An apology and motivations
I have had a post like this planned for ages. I wanted to talk about canvas sneakers, the mechanisms of fashion behind them, the diffusion of trends, intention, the whole lot. The more I planned, the less viable it seemed, because frankly, I am bad at writing. Long content is really hard to make, and to get it started, so my decision was to just take a step back and do this differently. Instead of a long and complex magnum opus I was never going to write, I'll make smaller posts, like a series. With the added benefit that I do not promise this will go anywhere. Maybe this will be the only one, maybe there will be ten of these, who knows.
A German guy wrote this before me
A simple question: how do you measure success as a fashion brand? This is capitalism after all, so we are
probably looking at some impressive sales or growth goal. Sell more, get bigger, sell even more, sounds very
simple, yet it would be a fatal mistake for most fashion brands (assuming you aren't running a fast fashion
store). A mistake that is costing some companies like Converse and VF Corp (Vans' owner) a lot of money and
energy to dig themselves out of it. But to learn why, we gotta understand why fashion isn't the same as a
tech company.
Growth is in the heart of capitalism, but fashion lives in an interesting intersection of psychology,
capitalism, and art. German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1904, in his essay titled "Fashion", that
fashion cannot exist without two very human impulses: the impulse to conform, and the impulse to
differentiate. A new style or trend shows up; a small group adopts it to stand out and differentiate
themselves, while signaling they are part of an "insiders group". Eventually, it spreads, more people adopt
the trend, and soon it becomes too common, it loses its distinction, until we have a new trend that goes in
the opposite direction. Simmel wrote this thirteen years before the Chuck Taylor All-Stars (then called
Non-skids). This is called foreshadowing.
As any fashion trend (and brand) grows, they approach the mass market, a tad after the early majority.
Things shift considerably once your public goes from the extreme fashion-conscious individual to the general
consumer. You go from a person who is willing to be into trends, to deal with the friction that buying
clothes from specialized retailers is, to pay the cost up; to a group that tends to be much more business
conscious, cares more about comfort and ease of access, and most importantly, that isn't loyal.
You can't trust the mass market
I do not mean that in a derogatory way, being loyal to a brand just means you are willing to stick with them
through price increases or changes in the product, you trust the brand after all. The general consumer isn't
like this. If tomorrow you need to make the product more expensive due to material pricing, they will look
for a replacement, a good enough bootleg even. The average consumer is ruthless about this; you will never
really satisfy the mass market.
The word we introduce is scarcity. We, frankly, don't want our goods to be easily accessible. So we just
don't make enough of them, we price them appropriately, and limit the supply so it never meets demand, so
the consumer is never used to seeing it on the shelf. Scarcity is a funny thing; no one likes it, yet entire
subcultures are completely dependent on it, and fashion itself is dependent on it. If a style is too easy to
access, it loses the cool factor, and it becomes the default.
Reality is a little more complicated, while some brands are fine running their entire logistics in scarcity,
others split their inventories, simple products for the mass market, and premium goods for the more "premium
market", let's say. Here we would need to discuss other things, like the Halo Effect, but for now, this
shall be enough.
On the next post, I want to explore what happens when you fail to do this, when you open the gates and make
as much as possible of your product. Hopefully, I don't lose focus until there.
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