If an item for sale could be counterfeited and sold to me at full price (or 5% of the real item's price), and I would never know the difference, I probably have no business buying the brand value of it.
If something's value can fluctuate so wildly, and even end up in a trash bin because it can't sell, I'm probably not going to believe that it's something worth me buying.
Maybe I never get to enjoy those luxury watches or backpacks that everyone's wearing (whose point only seems to be the white name patch in the corner), but equally, I never get pulled into buying something that I regret and wonder if it was worth it (or genuine) later.
You buy it for others, not for yourself. As long as you're playing status games at certain circles, these things are useful to signal your wealth to people who care
In a previous life I was in the men’s middle tier luxury business. We would go to clothing shows (Javits) in Manhattan. Multiple shoe companies would present a shoe to us that had a “Gucci sole, leather, just no buckle” or a sweater “milled in the same factory that YSL uses” all at a fraction of the price.
Luxury typically today just means logo. Very rarely is a garment worth the 10x markup just because it has a LV or Gucci stamp.
I do think bespoke suits and certain fabrics are worth their ostentatious price points but to your average consumer they just want the brand.
To some extent it’s the same in all industries particularly the computer industry.
This is why I hate buying clothing/accessories that have a logo on it. Not because I don't want to have a logo showing, but because I feel like I'm paying so I can have that logo.
The nice thing about men's fashion is that there seem to be more staples that are timeless than there are in women's fashion. There are wide swings in women's fashion, but if I buy right, I can get away wearing something for years and it isn't dated.
Well the most timeless staple is really a principle: fit. When you buy clothing that fits you will (almost) always look better than the average bear.
Good staples to look for / own:
-denim trousers
-white and blue dress, oxford, and tee shirts
-deep navy blazer (no gold buttons)
-mid or dark charcoal grey suit with some depth to it
-dark brown cap-toe shoes (with a belt in the same color family)
-navy, black, or grey wool sweater
The article mentions discount "designer" outlets in the UK. These exist in the USA too, but seem to be (deliberately?) hard to find. E.g. a Google search for "Prada outlet" won't produce useful results. I've been to the one in Palm Springs where family found some quite significantly discounted product at Prada, Burberry, Gucci:
Outlet stores really have limited inventory and that is shown if you've ever compared a Gucci/Prada outlet store to a retail store.
Outside of generic items, you will rarely find any gems and also: the more expensive the brand, the more behind the season the outlet store is. They are really not the same as retail stores.
The outlet discount for those brands also rarely exceeds 50%. For some items, it doesn't even exceed 20-30%.
A lot of outlet stores have garments produced specifically for them. They never appear in the retail stores. The garments are produced with lower quality materials and lower quality controls and standards in order to keep the selling price point lower.
Edit: The garment producers are basically just paying for licensing of the brand name and slapping a label on them.
I wonder how much of this is true and how much of it is face-saving ops for any given party. It must be difficult to know for sure unless you're part of the supply chain.
There was a documentary on a German public network where they investigated this and lab tested the garments and the quality of materials from the exact same brand from the flagship stores in the city vs the outlet products. Not all of the brands did this, but a lot of them used outlets to get rid of poor quality stuff, experimental product lines and a lot of low quality garments. In some cases, for Levi for example, they had a lot of styles that you could not even find in the normal retail stores.
This horrible trait of capitalism does not only apply to high end expensive luxury items, unfortunately.
I frequent a thrift store chain called Value Village (aka Savers in USA) quite a bit. So much so that I regularly talk to a lot of the employees in the few that I visit more often. And I love looking at the hoards of books they have on hand at all times.
One day an employee was shuffling books around, taking the older books that hadn't sold in a few months off the shelf.
I asked her what was done with those books, and she admit that they end up in the trash.
Those books didn't cost them a penny. They were all donated for free.
Instead of giving them away or lowering the price below their $2/book minimum they choose to dispose of them at the dump.
That makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, and zero sense from a human standpoint.
There are hoards of extremely impoverished families where I live. The schools are rotting from the inside out.
I imagine either of those groups would gladly take a few free books for their children to read.
Other more human thrift stores in the area offer books for as little as 25 cents each, and they go in the "free" bin if they haven't sold at that price after a few months but at that price they go quickly no matter the book or condition so it's a moot point.
Can’t these brands improve the efficiency of their manufacturing chain so they can scale production with demand and not hold so much inventory? How about using machine learning to more accurately predict how much inventory is necessary?
The inventory is usually in retail locations when sold. I can't remember seeing anything in a luxury brand showroom (typically very limited catalogue also) that wasn't in stock. Buyers in this segment don't want to order and wait for it. This makes it difficult to do just-in-time production. Some is artisan produced (luxury watches being one).
Machine learning has yet crack the code on what brand new high fashion style will sell best a season in advance when it is typically manufactured.
If it was a consistent, minimally customized product, not driven by trends.. probably.
But fashion is ridiculously fickle. Not only is it seasonal and geographical but it can be weather-based, totally reactive to the news and trends that turn on a dime, and influenced by what that movie star wore at that huge party last night.
(I've advised on a couple startups that have tried to accomplish this. The large trends are relatively straightforward and predictable, it's the frothiness/immediacy within that that becomes a mess and wholly unpredictable.)
Machine learning works much better on bigger data (cheaper brands), and Zara uses it for example to copy and test efficiently. That's also why luxury brands hate it so much.
I remember when we went to our honeymoon in Mauritius there were some outlet places they would drive people around to, I figured that was a pretty good idea (although not sure how much of a discount things really were) if the idea is to keep things exclusive then sell your discounted things were it will be too expensive for people to reach.
Guys. Using a cliched phrase like "top dollar" indicates irony. Repeating it, and especially repeating it in all caps does more than indicate irony, it is screaming irony right next to your ear.
Brands at that level only make clothes for the sake of advertising. You need to have the show, which is mostly couture anyways. Accessories, make up and fragrance are what gets them paid. Could only read the first few paragraphs before the paywall, sorry if that was redundant
Maybe but in my experience the more "luxurious" an item is, the crappier it gets. I do think we should hand out milsurp to the houseless because the military (except the army) gets some of the sturdiest garments and equipment I've ever seen. Boots that last a lifetime that kind of stuff. Honestly I wouldnt mind if the military gave us all uniforms (except the army). It's high quality stuff, except for what they make the army use.
There’s a fake luxury level for which this is true. These are brands like Coach, Vera Bradley, Kate Spade and Tiffany & Co, which are billed as luxury but are primarily bought by lower middle class who want people to believe they have money. These people have been duped and the quality is garbage.
There are some luxury brands making high quality products, but most of them are smaller names that you don’t really hear on a daily basis.
I knew it! I'll head down to the strip mall and let everyone know! Maybe we can still all pool our money together and get a nice jacket to share or something.
My favorite jacket is a reproduction of the classic British windproof smock in sturdy polycotton, but black rather than camo. It's practical with plenty of roomy pockets, cut so there's room to move, windproof and quite water repellent with a coat of wax. And because it's simple polycotton, it's easy to repair if it tears or a stitch rips. It's unlined so I can use it almost all year, and roomy enough that I can fit warmer layers underneath.
Along with it, I bought a surplus Czech winter jacket. Olive drab canvas, furry lining, built like a tank. I have no doubt it will last for decades, and it was €30.
The value for money you get with military surplus or good reproductions is astounding. You won't have the fashion brand logos, but you'll have clothing that lasts for decades.
(I bought it from Varusteleka in Finland. They're a bit quirky, but the selection is outstanding and they ship worldwide)
Not quality goods, you are buying a label. Its value is all perception, and part of that perception is exclusivity.
Should we be concerned with what proportion of the price is spent on advertising, on fancy materials, on renting a store on 5th avenue, and on keeping that store attractively full of the latest garments? These are all part of creating this perception, and in a sense they are all wasteful. But companies which get the balance wrong disappear.
(Perfectly functional clothing costs next to nothing now, compared to say 50 years ago. Thanks to the invisible hand. But if what you want is more clothes that everyone knows are more expensive than your neighbor's, then it can't help you.)
The increase in quality compared to price has nothing to do with the mythical invisible hand, but rather improvements in materials and production methods.
They'd like to sell the items that don't sell cheaply, because it means more profit, but this would lower the perception of their brand, so they'd end up losing money on the upscale items. Costing them in the total calculation.
So they throw away everything, inefficiently, for free.
That's what I was explaining. It's more profitable to keep up the illusion of value than actually creating value. This is normally seen as a market inefficiency, too, in economics lingo
But how do you tell what is "actually creating value"? For instance, do movie producers do this, when they construct whole buildings and then knock them down a week later?
They're just too greedy, and produce way too much in hopes of selling it because they must increase growth. Pretty simple, really.
Luxury brands have shot themselves in the foot. Because of this greed, people are now used to 70% (or more) off at sales. Heck, even Mr Porter is doing 80% now. When you know that in a couple of months there's another sale, why would you buy an item for full price? Then, of course, people forget and don't buy the item at all, or maybe their size is now unavailable, trends shift, etc.
It's going to backlash in other ways, too: since you can now get luxury goods for far cheaper, it's not as much a status symbol, so there's even less reason for buying it.
This is also why people go nuts for limited releases, but these luxury houses prioritize growth more than a sustainable business. That risk won't pay off.
Luxury goods like Gucci and Louis Vuitton do not go on sale for more than 50% ever. Some goods never go on sale, and some goods take years to go on sale. Even then, it's $2,000 -> $1,000. With that, if you couldn't afford the $2,000, you can't afford the $1,000.
As well, the items that do go on sale are generally not the most sought after items and are mostly the generic items since they have inventory left over.
The brands you are seeing that have 70% off sales are not on the same price class as a brand like Gucci.
There are generally 5 tiers of pricing for clothing brands (by T-Shirt pricing to keep it simple):
$10+, $50+, $100+, $400+, $800+ (Gucci)
... (and of course there are higher and in betweens, but if you look at clothing brands prices the tiers stand out clearly)
If an item for sale could be counterfeited and sold to me at full price (or 5% of the real item's price), and I would never know the difference, I probably have no business buying the brand value of it.
If something's value can fluctuate so wildly, and even end up in a trash bin because it can't sell, I'm probably not going to believe that it's something worth me buying.
Maybe I never get to enjoy those luxury watches or backpacks that everyone's wearing (whose point only seems to be the white name patch in the corner), but equally, I never get pulled into buying something that I regret and wonder if it was worth it (or genuine) later.