RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Arriving in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the Brazilian summer, in a country experiencing an ongoing economic boom, certainly puts the bleak, uncertain economic outlook of wintry Europe and North America into sharp relief.

I was invited to Brazil on the generous invitation of ABIT, the Brazilian Textile and Apparel Industry Association, to attend Fashion Rio, the smaller of two semi-annual fashion events just concluded in Rio and São Paulo this week. And as ever on my trips to international markets, it was the perfect opportunity to explore firsthand one of the fastest growing luxury markets in the world, to see some local designers, and to get to know the local BoF community as well. Brazil ranked 13 on our list of countries with the most BoF readers, based on website traffic in 2011.

I came to Brazil with three questions on my mind: what are the prospects for the Brazilian luxury industry, what’s it like to do business here, and who is the Brazilian consumer?

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Hermès Flagship, Mumbai | Source: skyscrapercity.com

In our second article this week focused on India, we investigate the barriers impeding the growth of India’s international luxury goods market, which go beyond the recently lifted restrictions on foreign direct investment.

MUMBAI, India — “By the end of 2015, emerging markets should account for more than 50 percent of luxury sales,” Antoine Colonna, a luxury analyst at the asset manager Carmignac Gestion in Paris, told The Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2011. “This isn’t evolution. It’s revolution,” she continued.

But in India, the revolution has yet to take hold. Despite having the world’s second-fastest growing major economy and a rapidly expanding population of high net worth individuals, the country’s market for international luxury goods, worth around $1.3 billion, remains surprisingly small. In fact, while China currently accounts for an estimated 10 percent of the global luxury market, India makes up a mere 1 to 2 percent.

So why has India’s market for international luxury goods failed to take off?

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Bandana Tewari | Photo: Johan Sandberg for Industrie Magazine

PARIS, France — Bandana Tewari has made a name for herself as one of the fashion industry’s smartest commentators. As fashion features director of Vogue India, she has quickly become the go-to source for anyone who wants to learn about the country’s rapidly evolving luxury market. Recently, she was named to Industrie magazine’s Fashion Media A-list, alongside other leading fashion commentators including Cathy Horyn, Tim Blanks and Suzy Menkes.

So, I am delighted to reveal that Bandana Tewari will pen a regular column for The Business of Fashion, offering her unique perspective on the Indian luxury market, starting with this interview originally conducted for Industrie.

I sat down with Bandana in between shows during Paris Fashion Week in September to talk about India’s fast growing fashion market, tailoring luxury products to Indian sensibilities, the power of Bollywood and wearing Tarun Tahiliani saris with Manolo Blahniks.

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Xiu.com screenshot | Source: Xiu.com

We continue this week’s focus on e-commerce by turning our attention on how to succeed in the rapidly expanding e-commerce market in China. 

BEIJING, China — According to a recent report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), China is set to become the world’s next e-commerce superpower, surpassing the United States to become the largest online commerce market in the world, with an estimated market size of $300 billion. In 2006, less than 10 percent of China’s urban population shopped online. By 2015, that figure is expected to have quadrupled, reaching 44 percent, while the total number of e-commerce shoppers in China will grow to 329 million.

What’s more, according to BCG, China’s massive geography, a middle class that is rapidly expanding beyond the country’s largest cities, and widely accessible, heavily subsidised high-speed internet — broadband in China costs just $10 per month, compared with $30 per month in India — make the country unusually fertile ground for e-commerce, with internet access far outpacing the reach of physical retailers. Indeed, up to a quarter of e-commerce demand in China is for products consumers cannot find in physical stores, with apparel and skincare amongst the fastest-growing online categories.

But for fashion companies aiming to crack the online retail opportunity in China, it’s imperative to understand that the country’s e-commerce market is very different to established markets in the United States and Europe and that online shoppers in China — much younger, on average, than their Western counterparts — have different expectations, preferences and patterns of behaviour.

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George Condo x Supreme Skate Decks| Source: Hypebeast.com

In Part I, we examined how New York-based streetwear company Supreme became a global cult brand with its own myths, iconography and belief systems. Today, we explore the creative and commercial philosophies that underpin Supreme’s lasting success, courtesy of our friends at 032c.

NEW YORK, United States — The mythology behind legendary New York streetwear brand Supreme is so potent, it’s easy to imagine founder James Jebbia as a king pin of downtown Manhattan. But as he will be the first to tell you, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In fact, Supreme’s core creative and business philosophies are the sum of Jebbia’s patchwork retail past; not, as one might assume, a storied legacy in skateboarding. His resume reads like a series of interconnected Google-map pins on a late-80s and early-90s SoHo New York. A British-transplant who arrived in New York around 1984, Jebbia got a job working at the now-defunct Parachute clothing store in SoHo.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I enjoyed clothes,” he says. He quit five years later to open, along with his girlfriend at the time, a small flea market on Wooster Street inspired by the myriad of stuff he coveted from The Face and i-D magazines. The project evolved into his first proper store, Union, an experimental shop on Spring Street that carried “mostly English brands” and one very important streetwear juggernaut at the time by the name of Stüssy. This allowed Jebbia to work with Shawn Stüssy, who asked him to partner with him to open one of his eponymous boutiques on Prince Street in 1991.

When Stüssy left the business, Jebbia opened up Supreme in 1994 in a small storefront on Lafayette, a then-desolate street that was a perfect place for his clientele to skate first, shop second – an order that would very quickly be reversed. “I opened Supreme because there were no other decent skate shops around at the time,” Jebbia says. “I thought, cool, I might as well be the one to do it.”

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