Dualité

Are store websites a little too boring to browse to your liking? Do you miss that editorial fashion fantasy that magazines thrive upon and yet website miss upon? Fear no more, there seems to be a new trend emerging on fashion websites.

I’ve been store surfing online looking at the latest holiday collections and came upon Barneys‘ site. Although I seldomly have browsed there, I did noticed that they’ve added a new shoppable editorial magazine. Most websites will have commercial photo shoots of a model wearing the item on sale, however the relationship between viewer and photo is sort of cold and generic in my opinion. Fashion editorials, on the other hand, are highly stylized with different accessories and contain more elaborate backgrounds. They weave a fantasy of eye candy that makes potential shoppers go “oooh…now that’s pretty, and I want it.”

This format of catalogue shopping through editorials is relatively new from what I’ve seen of store websites. Barneys has picked up on the idea and launched their version of it called “Designer Mailer“. This holiday season, Canadian model Coco Rocha is splashed across the catalogue on every page. Whether in Flash or HTML  version, users can mouseover certain items that can be directly purchased online. The slightly disadvantaging point is that most of the items sold are accessories like shoes, bracelets, necklaces and bags. Some of the big ticket items like an L’Wren Scott dress are not available online, and can only be found in certain stores. A shame because for me in an editorial, I’d want to have the chance to purchase everything that I see. Call it online boutique hotel-style shopping.

I’m not sure if many shoppers are like me, but my desire to purchase depends greatly on how great the mannequins or models are dressed. I like being in a store where there are styled mannequins. It’s enough to send me finding the exact thing I see. Montreal, alongside Tokyo, in general has very attractive mannequin displays, especially at Simons. I can be sold on a look in seconds, it really doesn’t take much.

Online beauty stores can also apply this method of shopping by allowing users to mouse over a model’s face and imagine buying the very products that they’re looking at. They usually give credits in magazines as to what exactly a model is wearing, but you’d have to dig through the end of the magazine for that. An online beauty store could ideally benefit from this ease of purchase.

Certainly this is an interesting approach from Barneys, but they would need to work on refining the editorial shop just to make it a little more user-friendly. One advantage over Net-a-porter is having real physical stores in several locations (unfortunately only across America). I think The Gap & co. could use this kind of online business model as they have several brands and they could need the boost. I expect to see similar editorial shops to pop up in the near future.

Image credit: Barneys’ website

So the DJab special event at Simons was Saturday. I passed by to have a look at what was on display. They’ve actually cleared a small patch of retail space in the men’s section to make way for a color changing DJ booth, flanked by two sets of painted canvases.

On one side you had a couple of the artists painting a replica of their printed t-shirt version, on the other there were outlined illustrations in black and white. The curious (including myself) were invited to actually color in the illustrations with paint markers of flashy purple, pink and blue colors. I participated in coloring one of the flowers on the panda filled canvas (subliminal message that Dahlia is a flower). It was fun, silly and interactive.

I bought the DJab CD because I digged the sound and took a few photos. It wasn’t particularly a party per se, but it did attract curious onlookers to check it out. They were also selling all sorts of DJ-related goods like headphones and more listening stations on the inside of the store.

Not sure if the guys digged the t-shirts since it was too early to say if the event was a success, however it did make for an interesting shopping day.

Saturday Aug. 30th, there’ll be an event thrown by Simons at two of their locations, the one on downtown Ste-Catherine and the other at Ste-Foy. The event calls for a DJ spinning some special tracks and live painting from local artists. The party is actually hosted by DJab, a street clothing line for men being exclusively sold at Simons for the occasion.

If you’ve passed by Simons, there’s actually a listening station outside the store where you can preview the compilation album called “I See The Light” that will be sold for the event. From my impression, it’s one of those electro 80s inspired albums, which isn’t too shabby to listen to on a Sunday morning to pump you up in the morning.

While H&M may have had Lindsay Lohan’s girlfriend spin at the opening of the downtown store, it’s an interesting coincidence that Simons will collaborate with musical and street artists with much fanfare for a new collection they’ve just acquired. It’s especially notable that this is all for the men’s collection, which often gets overlooked and rarely receives any attention from the media. For a department store, Simons has done everything to keep its inventory fresh, exclusive and young, pushing past the traditional boundaries of department stores and really turning it into a fun shopping experience.

We can see that music is increasingly sharing the spotlight with fashion, which really has always been the case since the inception of popular music. We can associate music and looks with the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Music has really caught the eye of fashion.

Expect the party to go down at Simons from 12pm to 4pm on Saturday, I’ll be there to take in the scene and take pictures.

I had originally dismissed The Globe and Mail for not reporting any worthy news on fashion other than trends, but I realize that my mistake was that I was looking in the wrong section. If you want some significant news on fashion that excludes trends and top 10 must-haves, you’ll have to venture over to the business section of most newspapers. And there you can find some pretty good articles. Apologies to the Globe and Mail, now I can’t get enough of your Report on Business section!

Which brings me to these very interesting articles that popped up in the last couple of days.

Made in Canada – An in depth look at the advantages and some tips on how to keep a Canadian business going with some examples of some companies who have learned harsh lessons throughout the year. This also highlights that despite China and India’s cheap price, in the long run, it could become more costly to make things overseas as wages will increase over time.

Procter & Gamble links laundry to fashion - Tide, owned by P&G, has come up with a new type of laundry detergent that could be called as the “anti-aging solution” for clothing. Sure it’d be great to have a detergent that didn’t destroy your clothes…but how about buying clothes made of reliable, high quality material instead of the cheap kind if you want them to last?

Sick of Slow Service, Customers Walk -This is an ever growing problem in the retail business as Canadian consumers are fed up with the slow service being offered to them. And here’s another contributing factor of the ailing department store industry:

Department stores lose the greatest amount of business because of frustrated customers leaving empty-handed, with 78 per cent of survey respondents indicating that they have left a department store because of long waiting times.

It looks to me that HBC will really have to put customer service as a priority if they want to lure customers back. It will also need to significantly exceed the kind of service you get at Holt Renfrew (which is to say discriminatory and snooty).

The Gazette (shocking, I know)

Catalogue Yanked -La Maison Simons has decided to pull it’s Fall catalogue from the shelves after receiving numerous complaints of using too thin models on its pages. Although it’s been argued that images of very thin models do not cause anorexia, it has been proven to be one of the triggers that can lead to eating disorders. Montreal has especially been aware of the image it projects to its consumers in the fashion industry and Montreal Fashion Week fully supports the use of not-so thin models. However, from my observations when I’ve been to MFW, some of those girls seemed too thin in my opinion. But kudos to Simons for taking action.

Just 2 weeks after HBC has been acquired by Lord & Taylor, Richard Baker is moving swiftly to put some of the best retail players in the business to revamp the Hudson Bay Company. The newly appointed CEO of HBC, Bonnie Brooks (a Canadian native), was the President of the Hong Kong fashion group Lane Crawford Joyce Group since 2003.

If you’re not familiar with Lane Crawford, they are one of the most well-established department store chains in Hong Kong on par with our Canadian counterpart Holt Renfrew or Ogilvy. Under Brooks’ management, “the Lane Crawford group has tripled its business in the last five years and expanded its scope beyond Hong Kong and Macau into China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia,” according to WWD.com.

Baker says that there’s a gap between The Bay and Holt Renfrew, and he wants to fill that gap, but many Globe and Mail commentators were skeptical. Raising the usually affordable Bay prices might drive consumers away even if they were offering a better selection of brands. This is especially true with the failed project of Complexe Les Ailes in downtown Montreal where they were offering high end brands with considerably high price points for shoppers. Toronto-based Fairweather Group bought Complexes Les Ailes in 2005 and the upper levels have since been turned into office space.

Bringing in a luxury player and turning The Bay into a brand that sits between The Bay (the old one) and Holt Renfrew will prove to be tricky. Here’s a pricing breakdown between the two.

Holt Renfrew: Carries ready-to-wear and some bridge collections. $200-$5000 on average.
The Bay: Carries fast fashion, local, and some bridge collections. $20-$300 on average.

A premium price point would probably be somewhere between $75-$1000, if they indeed intend to offer better brands. However, I don’t know why this hasn’t been mentioned but what about Simons? They clearly have that premium price point – offering unique different brands, established an attractive shopping experience, while also offering a chance to pick higher quality brands. The demographic is however geared towards 18-25 year olds, while The Bay is probably targeting 25-35 yr olds. If anything, the new Bay (or Lord & Taylor) should perhaps take a cue from Simon’s and just make the experience a little more fun and luxurious without alienating their intended consumers.

Some might scoff at the idea of paying more for clothes, but these are people who don’t care for quality or don’t know what quality clothing is. What with the way stores are churning out new stock every month, it’s no wonder the general public demand cheap clothing. But I really think all this fast fashion lifestyle will turn around bite them in the butt. Soon people will tire of keeping up with trends (especially as we get older) and we would eventually want something durable and trendless. Fashion designers are already working towards seasonless collections, so “trends” per se are becoming obsolete. Therefore, stores will now have to make up for their seasonless collections and improve elsewhere such as price point, quality, branding, service and consumer experience.

So the appointment of Ms. Bonnie Brooks does inspire hope for The Bay brand, or really just the department store experience as a whole. We’re in serious need of quality stores in Montreal, and despite my initial reactions of The Bay possibly losing its brand name and appeal, at least they’re making an effort in changing it for the better.