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NYT Syndicate
"The current way of showing a collection four months before it is available to customers is an antiquated idea, and one that no longer makes sense," Tom Ford said last February, before announcing that in September he would join Burberry as it moved to a"see now, buy now" model, with collections available immediately after appearing on the runway.
Tommy Hilfiger followed suit, as did Ralph Lauren. At one point, it seemed fashion might have a fully fledged revolution on its hands.
Fast-forward six months. Did the predictions come to pass? Did see-now, buy-now upend all expectations?
The brands, not surprisingly, say yes. But there is little concrete evidence to back up their claims. No global brand at the forefront of this movement has presented detailed numbers to support assertions of a spike in sales thanks to shoppable runways. And several still decline to comment on their strategy shift. So far this season, the movement appears to have no new recruits.
"I don't see anyone moving into this aggressively at this point," said Luca Solca, a luxury analyst at Exane BNP Paribas."So far, we are in experimental mode."
Still, many who led the charge are increasing their bets this season.
Last September, the Tommy Hilfiger brand built a Tommy Pier at South Street Seaport for the Tommy Now unveiling (a fair complete with a Ferris wheel, lobster rolls, a temporary tattoo parlour and 10,000 guests over a week).
The day after the show, these runway items will appear in 280 Tommy Hilfiger stores in over 70 countries.
"We're delivering on the desire for instant gratification and blending the worlds of fashion and pop culture together," the designer Tommy Hilfiger said.
Despite considerable restructuring costs, Avery Baker, chief brand officer of Tommy Hilfiger, said traffic to Tommy.com increased by 900 percent in the first 48 hours after the Tommy Now unveiling. Multiple styles sold out in 24 hours after the September show and sales grew by double digits across the women's category, with the highest gains in the United States, Japan and China.
And the brand's third-quarter sales for the period ending on October 30, rose by four percent, to $927 million, compared with the same period a year earlier, driven largely by international growth. However, its parent company, PVH, reported a considerable decline at the brand's North American stores in tourist locations.
"Obviously it has been a huge learning curve for all of us," Baker said."A switch to this kind of operational model requires extremely intense collaboration between teams that would typically work in a relatively siloed approach. It has been an incredibly exciting and intense period."
Last September, Burberry generated more than 15 million views for the brand across social media platforms, with particularly strong subsequent sales in the immediately available military-infused outerwear and Bridle bags (now its third-best-selling style worldwide). Although the company has released no official performance figures related to the move, Charlotte Cowley, head of investor relations, said the collection had been"extremely popular" and produced"great commercial results" on a trading update call with analysts last month.
E-tailers and department store buyers seem to agree.
Alison Loehnis, president of Net-a-Porter, said that while its see-now, buy-now offerings remained a relatively small percentage of the site's total inventory, they appeared to be popular, especially with younger customers (members of what the consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow called the"I want what I want when I want it" generation).
"This isn't just a marketing tool," Loehnis said."'See now, buy now' is also about consumers being able to 'wear now,' and addressing the seasonality issues that have become more of a practical issue for retailers and customers around the world."
Big shifts in company structure can require even bigger leaps of faith for those involved in the process, including investors.
Ralph Lauren was one of the first houses to embrace the see-now, buy-now strategy with its show last September in New York City. But Stefan Larsson, brought in as chief executive in 2015 to help the brand adapt to the modern era, stepped down last week citing differences with the designer Ralph Lauren over"product, shopping and marketing experience." (Larson was a champion of the see-now, buy-now model.) On the day of the announcement, shares in the company fell by 12 percent, to $76.61, the biggest one-day plunge in a year. Even before the plummet, the stock had fallen by 22 percent in the last 12 months.
Perhaps that is why for some, the middle ground appears to be the best position.
Massimo Ferretti, executive president of Aeffe, the Italian parent group of brands including Moschino and Alberta Ferretti, was an early adopter of the runway-capsule model with Jeremy Scott's debut collection for Moschino in 2014. Today, around 10 percent of the Moschino business is made up of see-now, buy-now sales, with 38,000 pieces in production and 10,000 cellphone covers created in the days before the show at Milan Fashion Week on February 23.
But, Ferretti said:"I would never consider moving the entire business over to this new and experimental strategy. Ultimately, quality ready-to-wear needs time for true creativity and quality to flourish. It is just not conceivable to create and scale collections three months in advance."
