €330 million.
Kering's shareholders vote to approve the Puma spin-off.
Puma's results are good, but Kering's shareholders have approved a plan to spin the sportswear brand off so the group can concentrate on luxury. Back in January, Kering had already cut its stake, handing 70% of its Puma shares to its own shareholders. Once the plan is done, Kering will be a pure luxury group.
Abercrombie & Fitch wants to be a $5 billion casual-wear brand.
At last week's investor presentation, Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz said the company had reached the right moment. After several years of work, A&F is heading toward becoming a $5 billion global casual brand. North America remains its main engine of growth, and China and Europe each have a shot at becoming a $1.5 billion business.
SMCP, the parent of Sandro, reports first-quarter sales up 11.9%.
Overseas markets carried the French group SMCP to a solid first quarter. Sales rose 12% year on year to €252 million. Strong demand in Asia, online sales, and more European tourists lifted Asia-Pacific sales to €51 million, up 42.8% year on year. The Americas also did well, with sales of €29.3 million, up 12.9%. All three of SMCP's brands — Sandro, Maje and Claudie Pierlot — improved. Sandro opened 45 new points of sale last year and grew sales 15.9% at constant currency; Maje opened 37 over the same period and grew sales 16% at constant currency, and plans to keep building out its digital business.
The Dior trademark case opens in Beijing.
On World Intellectual Property Day, the Supreme People's Court heard the administrative dispute between Dior and the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce over a rejected trademark review. The case decides whether the bottle for Dior's J'adore perfume can be registered and protected as a trademark in China. In its final ruling, the Supreme Court overturned the first- and second-instance judgments and the decision under challenge, and ordered the board to correct its improper classification of the trademark application and issue a fresh review decision on the application for territorial extension of protection.
New company news
Comme des Garçons launches a new brand, CDG.
Last week Comme des Garçons launched a new brand, CDG, at its store in Tokyo's Ginza district. It costs less than the main line and centers on casual clothes built around the brand's 40-year-old logo. It goes on sale on the brand's own e-commerce site this July.
Precious-metals and jewelry companies including Berkshire Hathaway and Richline Group, along with the refiner Asahi, the jewelry retailer Helzberg, the supplier LeachGarner and the third-party verification company UL, have joined IBM to start TrustChain, a project that uses blockchain to track every link in the jewelry supply chain. It is expected to reach consumers before the end of this year.
One viewpoint
A report finds that long checkout lines cost retailers $37.7 billion in a year.
For millennials, what is the worst part of shopping in a physical store? Waiting in a long line to pay. A survey by the payments platform Adyen found that over-long checkout lines cost retailers nearly $37.7 billion over the past year. That pushes shoppers away from physical stores and toward e-commerce sites like Amazon.
In research conducted with 451 Research this March, Adyen surveyed more than 1,000 American consumers to better understand their current and potential shopping experiences, their preferences and behavior, and the effect of shifting digital trends.
The results show that consumers want more than deep involvement in the shopping experience — they also want convenience. Over the past 12 months, 86% of American consumers said they had walked out of a store because the line was too long. That amounted to an estimated $37.7 billion in lost sales. When retailers do not accept a customer's preferred way of paying, they can lose another $1.1 billion in potential sales.
The results also picked out one key group of shoppers: "Spendsetters." According to a spokesperson, they make up about a third of all consumers and 52% of millennial ones. They are the technically fluent shoppers who adopted new digital services and features early.
"These consumers will lead the future of retail and become the group that decides how people spend and shop," an Adyen spokesperson said. "They show where the retail experience and the industry are going."
The survey found that 75% of respondents will shop at stores that offer simple ways to pay; 69% will wait only in short lines and prefer stores that can ship out-of-stock items straight to their homes; and 61% of "Spendsetters" want an experience tailored to how they have shopped in the past.
Fashion Revolution, a British nonprofit that works on sustainability in fashion, has published a report saying that high-end brands such as Chanel, Gucci, Dior and Versace disclose little about their supply chains, including on the environment and on working conditions. Adidas, Reebok, Puma and H&M scored between 51 and 60, the highest in the report.
Fashion Revolution was founded five years ago, after the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Bangladesh. Its argument is that brands must keep their supply chains open to view, so that unauthorized suppliers can be found, risks managed, and abuses of workers' rights and damage to the environment prevented.
Without that openness, the group says, there is no way to monitor conditions inside factories or to hold down problems such as unauthorized subcontracting. Today the great majority of fashion brands and retailers own no factories of their own. At any moment they may be working with hundreds or thousands of plants — the suppliers that cut, sew and assemble our clothes. As the report puts it, "This can sometimes serve as an excuse for brands to avoid responsibility for how their products are made."
The report's index shows that many luxury brands still disclose nothing about how they make their products. Some high-street brands, on the other hand, are ahead on transparency: they drew heavy criticism in the past, and pressure from the industry and from shoppers made them look again at their supply chains.
To score each brand, Fashion Revolution weighed the company's social and environmental policies and how it carries them out; how complete and accessible its supplier information is; how it responds to problems at supplier plants; and what it does about gender equality, overproduction and wages paid around the world.
The report covers more than 150 brands across luxury, accessories, sportswear and high-street fashion, all chosen because their annual revenue tops $500 million.
Cover image from: CDG
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.