Luxury fashion is now a global industry, driven primarily by a series of mega shopping festivals such as Chinese New Year, Single’s Day, Diwali and Ramadan that span the globe. But how can complex multi-brand luxury fashion retailers and brands best co-ordinate their omnichannel efforts across a worldwide stage?
The answer to the multi-market challenge is not simply to sell what they make, but to ensure luxury fashion brands’ production processes are ruly responsive to consumer trends, making and stocking the right products at the right time, in the right places and in the right quantities to satisfy real-time customer demand.
For example, the product mix demanded by Chinese consumers during their New Year celebrations are likely to be subtly different to those in demand among Middle Eastern shoppers during Ramadan and Eid. In fact, many luxury shoppers now expect festival-specific products bespoke to their region.
Brands from Gucci to Louis Vuitton, for example, produced pig-themed capsule collections to celebrate the 2019 Chinese lunar new year holiday. Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton created pig-shaped keyrings and bag charms made from exotic skins and treated leather, priced around $500. Meanwhile Gucci went the whole hog adorning bags, t-shirts, sweaters and seven socks with Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs.
In this complex and highly competitive era of
global fashion, inefficiencies can be hugely amplified once operations are
scaled up. Forecast-driven brands and retailers, who lack a real-time view of
demand can be left with prohibitive levels of surplus stock and all the risks
that entail for profit margins, brand equity and sustainability.
To achieve the necessary level of real-time seamless
integration to avoid a disconnect between supply and demand, retailers and
brands need comprehensive real-time data processing to achieve complete
visibility of inventory right across their retail, ecommerce, wholesale and
production operations.
This gives brands and retailers the ability
to benefit from effective omnichannel strategies, delivering advance management
capabilities right across the entire retail value chain — from factory to the
store.
Market-leading solutions not only integrate in-store systems such as point-of-sale, they can also provide specific solutions such as shopper tracking and store cycle management tools.
Remaining agile and responsive to customer demand is difficult enough across one geographic territory, but the new era of global eternal peak trading, driven by a continuous succession of regional mega-shopping events, greatly increases complexity.
Luxury footwear brand Church’s Shoes, which owns 52 stores globally in countries including UK, Italy, USA, China, Singapore and Hong Kong, is just one fashion brand that has managed to integrate sales data and production processes.
Church’s swapped its disparate legacy systems with a market-leading omnichannel solution that can leverage single stock pool capabilities.
Church’s also now benefits from a single view of customer on an international scale in real-time. This enables the brand to handle and process order enquiries more efficiently thanks to better knowledge of stock availability across channels and deliver personalised in-store customer experiences.
Read Dedagroup Stealth’s latest report ‘The Era of Eternal Peak Trading’ to discover more about the globalisation of luxury fashion.
Find out how Dedagroup Stealth’s solutions can give your fashion or luxury brand the omnichannel capabilities it needs to capitalise on the new era of global eternal peak trading.
