FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Columbus, Ohio, June 7, 2023 – Asset Strategies Group (ASG) is pleased to announce its latest move in the retail services sector: the acquisition of The Robin Report. Just as with their acquisition of Chute Gerdeman in 2020, this transaction is another significant step in ASG’s ongoing commitment to broaden and enhance its scope of retail services, offering clients comprehensive, industry-leading insights.

The Robin Report, published daily, along with its weekly Retail Unwrapped podcast, has established itself as a highly regarded retail industry knowledge platform and is the latest addition to ASG’s growing portfolio.  The acquisition is a clear demonstration of ASG’s dedication to providing its clients with the best possible resources for understanding and navigating the ever-evolving retail landscape.

The combination of The Robin Report’s retail insights with ASG’s extensive experience as a leading provider of real estate, store design, and related business services for retailers furthers ASG’s mission to serve retail with strategic leadership.

“The acquisition of The Robin Report is in perfect alignment with our long-term growth strategy,” said Carrie Barclay, ASG President & CEO. “As we saw with our acquisition of Chute Gerdeman, this move represents a crucial investment in knowledge and capabilities to ensure we continue to offer unparalleled retail services and insights in the rapidly shifting retail sector. We are thrilled to welcome The Robin Report team to the ASG family.”

ASG’s acquisition of The Robin Report will not only enhance its service offerings but also reinforce its position as a leader in the retail services industry. Clients can expect to benefit from an enriched pool of resources and a broader range of services, with the same commitment to quality and customer satisfaction that has always been a hallmark of ASG.

About Asset Strategies Group:

Asset Strategies Group is a Columbus, OH-based provider of solutions and services to the retail marketplace. Services include real estate strategy, tenant representation, store planning and construction, lease management, real estate technology, and, through its Chute Gerdeman business unit, world-class retail design. Their clients include some of the best-known brands in the industry. For more information on Asset Strategies Group, go to www.ConsultASG.com

About The Robin Report

The Robin Report is a well-respected source of in-depth, strategic insights into the retail industry. Through its thought leadership, The Robin Report provides a comprehensive understanding of the retail landscape, helping clients navigate the complexities of the industry and stay ahead of emerging trends.

Press Contacts:

Maxwell Miller
ASG, Manager, Marketing + Brand Strategy
614-212-5180

Deborah Patton
The Robin Report, Managing Director
deborah@therobinreport.com

Amid prolonged economic uncertainty, availability and affordability furthered the power and presence of grocery private label brands. They collectively increased market penetration beyond expectation, signaling the strength of their Share of Voice and verifying a shift in consumer preferences.

Sustainable business practices have evolved from a slogan to a purpose. MOTIF Rewire 2021 hosted a global sustainability event for the fashion apparel/retail industry to advocate for thinking disruptively, creatively and differently. Janice Wang, Chair of the Board, MOTIF & CEO, of Alvanon states emphatically, “Cleaning up the fashion industry is everyone’s job. Everyone must play a part in this whole journey. We must share our knowledge, no one person can do it all.”

All in all, an entire average closet of clothes, shoes, umbrellas, backpacks etc. comes out to a whopping 1368.4 kg of CO2 emissions and 616,000 total liters of H2O used for production and delivery — larger closets resulting in even higher numbers.

Wang has a poignant message for veterans and newbies alike:

• To the veterans, ”You have built a career in this industry, you need to protect it, you have the power to make decisions that can have real impact. Make learning part of your teams’ workday.”
• To the digital natives, “You are our future, you know digital, you know what it can do to help the industry. Forward this to your colleague in a different part of your company.”
• And to the newcomers, “You are also our future, you may not know all the granular details of the industry, but you have ideals and great ideas. We will help you fix it. Forward this knowledge to a friend.”

What’s in Your Closet?

If you find it difficult to think of fashion sustainability in abstract terms, especially when it comes to incomprehensible numbers and quantities of CO2 emissions and liters of water used, it helps to zoom in on what these numbers look like in our day-to-day lives. Andrea Kennedy, Lead Instructor, Sustainability at LIM College and Michael Londrigan, Lead Instructor, Supply Chain at LIM College, reveal exactly what these numbers look like in our very own closets.

• A tank top, for example, that has just arrived in a store, has already emitted 2.7 kg of CO2 and used 2,650 liters of H2O in the process of manufacturing through delivery. That is the CO2 emissions equivalent to charging 385 smartphones and water usage of 17 standard bathtubs filled to capacity.
• A pair of jeans? 33 kg of CO2 emitted, the equivalent of driving 85 miles in a standard car.
• Manufacturing sneakers result in 14 kg of CO2 emitted and 8,5171 liters of H2O used which, comparatively speaking, is equivalent to the amount of water used in 23,850 cups of Starbucks.

All in all, an entire average closet of clothes, shoes, umbrellas, backpacks etc. comes out to a whopping 1368.4 kg of CO2 emissions and 616,000 total liters of H2O used for production and delivery (calculated on the Sustainable Apparel Coalitions HIGG Index). Many of us (including myself) most likely have even larger closets resulting in even higher numbers.

The commitment to a more sustainable industry requires changes both on personal and industry levels. As eloquently stated by both Anthony Burns, COO ACS and Londrigan, “This is a people’s business. Everything revolves around what people want and what people are going to do. Can we affect those behaviors as an industry? The industry has to affect its own behaviors and only then can it affect the consumer’s behavior.”

Attempting to change an entire industry seems like a daunting task, yet there is no wrong place to start. The only mistake would be in not starting at all.

Supply Chain Transparency

Transparency has a critical impact on the success of sustainability. Over 75 percent of global companies have explicitly increased ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) targets in 2021, yet only less than 50 percent are seeking greater supply chain transparency (HSBC Navigator 2020 Report). Companies tend to shy away from disclosing sustainability transactions because transparency is so difficult to explain. Supply chains were not designed to be transparent. They can be somewhat of a black box and companies worry what might be revealed if they were to reveal information that could undermine their competitive advantage, expose them to criticism, or result in erroneous data from all links within the supply chain. (Read more in depth about Supply Chain Transparency here) Serai www.seraitrade.com, an HSBC digital platform addresses these complex, interconnected problems and helps build traceability.

Vivek Ramachandran, CEO of Serai and Lindsey Hermes, Head of Enterprise Solutions at Serai have valuable insight into the importance of a transparent supply chain with tools Serai provides help companies achieve this.

A new way of thinking is required and a key to success is the incentivization of sharing data. According to Ramachandran, “Every T-shirt, every garment should have transparency to see where it\’s made, who it\’s made by and the credentials of the company making it. That is incredibly difficult to do without data providers being incentivized to share data. We need to build a model so companies that share information about themselves are recognized and rewarded. You need incentives for the data providers, not just the data recipients.”

A transparent supply chain contributes to a more sustainable industry by requiring brands and companies to fully annotate the details of what is happening upstream and to be willing to communicate this knowledge both internally and externally. This is even more critical as discerning consumers are more often demanding information detailing product ingredients and materials, the source of these materials, and the working conditions in which they were produced. Researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management found that consumers may be willing to pay 2-10 percent more for products from companies that provide greater supply chain transparency.

The Fashion Industry’s Most Expensive Mistake

Most retailers are struggling financially, especially because of the pandemic. Ahmed Zaidi, a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University paints a picture of what life was like for his family’s sock manufacturing factory in Lahore Pakistan and provides valuable insight into the fashion industry’s most expensive mistake caused by operating with uncertainty.

Not knowing how well a product will sell sets the ball rolling in a series of unfortunate events. Trying to achieve high margins is often compromised by discounting, a tale as old as time. Retailers buy cheap and order big with the uncertainty of estimating how low or how high they can set prices to sell their products. In addition, suppliers are pressured to cut costs in order to produce at a lower cost. Small and medium suppliers, such as Zaidi’s family, do not have the choice to say no to retailers and their financial situation becomes a fight for survival. If they cannot produce at the cost retailers demand, they cannot sell.

Uncertainty is not just an expensive mistake from a financial perspective. It’s expensive from a social perspective. People’s livelihoods are at stake. Uncertainty causes factories to produce at costs lower than they can actually afford. It contributes to overproduction leading to large amounts of excess inventory, which ultimately ends up as waste in landfills. It’s the reason behind massive discounts and the loss in margin numbers. It costs retailers financially, socially, and environmentally.

So how do we tackle this uncertainty?  “In the presence of uncertainty, delay judgment,” so says the sceptic Greek Pyrrhonist philosopher, Aenesidemus, as quoted by Zaidi.  Be pragmatic: Delay judgment and utilize the digital innovations of companies whose entire mission is to eliminate waste through the use of digital fashion.

Looking Towards the Future

Innovators at the forefront of their industries bridge theory to practice with tangible, concrete solutions that can help bring the fashion industry one step closer to sustainability.

TG3D

Rick Yu, CMO and Co-founder of TG3D, a 3D fashion technology solution provider, has a compelling pitch for maximizing the use of digital data to better understand customers, forecast future demands and plan strategically, ultimately preventing unnecessary waste and overproduction while minimizing customer returns. With virtual sampling, provided by TG3D, a waste is eliminated during the development process. Brands can save 80 percent of the fabric, energy, water, and pollution waste of traditional processes after adopting 3D virtual prototyping.  “I believe this new paradigm brings tremendous benefits, such as facilitating communications and collaborations across the supply chain as well as improving speed to market. It also helps with sustainability initiatives through reducing the amount of samples needed to be made and ensuring products will come with better fit to your customers,” Yu states.

Avery Dennison

Avery Dennison is a global leader in materials science and manufacturing. Their brand messaging has become a vehicle to harness their storytelling capabilities into areas like sustainability, social justice, and accountability, expressing their values in a visible way and connecting with their customers on a deeper, more emotional level.  The recently released

Integrated Sustainability and Annual Report, states, “Sustainability isn’t separate from our business strategy — it is a business strategy. Sustainability is one of our values and integral to our aim of creating value for all of our stakeholders through innovation, operational excellence and highly disciplined capital allocation.”

Brian Cheng, Director, Digital Transformation at Avery Dennison, says, “The impact we can make as a company on saving the environment with digital sampling is tremendous. By reducing just the physical samples we create we can save six barrels of oil (that’s enough oil to drive across the U.S. twice). We can save enough water for 115 people annually and much more.”

EDITED

Hannah O’Rourke, Senior Retail Strategist at EDITED, believes real-time market intelligence more fully reveals the implications and impact decisions around product, pricing, and assortment can have on the industry. She says, “According to the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol and Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which surveyed 150 executives from retail businesses across Europe and the U.S., three in 10 companies state that the availability of reliable data holds the key to a greater understanding of sustainability over the next decade.” The Sustainability EDIT is available as a downloadable report and provides intelligence on how the industry has been expanding the use of sustainable fabrics and processes in their assortments, as well as the pricing and performance metrics behind eco-friendly products.

Reinventing Retail

A key takeaway from MOTIF’s three days of inspiring conversations and innovations is a reminder to all retailers and manufacturers to not get hung up on perfection. Any step, no matter how small or large, is a step in the right direction. To watch the MOTIF presentations, log on here.  https://motif.org/event/rewire-sustainability-2021/#agenda

There are only a few fashion capitals in the world, and they all paint a stark picture for the future of retail worldwide. From New York, London, and Paris to Milan and Tokyo, retailers are searching for relevance as consumers learn to live with the reality of Covid-19.

Whether reeling from a pandemic-induced slump or ramping up for a recovery, fashion retailers face a new set of consumer sensitivities and preferences. Everyday moments such as visiting the local mall, dining inside restaurants, socializing over coffee and heading to the gym no longer seem as safe as they did a few months ago. And this new reality is compelling shoppers to favor value over luxury, personal health over entertainment and homebody lifestyles over out-of-home activities.

Nontraditional fashion business models may be creating new alternatives to brick-and-mortar stores. However, they do not necessarily get to the heart of what consumers need right now.

The full impact of Covid-19 remains to be seen. Yet, the past six months are shedding light on the need to reinvent the entire fashion retail industry. Brands may not be able to go back and make a new start, but they can undoubtedly deliver what their consumers need to come back again.

It\’s Time to Mix Things Up

Nontraditional fashion business models – such as subscription rentals, curated boxes, and digital-only niche startups – may be creating new alternatives to brick-and-mortar stores. However, they do not necessarily get to the heart of what consumers need right now.

According to McKinsey & Company, in most countries, more than 70 percent of consumers are not yet comfortable with leaving home and resuming their pre-pandemic social activities. This finding indicates that few people are willing to justify the purchase of high-end shoes, dry-clean-only clothing and fine jewelry. Instead, they will most likely gravitate toward comfort, practicality and convenience.

Breaking through this new market dynamic requires more than offering the right price at the right time. Fashion retailers also need to redesign their supply chains to ensure that the right assortments are available at e-commerce and the brick-and-mortar store. Consumers will not merely look for a similar alternative if a desired product is not available on the digital and physical store shelf. Instead, they will tap, swipe and click their way to a competing brand that carries it.

Let\’s face it: if your favorite Levi\’s are not available, would you merely purchase the next-best brand at the same store? Of course not! You\’re going someplace else until you find those Levi\’s, even if they cost more. And more likely, you\’ll return to that new retailer first when you are ready to purchase a new pair.

Reinvention Begins with Responsive Inventory Management

So, how can fashion brands ensure they always have relevant products on hand? While it\’s true that supply chains are still at risk, they can get ahead of disrupted inventory availability by engaging directly with consumers to find out what they want, even if they are not spending.

Such a relationship must be built in an authentic way that matches the brand and resonates with existing and potential shoppers without being intrusive. Messaging is key: Retailers may choose to communicate on their branded website, through social channels or in an e-mail why it\’s safe to shop online and how the health and safety of warehouse workers are assured. They may even spark honest conversation around the comfort and joy that a seemingly frivolous purchase brings at a time of uncertainty and turbulence.

The idea is to provide a source of connectedness that consumers desire, while the fashion brand understands consumers more intimately and forges an engaged and loyal community. With this insight, retailers can quickly assess their entire inventory – both in season and out of season – to make decisions based on timing and relevance, category by category.

This exercise may mean delaying the availability of spring and summer fashions for the next year or repurposing them for the upcoming fall transition or winter seasons. Some products may also be sold in flash sales during the holidays to improve the company\’s cash position. Meanwhile, orders for new items can be readjusted to address expected shifts in style preferences.

A Renaissance (not an Apocalypse) Is Rising

As much as news headlines like to declare that retail will undergo a devastating apocalypse, I believe that fashion retail is undergoing a renaissance that centers around customer wants and experiences.

Old, well-loved brick-and-mortar brands may be consolidating under different names or disappearing altogether. But fashion retailers that choose to invite input from consumers and let that insight inform and direct their inventory decisions will be the ones that will profitably become part of long-lasting shifts in the industry.

As we all continue to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, daily life has changed dramatically for many workers dedicated to retail and consumer-facing businesses. Brands everywhere are having to make difficult decisions on how they will support compliance with local regulations and closures, continue to serve the business, and strategize on how to emerge stronger after this is over.

For many, this means that large populations of employees – including those who work in headquarters and store support centers, store associates, and distribution workers – are faced with new types of working, including working from home.

Adapting to the Pandemic

The technical challenges in quickly enabling large populations to work from home can be arduous, as can the accompanying cultural and people challenges – but both can be overcome.

At SAP, while we have long had a productive virtual component to our own operations (including very flexible remote and work from home components), we have also had to adapt to this new way of working and make changes in response to new variables across local, state and federal governments.

At SAP, while we have long had a productive virtual component to our own operations (including very flexible remote and work from home components), we have also had to adapt to this new way of working and make changes in response to new variables across local, state and federal governments.

Here are a few suggestions to help improve your own journey based on our own experiences and on our work with many of the most valuable and most innovative brands in the world.

People and Culture

If you can effectively reinforce your culture while supporting these changes, you will emerge stronger than before.

• Listen and be empathetic. Your teams will react differently based on their own situations. It is key for each individual manager to have open discussions with their teams – both in group settings and in 1:1\’s. No topic should be off limits.
• Empower your leaders. Give your managers enough authority to approve equipment that is needed to boost productivity. Determine loosely what your policy will be – and then let the managers put it in action. Better yet – push rational decision making down to the individual.
• Recognize both formal and informal networks. As your leaders communicate along the \”official\” lines, recognize that there is tremendous power in having this same message reinforced by \”informal\” networks as well. People often seek reassurance from leaders outside their reporting line, or others they respect in the company. Each one of these discussions can advance or hamper the effectiveness of your overall communication, so make sure that leadership is calmly reinforcing the same message.
• Reinforce your culture – virtually. Most that choose to work in retail are friendly and people who are focused and thrive on daily interactions to power their day. Find ways to facilitate similar interactions virtually. Some nimble retailers (large and small) are providing \”video selling\” capabilities to allow their people to continue to interact with their customers, even virtually. Celebrate your people and highlight examples of success or incredible service. Make it fun and do a \”home fashion show\” where you award the best dressed/most creative/best office space virtually.
• Allow flexibility in timing, productivity, and pace. Recognize that broad closures mean that many are scrambling to care for their children, elders, and other loved ones. Enhance your sick leave policies – even if just temporarily. Allow flex time arrangements to enable workers to get their work done on alternate schedules. You hired each person for their professionalism, so trust them to adapt to their own situation and stay productive.

Customer Relationships

Make sure your customers know how you are managing through this, and what you are doing for them.

• Consider offering \”video personal shopping.\” If your store is closed, make phone appointments available so your talented people can provide the next best thing to \”being there.\”
• Provide in-person experiences to select customers. Use this to reinforce relationships with your best customers – whether this is still virtual, in their own home, or in store during special hours (or pop-ups). As long as safety precautions are met, this can go a long way in maintaining your bond with customers.
• Accelerate your digital experience. Overcommunicate on all aspects – store closures, hours, special programs, promotional offers, and overall customer experience – so that customers don\’t forget your brand and also continue to experience the brand the same way they always knew and loved.

Individual Employees

Recognize that this is new ground for your employees also. Encourage your individual employees who are working remotely to:

• Follow a daily routine. For those who are energized by exercise, with broad gym closures encourage home workouts or other activities they can do to stay focused.
• Understand the impact of sleep and the value of a calm mind. Science has shown that humans are suboptimal if they get less than 8 hours of sleep. Invest in remote mindfulness training to help each person understand their own stress triggers – and how to control their response.
• If possible, find a consistent place to work. While not everyone has a home office, using the same space daily sends important signals to the brain along the lines of \”this is where I do work.\”
• Plan their day – and then follow the plan. Offices, stores, or distribution centers inherently have structure. Our own teams tell us that they are more productive when they have a structured day while working from home. This doesn\’t mean, of course, that everyone working remotely has the same daily plan. Within the confines of \”flexibility\” above, give each person the ability to follow their own structure.
• Dress as if they were going to the office or attending an in-person meeting. This is one of the most important points we have found – dress for success. All of us that are privileged to work in fashion and retail know the power of self-confidence that can come from feeling good about clothing. Wearing pajamas, while comfortable, will not provide the best self-worth and productivity.

Technical Infrastructure

Transitioning from remote stores, distribution centers, or headquarters environments to purely virtual can be challenging from a support and bandwidth perspective. As Mike Golz, CIO Americas at SAP, says: \”We need to be prepared for an extended period of working virtually and will most likely keep many of the new processes, best practices and experiences in place when we emerge from the current situation.\”

• Evaluate your infrastructure and secure additional capacity if needed. Try to model what is needed now, in the short term, and in the long term – and ensure the availability of proper technologies and capacity.
• Choose remote solutions and communicate regularly. Allow employees to use one or several of pre-approved technologies for collaboration. We have found that providing a few choices helps us better serve our people and get valuable insight into what features and experiences provide the most impactful help to our teams.
• Identify system redundancy and contingency plans. Even after planning and securing capacity, there is always a possibility that a remote solution could be bandwidth constrained on the provider side. Make sure your teams know what to do if certain systems are down or infrastructure is overloaded.
• There is no substitute for seeing your counterparts. Research shows that the vast majority of a message is lost if communication is purely verbal. Provide or allow employees to purchase higher-quality webcams with front-lighting and train your team on best practices for video calls (positioning, background, lighting, body language).
• Challenge your teams to learn new systems quickly. Make it competitive – and provide awards and recognition as a result. Use this as a way to catch up on required training.

Your customers and your employees will remember the way your brand responds to this challenge. Many successful and well-known sports coaches have been known to say, \”every day, you are either getting better, or getting worse.\” Make sure you are headed in the right direction.

Most importantly, make this experience your own and do it in a way that is consistent with how you operate your company. If you do, you will not only manage through these times – but come out ahead, stronger together, and better prepared for the future.

We are pleased to announce the winners of The Robin Report 2020 Retail Radicals. We have worked in collaboration with SAP on our second annual awards program that focuses on identifying radical thinkers and doers (innovators and entrepreneurial leaders) exclusively in the legacy (brick-and-mortar) sectors of the retail industry. These radicals are clearly driving the major transformations within their respective retail brands. We celebrate traditional, legacy radicals because they face challenges that are much larger and more complex than those of the legion of tech-driven startups who are so often celebrated.

Our 2020 Radicals program has evolved into a data-based and qualitative awards platform. We identified metrics for outperforming retail brands across various sectors in the industry which were measured through a systematic quantifiable analysis. Qualitative factors supporting the data were researched across publicly accessible reports covering their major innovations, including breakthrough technology strategies. The combination of these quantitative and qualitative metrics frame this year\’s awards and support The Robin Report Index: 2020.

Like all strategic transformations, it requires enlightened leadership, major capital commitment, dedicated resources, innovative initiatives and extreme focus matched with a high-level of financial discipline to achieve success in terms of revenue growth and profitability.

\”The 2020 Retail Radical Award winners represent some of the most transformative companies in the world. These winning companies are on the cutting edge of experience management, earning loyal customers by removing complexity, resolving technical debt and driving nimble and efficient experiences.\” said Matt Laukaitis, SVP and General Manager of SAP\’s Consumer Industries. \”The analysis proves that these brands are executing at the top of their game, delivering measurable outcomes for customers, stakeholders and partners that far outpace the competition. Congratulations to these well-deserved recipients.\”

The Winners

As a result of our analysis, Target, Levi, Nike, VF Corp., and Ulta are the 2020 Retail Radicals winners. Each represents a discrete sector of the retail industry. Based on all of the strategic initiatives and innovations, these companies have implemented capital investments in technology, resources and infrastructure focused on elevating the physical store experience and accelerating the integration of their digital experience with the physical store experience while out-pacing their competitive peers in delivering the outperforming financial metrics.

Like all strategic transformations, it requires enlightened leadership, major capital commitment, dedicated resources, innovative initiatives and extreme focus matched with a high level of financial discipline to achieve success in terms of revenue growth and profitability. These factors define each of the five Retail Radicals of 2020. We believe the five Retail Radicals have reached an inflection point activating a successful transformation that will accelerate a sustainable profitable growth curve going forward.

Robin Report Retail Radicals Featured as Thought Leaders

Over the coming year, our 2020 Radicals will be celebrated in The Robin Report including in-depth reports on the \”star\” radical thinkers and doers and team leaders who have been major drivers in innovation and contributors to each company\’s outperformance. We will also feature Retail Radicals at The Robin Report Spring 2020 Executive Forum to be held at the SAP Innovation Lab on May 19 as well as at the Columbia Business School retail forum in August.

Again, this is a program unique to traditional retailing which is in the process of transforming itself to meet the demands of today\’s digitally savvy customers of all ages. We believe that the innovators in traditional retail will be the forerunners that shape the sustainable future of retail.

With the apparel market several years into its profit-crippling period of disruption, some of the biggest names in the business are finding that digital technology, the explosion of which led to the near-destruction of traditional retailers and brands, may now hold the key to their salvation. Brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Kohl\’s, Lululemon and Ann Taylor are rapidly transforming their design and product development processes to keep up with consumer expectations of getting exactly what they want when they want it.

Leading the charge in this effort is Li & Fung. In recent years, the $13 billion company, under the leadership of Spencer Fung, great-grandson of the founder, has increasingly focused on using its sourcing, production, importing and logistics platforms to become the \”supply chain of the future,\” a multidimensional world in which brands, retailers and suppliers can seamlessly connect to an ecosystem of digital services and data insight never before possible.

The Inevitability of 3D Development

Li & Fung President of Supply Chain Solutions Sean Coxall remembers the exact moment several years ago when the lightbulb went off for him: \”We were making physical samples and then photographing them. One day I came into a room and saw all these people sitting at the computer, touching up the photos, and asked what they were doing, and they said \’We\’re trying to make them look more digital, to put them in the digital showroom.\’ And I wondered \’Why on earth did we just waste 16 weeks and all this money to make samples? Why don\’t we just make the 3D renderings?\’ That was the aha moment, and I started putting desks in and started hiring people.\”

Spence Fung knew that in the future, the successful players in the apparel supply chain would use technology to speed up and optimize all phases of design, development, production, procurement and distribution.

Sean also had a strong hunch that one of Li & Fung\’s longtime, visionary brand partners would be perfect for this new approach. \”Daniel Grieder at Tommy [Hilfiger] is probably one of the most inspirational CEOs out there, along with Tommy himself. They really think differently. But using 3D digital samples to sell to wholesale customers? Daniel knew buyers would resist, that they\’d want to come in and see the physical samples. But he went ahead and did it anyway. It was then that I realized it was the only way forward. This would be the thing.\”

At the beginning, Sean\’s focus was the cost saving of using 3D, but then quickly realized that was only a small part of it, that the time savings all the way downstream, taking months out of the calendar, was the real game-changer.

Manufacturability

What sets digital creation of apparel apart from other 3D design simulations, according to Idy Lee, Senior Vice President of Digital Product Development, is patternmaking and production know-how. \”To make a design manufacturable, you must start with a 2D pattern and then create the 3D simulations from that. The creation and production of a garment require the block pattern knowledge behind it. We aren\’t waiting around for the technology, but are using existing systems instead. We have the best analog platform in the world and are now digitizing it.\”

Lee, who joined Li & Fung 15 years ago as a newly minted MBA, leads a staff of 120 professionals in seven locations around the world including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Delhi and New York. Her team does 3D design, product development, e-commerce and marketing work for the company\’s clients in apparel, hardgoods, accessories, footwear and more.

Walking through her Hong Kong group\’s expansive workspace, she indicates computer monitors displaying products of major global brands being created by members of her team, many of whom are designers in their own right. On one, we saw a beautifully detailed woven houndstooth plaid. \”Fabric of course has to be digitized first, to get it to real life. There are a few ways to do this. You scan it through some high-resolution scanners, and then do what we call testing, which captures the physical characteristics like draping, and creates an algorithm that can simulate the properties into a garment.\”

In the future, according to Idy, fabrics could actually be created digitally, a more inspirational way of developing products. \”You can do digital creation from a very core base fabric and apply textures, prints, finishes very quickly. For example, if you want to create different finishes, like a shimmering layer on a cotton fabric, you can create that digitally. You can create 3D models of the trims to put on the garment. The cost and time savings are enormous, and the product ends up even better.\”

Reducing Creative Risk

Brands love the increased creative possibilities. \”Designers and technical designers are saying it\’s giving them more white space in a framed-up direction. They can spend more time being creative while knowing it will sell. Everyone can work more like the luxury brands with strong brand DNAs to frame up their themes and their iconic models.\”

Could this mean that one day we will be being able to walk into a traditional department store and not see floor after floor of the same 40 percent-off khaki pants and golf shirts? Sean Coxall feels that the days of the \”sea of sameness\” at retail are numbered. \”If you walk into the new Zara in the IFC Mall here in Hong Kong, you think you\’re in a high-end specialty store. It looks really good, very clean, very sleek, everything displayed more exclusively. This fast fashion stacked-to-the-rafters thing is finished. Nobody wants to see a sea of cheap clothes.\”

Speeding Toward the Future

When he became CEO of his family\’s company in 2014, Spencer Fung started to reflect on where the company needed to go, and how to \”skate to where the puck is going to be.\” He knew that in the future, the successful players in the apparel supply chain would use technology to speed up and optimize all phases of design, development, production, procurement and distribution.

Getting the ball rolling with digital design and product development made a lot of sense because the biggest pain points for their retail and brand partners were the excess inventories and markdowns resulting from trying, and failing, to guess what consumers would want 18 months ahead of time. Using existing tools to digitize product development and design, Li & Fung was able to convince forward-thinking clients to shorten lead times from months down to days and, in some cases, hours. The larger the company, the faster those savings would accrue to the bottom line.

Said Spencer: \”We work with between 1,000 – 2,000 retailers. In terms of adopting a more digital approach, there\’s a normal bell curve distribution with 5-10% moving ahead very quickly to embrace new ways of working, then another small percentage that is very slow to adapt to using digital tools like 3D-design. For us, the opportunity is with the middle portion, getting them to change.\”

Playing Consumer Catch-Up

Rick Darling, a longtime Li & Fung executive who now runs Global Brands Group (GBG), owner of Juicy Couture, Frye Boots and others, feels that the shift to digital on the back end is fully in line with what\’s happening downstream.

\”There\’s a lot of innovation at the retail consumer level, with digital connections with the consumer, DTC (Direct-to-Consumer), social media. It requires faster, broader assortments, but the industry infrastructure wasn\’t built for all that. The use of technology is woefully underdeveloped in the back end. Li & Fung is at the forefront of unlocking the value of a what a digitalized supply chain can offer the industry,\” says Rick.

Rick has fast-tracked the shift to digital product development at GBG for many reasons. \”I would say now 30 percent of our apparel is fully digital. Not just digital samples, I\’m talking about digital design, fit, sales samples, digital photo samples, and in some cases uploaded to the web for selling so that nobody has to take a photograph. In footwear we\’re a little higher than 30 percent because we had a head start there.\”

Regarding the potential penetration of digital, and its impact on speed and sustainability, Rick is unequivocal: \”I think 100 percent is possible in the foreseeable future. It goes beyond a cost impact; it gives you tremendous flexibility. You\’re no longer inhibited by the number of SKUs, adoption rates, because you can design them quickly. You\’re no longer creating waste, and shipping samples back and forth and cutting out the backs to get through customs, and throwing samples away. When you think about the waste and the impact on the environment of our industry in the product development cycle alone, it\’s horrendous. And 3D capabilities allow you to jump start and go past all that stuff.\”

Necessity Breeds Transformation

Often the mindset change begins with a lightning bolt of inspiration. Sean Coxall recalls a designer who \”suddenly saw snake print:\” \”On the plane from New York, she sketched some designs and when she landed, she said, \”Quick, I need these styles.\” We found the fabric, knew there was yardage available, scanned it in, and by the next morning the buy was made. The styles were in the stores within six weeks, compared to four months previously. There was six-hour turnaround from Idy\’s team, all helped by the fact that we had existing blocks [block patterns].\”

Another brand had a striped fabric in stock that was outperforming others, and realized they needed to use it for more styles. They quickly sketched up the styles, and Idy\’s team managed another six-week turnaround for production for the chase-collection.

Coxall, whose been in the industry for more than four decades, shakes his head at the fact that there are people still doing things the same way as when he started at Marks & Spencer almost four decades ago. \”We\’re paving the way for a totally different way of working. The technology exists. It\’s just the mindset that needs to change, and it\’s starting. We have the intelligence; we know how to get the data. We know how to make a 3D sample. We can digitize the fabric. We can communicate with factories and mills. We can connect everything. The human beings are the biggest obstacle.

He adds, \”Spencer has an amazing vision, and we\’re here to help make it happen. It\’s hard, because we\’re disrupting ourselves. The vision, we have clear plans, we know what to do, and we\’re ready to bring people on this journey with us.\”

Alvanon has three special reports designed to help you make informed decisions, wherever you or your company are on their trajectories.

When Caring for People and the Planet Means Profit

How does sustainability make good business sense? Despite what some may think, profit can coexist with social and environmental impact. What makes a company sustainable and successful? Read more…
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Data + 3D = Efficiency!

There are five easy ways to ensure a perfect denim fit, whether it\’s the re-invented five pocket jean with wide or tapered leg or a chino-style sitting high at the waist. One thing remains constant: consumers demand a perfect fit, irrespective of design trends. As an industry, how can we best deliver fashion, newness and also democratize fit? Read more…

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Reinventing Plus Size

Of the 62,000 specialty stores in the US, only 2,000 of them focus on plus size women. The average woman in America is having a hard time finding apparel. Women who wear plus size clothing spend 20% more than regular-sized women: This means there is a huge opportunity for businesses who are able to bridge that 80% spending gap. Read more…

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Get the scoop on \”The Aging of eCommerce.\” And vital issues such as the health of the consumer marketplace from three of NPD\’s leaders: Don Unser, President of NPD\’s retail practice; Matt Powell, VP/Senior Advisor over the sports segment; and David Portalatin, VP/industry advisor over the food category. Gain insights into what\’s on consumers\’ minds; winners, losers and laggards across retail; emerging trends, what follows the maturing of digital commerce; what the landscape looks like in a new normal, and finally a 2019 Holiday outlook.

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Fast fashion is finally on its way out and the cost-per-wear value metric is making a comeback. Companies that were forced to reduce the quality of the materials to manufacture clothing just to stay alive in the race-to-the-bottom can finally pull their heads out of the sand, count their dead (brands) and take a look around at the new retail landscape that\’s emerged from the ashes. The resale market will soon eat up a chunk of the demand for off-price goods. Environmental analysts for some time have been pleading with consumers to choose quality products with a longer lifecycle. Shoppers are beginning to heed the call by purchasing higher ticket merchandise with the intention to sell or donate it (instead of trash it) when they\’re finished. In fact, 40 percent of consumers now consider a product\’s resale value before they even make a purchase.

This shift has led brand leaders to ask one important question, the answer to which will define the retail industry the years that come: Does this mean we will be able to manufacture quality clothing again?

Brands can finally resume manufacturing quality clothing without worrying that their products will lose out to substandard knockoffs. The retailers that altered their sourcing model to accommodate fast fashion now need to reevaluate their value proposition, manufacturing process, and the materials they use to create apparel to accommodate the return to a cost-per-wear value model.

Advertising Cheap Products Is So Passé

Next-gen consumers have been inundated with advertising for their entire lives, so it\’s challenging to impact their purchasing decisions through traditional marketing. Young customers don\’t buy in a vacuum, either. Their purchasing behavior often influences the shopping patterns of others who want to express the same \”cool factor.\” Certain demographics–such as young consumers and African American shoppers–are seen as influential trend-leaders and, therefore, the ones to imitate. This means their purchasing behavior influences not just their own demographic, but other demographics looking to them to lead the way. And next-gen consumers pride themselves on being above the advertising hype that targets them. Their purchasing preferences reflect this in a couple of ways:

• A preference for physical retail.
• Disillusionment with paid influencer endorsements (bye-bye, Kardashians).
• The desire for self-led product research.

Remember the old \”show, don\’t tell\” adage from English 101 to allow the readers to experience the story, not just hear it? Well when it comes to marketing, next-gen consumers are looking to be shown quantifiable product information to justify their purchase, not told what to buy. Instead of making rapid-fire purchases based on product photos on their Facebook ad feed, next-gen consumers are doing their due diligence–and checking labels–to weigh their options.

Sustainable, Washable Fabrics Lead the Way

Here\’s what doesn\’t suit modern consumers\’ laissez-faire approach to fashion: dry cleaning. The amount of effort that goes into tending to a garment can make or break a sale nowadays and the sustainability movement is playing a big role. Fast Company recently reported that the \”newest thing in fashion\” is consumers not washing their clothes to reduce their carbon footprint. Eco-friendly fashion startup Pangaia created a cotton/seaweed blend t-shirt treated with peppermint oil that needs to be washed less often than traditional fabrics. But customers aren\’t yet ready to step away from traditional laundering cycles still want to expend as little effort as possible to get their clothes clean. This means that they want to see the words \”machine washable\” when they look at the tag of a garment. Nearly two in three consumers (a whopping 62 percent) say that a garment\’s wash instructions are an important factor in their apparel purchase decisions. Retailers that choose to manufacture with natural fabrics instead of knockoff fabrications are uniquely positioned to reap the benefits of this trend, since natural fibers like cotton and wool stay clean for longer amounts of time.

Polyester and Rayon Can Step Aside

Consumers in the new, sustainability-focused retail landscape are demanding better fabrics with a longer shelf life. Just as retail is shifting towards small format specialty stores, in apparel production limited, curated batches are more in-demand than mass-produced merchandise and synthetic fabrics. In fact, scientists are discovering some pretty scary side effects to the synthetic materials that reigned during the fast fashion era. Who What Wear cites findings from Science Daily concluding that manmade fabrics– such as acrylic, polyester, rayon, acetate, and nylon– are treated with thousands of harmful toxic chemicals during production that can seep into the wearer\’s skin. This discourse has led to the launch of sites like the Cotton Inc. Check the Label Project, which encourages customers to check clothing labels and to choose \”Good for you\” fabrics, like cotton, over less healthy synthetic options. Sites like Check the Label are teaching consumers to prioritize natural fibers, to great effect: a whopping 78 percent of consumers now say that cotton is their favorite fiber or fabric to wear.

Fabric Longevity Is Another Biggie

Product warranties are also experiencing a resurrection. A recent report by the Fashion Retail Academy in London found that 39 percent of consumers would rather spend more on quality apparel with a longer shelf life than buy cheap clothing that only lasts for a few wears. Now that fast fashion is slowing down and consumers are putting more thought into the environmental impact of their purchases, the perceived longevity of apparel is once again an important selling point. But this doesn\’t just refer to clothing that doesn\’t fall apart after a few washes. Consumers want clothing that retains its shape wear after wear, since they\’re buying clothes with the intent to wear them for the long haul. Sustainable products advertise themselves. Many of the articles written for consumers in the past year highlight companies that offer lifetime product warranties, including outdoor retailers such as Patagonia, Columbia, and North Face. Preppy brands like L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer also offer lifetime warranties. While not everyone can offer this desirable return policy on their existing products, sustainability should be factored into retailers\’ sourcing decisions and their marketing decisions.

To the woke retailer go the spoils.