Gone are the days of “prestige” and “social status” as indicators of desirability in luxury brands—millennials want authenticity, singularity, and social value from the brands we choose to champion. Everlane, along with brands like Warby Parker, Indochino and even the newly launched ‘How About We’ (a dating site that provides members with a complimentary concierge service) are doing something compelling in the prestige space. They offer all the consideration and it-factor of a luxury experience, but with a sense of innovation and transparency a lot of the ‘traditional luxury’ brands find hard to achieve.
3 Major Hurdles Brands Face Launching Ecommerce in China
Despite the lack of a functional shipment and payment infrastructure, Chinese companies have invested heavily in e-commerce in the past decade and have created an online demand worth hundreds of billions of dollars. However, while the path has been forged and consumers have been educated to purchase goods online, western brands who want a piece of this tremendous market will discover that the lay of the land is unlike what they’ve experienced in the US or Europe.
The True Opportunity for Brands on Curation Based Platforms
Here is an example of an obvious opening sentence to an article covering digital media and fashion: the web is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace. While seemingly simple, sometimes clichés are just the bare truth.
Bringing Technology In-Store
To say today’s consumer is connected is a vast understatement. Technology enables people to be instantly and constantly connected to experiences, information, other people, to brand stories, and to products. What’s more, their expectations of how businesses and brands can, and should, leverage technology are dramatically rising. Clearly, this is impacting the retail environment and we have already seen multiple brands respond by incorporating digital to the store experience in various ways (some successfully, others less so).
The NEW Customer Service Means Offering Convenience
In a recent interview by Luxury Society on trends for 2013, I mentioned customer service as a critical trend for the coming year, adding that “No one in luxury really likes to discuss customer service because the assumption is always that, as a luxury brand, there is an innate high degree of service.”
The Perfectionist’s Digital Dilemma: Quality vs. Urgency
I was fortunate enough to attend the FashionForward Conference back in October, and while there were a host of topics and discussions that I found “tweet-worthy,” I keep coming back to a statement made in the Curation-Based Communities presentation. It was something to the effect of, “Don’t get too bogged down worrying if an image or post conforms exactly to your brand standards, and it doesn’t have to be approved by your Creative Director. If it’s interesting – just go with it!” Now picture a collective intake of breath by all the brand manager and agency people in the room. It’s kind of heresy, isn’t it? We spend a good deal of our time ensuring that images, fonts, language and collateral conform to a set of rules, so that every time someone interacts with our company/product, it feels “on-brand.” I personally have devoted an inordinate amount of time convincing clients that we CAN’T change the color/position of the logo or use different fonts or do anything that isn’t perfectly sized, spaced and described. My mantra has been: if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all!
