What Fashion Retail Professionals Need to Know Today

Discover the most relevant industry news and insights for fashion professionals working in retail, updated each month to enable you to excel in job interviews, promotion conversations or perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distills business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events — to deliver key takeaways and learnings tailored to your job function, listed alongside a selection of the most exciting live jobs advertised by BoF Careers partners.

Explore global job opportunities in retail on BoF Careers today, from a sales consultant at Paul Smith in London, a store manager at Acne Studios in Paris, to a retail sales manager at MyGemma in New York, or an inventory controller at Alexander McQueen in Singapore.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for retail professionals today:

1. The Stores Defining a New Era of Multi-Brand Retail

Several big luxury e-commerce sites have changed owners or been shut down over the last year. But their struggles have created an opening for a new wave of retailers looking to build a healthier, more sustainable model for luxury retail. “Right now, there is a space for good curation, good customer service, interesting activations, playfulness, humour, thinking outside the box … and the hardest thing to create, intimacy,” said Julie Gilhart, a business consultant and former long-time fashion director at Barneys.

This new landscape includes survivors like The Webster, Dover Street Market, Kirna Zabête and Elyse Walker. They’re joined by newcomers like ESSX and Café Forgot in New York, and the likes of Sportivo in Madrid, LN-CC in London, The Broken Arm in Paris and ENG in Shanghai. [A popular approach is to] convince hyper-digital consumers to browse IRL by providing an in-store experience that cannot be found on Instagram, TikTok or Ssense. That means taking risks on emerging, if not obscure fashion labels and catering to local tastes.

2. Is Gap’s Turnaround Finally Working?

Under CEO Richard Dickson, the former Mattel executive who was appointed to the top role almost one year ago, the Gap brand’s entire visual identity has seen a gradual overhaul. Its assortment was scaled back to emphasise core styles. A website redesign has made the e-commerce experience less cluttered. And most importantly, products are being presented to shoppers — both online and in store — with an appealing mix of trendiness and accessibility. Dickson has credited Zac Posen, who joined Gap Inc. as creative director in February, for that last bit.

Customers are starting to notice. In the quarter ending May 4, all four of the company’s brands, which also includes Banana Republic, Athleta and Old Navy, posted sales increases for the first time in years, while Gap Inc.’s stock has more than doubled since Dickson’s appointment in July 2023. A slew of fashion-forward collaborations and capsules have helped propel Gap into the cultural limelight recently, including a tie-up with the California brand Dôen in May. “You can tell they’re not trying to appeal to everyone anymore,” said retail consultant Gabriella Santaniello. “They’re comfortable.”

3. Why Retailers Must Help Rebuild Society

For retail, there is no longer a trusted, bi-partisan, democratic structure working for the common good. No more equitable system of capitalism raising the prospects of the average consumer. No more robust and widespread domestic investment or job creation and no more steady stream of bright, educated workers filling the ranks of our industry. Retail has become a job reserved for those who are either just passing through or have nowhere else to go.

But the era of corporations selfishly extracting value from our societal systems is over. Not because of some sort of new corporate consciousness but rather because these systems have nothing left to give. We’ve bankrupted them. Consequently, we have crossed over into a new era where competitive advantage will come, not through further extraction of value but rather, through contribution of value. An era that will be marked by a historic rethink, the green shoots of which we are just now beginning to see emerge in the landscape.

4. With a New Owner, Von Dutch Plots a Comeback

New owner White Space wants to turn Von Dutch’s latest spurt of online relevance into sustained sales. WSG Brands’ priorities are to build up its US business (currently, 90 percent of sales come from overseas), energise its marketing with fresh collaborations and global campaigns centred around its American heritage, and ink relationships with the right partners.

“[The brand has] the cultural relevance, global brand awareness and the ability to be licensable,” said Marc Benitez, WSG Brands’ chief operating officer. “When you couple those parameters with the movement of Y2K brands and what they represent to a younger generation, all the stars aligned.” But those efforts haven’t led brands like Ed Hardy and Juicy Couture to recapture their former relevance. Licensing comes with challenges: While it can be lucrative, it forces the owner to give up a degree of control over a brand’s appearance, production, quality and distribution.

5. Op-Ed | Let Temu Keep the Cheap Stuff. Amazon Should Go Luxe.

Over the past two weeks, Amazon has sought to make inroads in the selling of both bling and bargains. Only one move is wise. It has a better chance of competing with Tiffany & Co. than Temu. Amazon will help facilitate a deal by Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson’s Bay Co. to acquire rival Neiman Marcus Group for $2.65 billion. The tech giant will take a minority stake in the resulting company, Saks Global, giving it access to the luxury sector. The move comes just days after it emerged that Amazon plans to take on PDD Holdings Inc.’s Temu and Chinese fast-fashion rival SheIn Group Ltd. with a new storefront selling ultra-cheap goods.

Neither market will be easy to conquer. But even a behemoth like Amazon will struggle to beat Temu and Shein at their own game, and in the process, it risks devaluing what has become its core proposition: convenience. And while it’s also unlikely that Amazon can outperform LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, owner of Tiffany and Dior, there may be potential to make inroads with other high-end players, given recent turmoil in online luxury fashion.

6. Fashion’s Travel Retail Bet Pays Off

The post-pandemic travel boom is showing no sign of letting up. Fashion and beauty retailers have mostly benefitted from the tourism surge, though a rapid and seemingly permanent shift in how and where travellers spend their money has thrown some brands for a loop. Western tourists are spending more on experiences. Chinese tourists, meanwhile, show a growing preference to shop at home rather than while on holiday abroad, and a post-lockdown preference for Asian destinations over European ones has carried through to this summer.

Big duty free players, such as LVMH and Estée Lauder, have struggled to keep up with the shift in travellers’ spending patterns. For fashion and beauty brands not saddled with vast infrastructures catering to circa 2019 Chinese tourism, winning a share of holiday shoppers’ wallets is much simpler. An over-the-top resort pop-up is always popular; at the Mytheresa X Flamingo Estate outpost in the Hamptons, vacationers can purchase beauty products and jewellery, or even test-drive an all-electric Porsche. Others are opening duty-free boutiques in airports in long-haul layover hotspots.

7. Ahead of the Olympics, France Ramps Up War on Fakes

In the touristy Saint-Ouen flea market, not far from the Stade de France where athletes will compete in this summer’s Paris Olympics, police officers swarmed in at dawn on April 3 and shut down 11 stores selling counterfeit bags and shoes. They confiscated 63,000 items of clothing, shoes and leather goods, including fake Louis Vuitton and Nike products, and threw them into garbage compactor trucks on the spot. Ten people were arrested. Michel Lavaud, police security chief for the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb, described the operation as part of a pre-Olympics crackdown on knockoffs.

Fake fashion is big business. Counterfeit branded clothing alone is estimated to have cost companies in France €1.7 billion ($1.83 billion) in lost sales on average each year between 2018 and 2021, according to the European Union Intellectual Property Office. But the police crackdown on street merchants in Seine-Saint-Denis, where one in three lives in poverty according to French national statistics, has drawn criticism for pushing people already in economically precarious situations into further difficulty.

8. Why Revolve Is Buying Paris Couture House Alexandre Vauthier

Alexandre Vauthier has found a buyer. Revolve, the US e-tailer which also operates luxury site FWRD, will acquire the French haute couture house out of administration. The deal will allow the label to retain its 29 employees and return to the Paris couture calendar, the companies told BoF in an exclusive interview earlier this month. Revolve and Paris-based Vauthier may appear to be strange bedfellows: most of the e-commerce player’s 22 in-house labels (which account for 20 percent of sales) are more accessibly priced ventures.

Some are created in partnership with tastemakers and influencers like Aimee Song, who play a key role in driving traffic to the platform. For Revolve, adding a top-end designer concept to its roster represents the “next step in our brand building,” CEO Michael Mente said. The brand is in the midst of a marketing shift, and has increasingly been pulling back on the influencer-centric approach it’s so known for. “Influencer marketing is just one arrow in our quiver. … In a scary economy for emerging brands; we want to be proactive about finding great talent that needs support.”

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