Wall Street Journal: In West L.A, A Homeless Man Inspires New Brand
Back in August when the BoF touched down in L.A. to poke around the lively local fashion scene, I witnessed a very interesting character twirling  down Robertson Boulevard in an outrageous outfit. Today, I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about the same gentlemen, who has inspired a range of t-shirts that are all the rage in the City of Angels.

Fashion Inc: Web 2.0 at the Luxury Briefing Conference
I had the full intention of attending all three of the London conferences this Autumn dedicated to the web 2.0 and luxury. Unfortunately, I am home-bound due to a nasty bout of Shingles (yes, really), and so was happy to see Lauren’s as-it-happens report from today’s conference.

WWD: What’s Next for Fashion Networks (subscription required)
Even WWD is getting in on the social networking act, though they don’t necessarily seem to "get it" just yet. They begin the article by saying it remains to be seen whether niche sites could grow as big as MySpace and Facebook. So, quick answer: Not likely at all. The most interesting insight was that Forrester Research says "16% of adults online belong to social networks and predicts that social media will increase in effectiveness in the next three years: In 2007, marketers spent $600m on social media and that figure is expected to more than double to $1.5b next year and rise to $6.9b by 2012.

Crazy Robertson photos courtesy of WSJ.com

At a wedding I attended in Karachi last year, all of the guests received a parting gift from the bride’s family. For the men, it was a beautiful dark brown wool satchel, festooned with colourful embroidery and handwork by talented Pakistani artisans. No two bags were alike so each guest received a one-of-a-kind gift which was rooted in symbolism and meaning.

All around the world, in the West and in the East, artists work away in cottage industries and small businesses rooted in the passion of making of beautiful things. And yet, it seems so many consumers’ lives are dominated by just the opposite of this. We live in a world where global megabrands at the high-end and on the high street drown out the quiet beauty of products by independent artists and designers. Up until now, it has been a challenge for them to reach a global audience, due to their small scale and geographic constraints. And so the victory march of the big brands has continued on.

Enter revolutionary web 2.0 sites like Etsy.com and threadless.com, which could alter the way consumers think about luxury and exclusivity, thereby changing the design process as we know it. This forces us to ask ourselves a few questions.

Is real luxury a $2000 bag  made of the best materials, produced in the thousands? Or, is it a one-of-a-kind piece  at a fraction of the price, lovingly made by a designer whose name you might not even recognise? 

Luxury, of course, is a relative and subjective term, so the truth is, it  could be either one, but Etsy.com is paving the way for the latter meaning to take hold. Welcome to the luxury of mass individualisation.

Etsy is a virtual co-operative of 50,000 artists, designers and crafters selling, promoting and bartering their custom-designed products to appreciative customers who are looking for something that is truly one of a kind. London style bible Dazed & Confused magazine says Etsy is "a movement sounding the death knell for generic, mass-produced design. That means custom clothing, accessories and housewares and more that’s guaranteed never to appear in your local H&M or Ikea."

Young designers like Monie and James of Working Class Heroes have found a way to directly reach consumers without the responsibility and challenge of managing a wholesale business or retail stores, for that matter. Etsy.com has become a platform for selling their beautiful handmade laptop wallets and iPod pouches.

Should you involve your consumers in the design of your product?

The 300,000-strong user community over at threadless.com thinks you should. Users vote each week on more than 600 unique designs submitted by t-shirt designers from around the world. The top 4-6 t-shirts each week are produced and sold to the community in limited edition quantities. In return, the designers receive $2,000+ in cash and prizes for their winning designs. They are even taking their products to the bricks-and-mortar world, having just opened its first retail store in Chicago this past August.

Earlier this year, Threadless founder Jeffrey Kalmikoff told the Economist that his model could work in any industry. “I am convinced Detroit could use it for designing cars,” he said. It will certainly be interesting to see if and how traditional apparel and accessories companies will use the wisdom of crowds to shape their own designs.

Many fashion companies struggle with re-ordering items that have blown out the door more quickly than predicted. Imagine if they knew upfront which of their designs would become best sellers. It would be one way to help inform the process of deciding how much to produce of each style. While one might argue that this approach makes less sense at the high-end level, where consumers expect the designer to take a strong stance on defining what’s cool, for high-street brands it could still be a very interesting way to predict the future. More pragmaticaly, it could also reduce the costs of slow-moving excess stock which ends up going on sale and eroding margins.

Cathy Horyn recently asserted that that London’s fashion renaissance might be linked to the fact that the city is awash with cash. From Russian oligarchs to Arab princes to Indian billionaires, it’s true that that London has become a playground for the world’s rich and famous. Perhaps this is also why there are no less than three luxury conferences taking place in London over the next few months, each with some focus on the opportunity that web 2.0 technologies presents for the industry.

Next week, The Walpole Group hosts Tech Luxe: Web 2.0 and Beyond, a half day seminar to help companies learn how they can "reharness the creative power of technology." Speakers will include Nick Robertson of the innovative online fashion retailer asos.com.

Then, in later in October, the World Luxury Congress will hold its annual 3 day extravaganza in London, covering a full gamut of topics from expanding into emerging markets, investing in luxury, and the requisite session on exploiting online technology for luxury brands. It looks like it’s going to be a knockout event, with a nice balance of speakers from the creative and business sides of the luxury industry. Indian designer Manish Arora, Carol Brodie of the Robb Report, and Nadja Swarovski are all scheduled to speak, following the keynote from David Tang of Shanghai Tang.

Finally, in November, the team behind Luxury Briefing will host Web 2.0 – Are you on Board?, also in London. Another steller group of speakers, including real online innovators like Natalie Massenet of Net a Porter, Tyler Brule of Monocle, and Jason Campbell of JC Report will all be sharing their experiences.

The Business of Fashion will be on the scene, scoping out the conferences for the most interesting insights. Stay tuned.

When Malcolm Harris, one of the designers behind the Katsumi & Malcolm label which was once financially backed by Madonna, wanted to launch a new brand, he knew he needed to do something singularly different.

Harris is the man behind Cut, Sew & Blog which has got young fashion insiders and the blogosphere buzzing and is already spawning internet spoofs. By turning to web 2.0 technologies and using sites like Myspace and Youtube to promote his new label, Malcolm may be the first fashion designer ever to build his entire business strategy around the use of the Internet, as opposed to treating it as a cosmetic afterthought. He recently answered a few questions from the Business of Fashion to explain the rationale behind this strategy.

We first heard of Cut, Sew & Blog while perusing the comments in Cathy Horyn’s On the Runway blog and then received an email from Malcolm himself, inviting us to check out the blog. When a commenter on the Business of Fashion mentioned the Cut, Sew & Blog again in our own comments, saying her young colleagues at Style.com were addicted to the blog, it was time to take a look.

Cut, Sew & Blog is a personal — sometimes very personal — look into the thoughts, ideas and inspirations that constitute Malcolm’s world; the world of Mal Sirrah. From a detailed account of the breakdown of his relationships with Vogue’s Andre Leon Talley and supermodel Naomi Campbell to the passion behind his support for the Designers for Darfur initiative to only showing his collection for S/S 2008 online, Malcolm has taken risks not often seen in the fashion industry.

To the contrary, many young designers are the product of  carefully crafted PR images, designed to create a sense of distance, mystery and aspiration in the minds of potential customers. Instead, Malcolm has taken a completely different approach, going straight to his end consumer, bypassing the filtering roles of gatekeepers, fashion critics and the mass media. The result is a sometimes raw, often meandering and occasionally uncomfortable peek into Malcolm’s world. But, it makes for a compelling read and his internet strategy is ambitious, thoughtful, and distinctive. We’ll be watching to see how things progress.

1. You stayed out of the fashion scene for years and then decided to come back. Why, and why now? 

I left the fashion industry for five years until my return in 2005.  In my previous company Katsumi and Malcolm, I found myself enjoying a very successful business that no longer provided me with any personal or creative happiness.  After dibbing up my soul between the investors, editors, buyers and celebrity clients, I felt as if I had been robbed of all power and strength. I could no longer live up to the brand that was quickly becoming my prison. So I gave it all up 

This time around I am making a conscious effort to make a niche/sanctuary for myself that allows me to strike a professional, creative and spiritual balance. The current climate within the fashion industry is perfect for a brand like Mal Sirrah that focuses on our motto – Changing the World – One Dress at a Time. 

Photos and video courtesy of www.cutsewandblog.com.

Every week there are reports of new online fashion retailers, but some of the biggest names in the UK are noticeably absent from the space. Selfridges and Harvey Nichols have essentially no online fashion businesses to speak of, while the venerable Harrods is selling a heavily edited mix of its lower-priced collections, with an emphasis on accessories, knitwear and outerwear only.

All of this is even more surprising when you consider that many of the major American department stores, with similarly large profiles, have made heavy (and successful) pushes into the online space. Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, and Barney’s all have online sites with a large fashion assortment for sale. What’s more, many of the world’s best known luxury brands say that their rapidly growing online boutiques are their number one or two retail sales generators, even more than their flagship stores in the world’s fashion capitals.

Then of course there are online pioneers like Net-a-Porter, Yoox, e-Luxury and vivre.com. Just today, Net-a-Porter  shared the early results of its Roland Mouret virtual trunk show in WWD. In the first 4 days alone, more than $500,000 of pre-orders were placed and 250,000 videos were viewed in 22 countries around the world. (I’ve said it before, but this is a brilliant model for all involved. The customer gets to order in advance and participate in the action like a fashion insider, Mouret gets a global platform for his new collection, and Net-a-Porter knows exactly what quantities to order for its customers, but also gets a view on which items will be the best sellers, and can order more of these. And, think of all that working capital for Net-a-Porter to sit on for the next 6 months — they don’t even need to stump up their own money to fund the orders).

If you add to this the upstart retailers like brittique.com, fashionpublic.com, oli.co.uk, and letrainbleu.com (and toss in the online boutiques for Matches and Browns), you could say there is a virtual fashion fiesta going on.

SO, why have some of the coolest kids not joined the online party? The likely answer is probably some combination of conservatism, risk aversion, failure to grasp the size of the opportunity, and a legacy of snobbiness about selling luxury online.

Rumour has it that Selfridge’s has an online initiative in the works – so they won’t stay away for long. But, they will have certainly sacrificed a great deal of value in not having seen the opportunity earlier, even though they had such a huge head start in terms of skill and brand recognition.

Photoclip courtesy of Net-a-Porter

WWD reports today that Style.com has concluded an agreement to sell advertising on the Sartorialist blog maintained by Scott Schuman, a former fashion industry staffer who left a fashion sales showroom to create one of the best known blogs in the fashion blogosphere.

Women’s Wear Daily said:

A fashion label may get the best endorsement when its wares show up on a well-dressed city dweller photographed for fashion industry veteran Scott Schuman’s popular blog The Sartorialist. But for those who want more direct brand promotion, Style.com and Men.style.com will begin to sell ads forThesartorialist.blogspot.com beginning Sept. 1….

…The partnership is the first time the CondéNet properties have sold ads for a brand outside the company stable. Schuman’s blog, where he posts commentary on stylish men and women on the street, attracts more than one million unique visitors a month. He also pens a regular column for GQ and guest-blogs on Men.style.com and Style.com. "The Sartorialist reaches the person who really cares about fashion as a form of self-expression. He chronicles very chic people and his constituency are the people he photographs," said Dee Salomon, senior vice president of CondéNet. The site seeks to attract upscale automotive and consumer electronics as well as fashion brands. Style.com and Men.style.com and The Sartorialist will share advertising revenue generated from the blog. — WWD, 16 July 2007

This is, of course yet another sign of the increasing importance of fashion blogs as a communication vehicle for fashion brands, and it was smart of Scott to partner with CondeNet, who understand his demographic and who already have the advertiser relationships in place to generate ad sales.

Yet, having "upscale automotive and consumer electronics" ads next to Scott’s  eye-catching photos does raise some questions. Will they ruin the clean lines, aesthetic simplicity and fashion purity of the site?  Methinks it will be best to keep the ads focused on fashion and integrate them as cleanly as possible into Scott’s site, so as to maintain the integrity of what the Sartorialist’s 1 million monthly visitors are interested in: the photography.

Photo clip courtesy of Scott Schuman.

For years now, the Yves Saint-Laurent brand has been a drag on the otherwise strong results posted by many other fashion brands in the Gucci Group, owned by parent-company PPR. Most recently, Bottega Veneta has been on a tear with strong financial results (eclipsing YSL’s top line revenue in 2006) and a leading position in the luxury consumer league tables, making it the number two luxury brand in PPR’s stable.

The story for YSL is a lot less fairytale, and a lot more Nightmare on Elm Street. The brand has not been profitable since Gucci Group purchased it in 1999 and is still reportedly losing around €50m a year. The brand turned over €194m in sales in 2006. PPR doesn’t break out operating loss of YSL its website and has not provided a timeframe to investors for expected profitability.

It’s not surprising then that Stefano Pilati, YSL’s Creative Director, has been trying to inject new energy into this legendary brand. The latest initiative is an innovative project with Nick Knight’s Showstudio. According to WWD, Showstudio has received over 200 submissions of script ideas for a photoshoot to be held this Sunday, featuring the new "seasonless" Edition 24 collection of YSL basics. The creative output of the photoshoot will appear on a newly-revamped YSL website this fall, promoting the new collection in an interactive way, with some user-generated content to boot.

It’s good to see more luxury houses experimenting to see how the web can work for them. While a project like this won’t solve YSL’s systemic profitability problems (Valerie Hermann, YSL’s CEO, clearly still has her work cut out for her), it does bring some freshness to the way the brand is perceived and promotes the new capsule collection in a way that is bound to draw attention (and eyeballs). With a certain "Creative Technologist" on staff, we are looking forward to seeing more interactive experimentation from Gucci Group brands.

That oft-ignored market for men’s luxury has been popping up on my radar screen a lot more often in the last few months. Up until now, men’s luxury spending has been dominated by expensive watches. But, as a generation of high net-worth men with a taste for modern design is growing up, more players are reaching out to meet their sophisticated needs in innovative ways.

It brings to mind a casual gathering of friends that took place in my kitchen on a recent Saturday evening. Over wine and cheese, I watched in awe as hedge fund managers, private equity investors and investment bankers from London’s burgeoning financial community were comparing, discussing and examining each other’s (expensive) watches in excruciating detail. Some were taking pride in the beautiful pearl dialfaces, others in the high-tech mechanics, and still others in having a Swiss watch brand that nobody else had heard of. Digits were exchanged. Prices were quoted. Statistics were cited. Still, it wasn’t so different from the groups of professional women I have seen cooing over their friend’s new Chloe bag. Could the same passion for those watches and handbags be transferred to cufflinks, tailor-made suits and high-tech men’s cosmetics?

UBS Luxury sector analyst Yasuhiro Yamaguchi thinks so. In May, he published the first comprehensive analyst report that I have seen on the Men’s luxury market, indicating the increasing awareness that even the financial markets have of this segment. According to UBS, the market for everything from Swiss watches and German sports cars to handmade shoes and men’s cosmetics is bound to get a boost from rapid changes in the demographic and social fabric of North America, Europe and Japan. The report argues that with the advent of increasingly financially independent women, bursting-to-the-seams equity in global real estate, and societal acceptance of metrosexual and gay cultures in an ever-urbanising world, there is a growing pot of disposable income that will be spent on men’s luxury products and services.

While the report doesn’t provide a concrete figure for the overall size of the men’s luxury market, it does point to extremely high growth rates for various segments which have high exposure to men’s luxury. Another report by NPD says that the men’s fashion footwear market was worth $11b in 2006 and has been growing at about 20% over the past couple of years.  If numbers like this are any indication, it’s not surprising that both upstarts and major luxury players are looking to capture some of this value.

The most high-profile case study of a player staking their ground in this space is Tom Ford‘s men’s luxury brand. Mr. Ford recently announced plans to take his brand across the globe, hitting the major luxury poles in Russia, the Middle and Far East, Europe, and the Americas through a series of retail partnerships with prestigious local groups like Mercury in Russia, Villa Moda in the Middle East, Lane Crawford in Asia, and Daslu in Brazil.   

This strategy makes a lot of sense. It is the best way to ensure each store meets the specific needs and tastes of each market through the insight and local understanding of their partners. For example, Majed Al-Sabah (sometimes known in the industry as the Sheikh of Chic) of Villa Moda has told Suzy Menkes that there will be Tom Ford made-to-measure dishdashas available in the Middle East stores that Mr. Ford will open in partnership with the Villa Moda Group.  The slew of retail partnerships also ensures a rapid rollout to capture momentum from the start, while also minimising the upfront investment Mr. Ford would normally have to make in order to sustain a global rollout of this scale.  We are sure that Mr. Ford will make some tweaks in his retail format to ensure the expected 87 stores to be opened over the next decade are more welcoming and distinctive than the first store on Madison Avenue in New York.

There are also smaller niche lifestyle brands in London and New York that are trying to get in on the action. ARMREVOLUTION is a men’s luxury lifestyle brand which is going after the men’s accessories market. First up is a series of precision-designed architectural cuff-links made of Japanese stainless steel. These are in stark constrast to the more classic, soft-edged and quirky designs (read: tacky las vegas dice anyone?) that are widely available in the market today. The result is a striking set of products that stand out for their uniqueness and masculine modernity. These cufflinks add a dash of edge and subtle glamour to even the most humdrum of business and evening wear.

However, the price of arm architecture is not cheap. The cufflinks will retail for over £400 a pair and will be available through the ARMREVOLUTION website after the conclusion of a pre-launch exclusive sales period bookended by intimate pre-launch events in London and New York.

Jsen Wintle is the designer behind WINTLE, another of the new men’s luxury brands that have emerged in New York and London over the past few years (others include Duckie Brown, Band of Outsiders, Martin Andersson and Thom Browne).  WINTLE’s demi-couture and bespoke men’s tailoring is available at his sumptuous ateliers in London and Moscow and will show for the first time at men’s fashion week in Paris in July.

A walk into Jsen’s world is like an escape into another era, along with all of its beautiful trappings. The former interior decorater and filmmaker has recently enlisted the support of KCD to promote the growth of his brand and his ready to wear designs have been lauded by leading men’s magazines such as Arena Homme Plus and GQ Style. It’s no wonder then that the collection has been picked up by Podium in Kuznetsky Most, Moscow and The Shop At Bluebird in King’s Road, London. Women won’t have to wait too long to share in Jsens dreamy world of mystery. The Chambre Syndicale has invited WINTLE to show a RTW womenswear collection during Couture week in Paris in January.

Incidentally, both ARMREVOLUTION and WINTLE are using dark and mysterious internet videos to give consumers a peek into the worlds surrounding their budding brands. ARMREVOLUTION’s internet sales approach will also allow it to capture the full retail margin without the high fixed costs of its own retail store. It seems the leitmotif of men’s luxury of the future is a touch of intrigue delivered via the web. If only more large fashion houses were also harnessing the power of the internet in this way to communicate about their brands.

So, with the product and marketing in hand, what remains to be seen is whether men will indeed begin to consume luxury with the same voraciousness as their wives, girlfriends and daughters. There are clearly some players who are taking a bet that they will.

Photos courtesy of ARMREVOLUTION, Tom Ford, and WINTLE.

© 2007 Copyright Imran Amed – The Business of Fashion.

It seems every few weeks I come across some interesting quotes from or video clips of Cathy Horyn of the New York Times. As one of the first major fashion critics to pen a regular blog, it’s not surprising that she believes in the importance of blogging to the fashion industry. Regular readers know that this is a recurring topic on the BoF, especially after what I heard from some industry people at the Harvard Business School Retail and Luxury Conference earlier this year.

This is a video I came across where Julie Fredrickson of Coutorture attempts to interview Ms. Horyn on the topic of Web 2.0 and fashion. I use the word "attempts" intentionally. As you will see, by the end of the interview, Cathy’s journalistic instincts come out and she can’t resist turning the tables on Julie and ends up asking about her experience in (not) gaining access to shows at New York Fashion Week. The video pre-dates the launch of Cathy’s blog at the New York Times, On the Runway, but many of its key messages still ring true. 

People talk about Miuccia Prada as an intellectual designer. Up there with Martin Margiela, Dries van Noten and Rei Kawakubo, Ms. Prada is a heavyweight in the world of conceptual fashion. Season after season she manages to surprise and inspire the notoriously critical and fickle fashion crowd.

What’s less cool to talk about is Miuccia Prada’s knack for marrying the creative with the commercial. No other designer seems to be as able to take the most high-falutin’ catwalk looks and translate them into a commercial product in the showroom. For Prada and her infamous husband Patrizio Bertelli, "commercial" is not a dirty word. Buyers rave about Prada’s ability to provide the right balance between the consistent core items that form the foundation for her collection as well as the on-trend items that push the brand’s creative ideas forward. In more ways than one, she is a leader not a follower.

How cool it was then for me to see this stunning lookbook for Prada’s S/S 2007 collection, which once again strikes this inimitable creative-commercial balance. So many lookbooks are just boring shots of androids- cum-models with a white backdrop. Often, the logic behind this is that its best to let the clothes speak for themselves and allow buyers to focus on editing. Instead, Prada has seamlessly combined this season’s vibrant rich colour palette, key pieces and trends  (fringe bags, turbans, ruffled leather and pared-down chic), landscape and cityscape images reflecting the global footprint of her brand, and seamlessly integrated these with runway looks to deliver a strong message about what she might have been thinking as she conceived of her collection.  The technique she used reminded me of the recent Gilbert and George exhibition put on at the Tate Modern, where everyday photos were infused with saturated colours and political messages.

For someone who honestly was a big fan of neither the turban nor the fringe, she somehow makes it work for me. The products look completely different now because Ms. Prada has let us into her amazing little head.

Photos courtesy of the Prada website.

© 2007 Copyright Imran Amed – The Business of Fashion.