This Fast Fashion Brand Has Produced A New Series And Wants To Be "Anti Fast Fashion".

U.S.A

Urban Outfitter (referred to as UO) recently launched a "ReWork" environmental protection series, the flagship 90s style.

Broad black and white shirts, simple lines of high waist cowboy wide leg pants, reminiscent of H&M's high-end brand COS.

Each item is priced between 40 and 120 pounds, and other items under UO.

There is little difference.

What is striking is its slogan, the anti-fast fashion label.

It can be seen from the appellation that this new series is different from UO's other environmental protection series "Renewal".

Renewal is a collection of costumes from all over the world and is reopened after being rebuilt.

This ReWork series is designed to recover the leftover materials of high-end fabrics, and then design and manufacture the factories in the northern part of the United Kingdom, which are more basic in appearance, and strip off the past easily obsolete fashion elements.

Another element that reflects the series's "anti fast fashion" is "limited". Because of the restriction of raw materials, "Rework" is sold only 3 times a year, and is sold only through the British official website or the London flagship store Oxford Circus Store.

The number will be printed on a single product to prove to you that it is unique.

The director designed the Lizzie Dowson, which was last year's director of design from the British high street brand Toshop to UO.

"This series is a little experimental, designed entirely from the perspective of anti trend.

Fashion is changing so fast that we want to bring something different to our customers through the new series. "

Lizzie Dowson told British Vogue.

1/9UO is not the first brand to put forward the slogan of "anti fast fashion".

H&M has launched the "Close the loop" denim series containing 20% recycled cotton in 2014.

This practice is seen as part of brand marketing.

After all, according to the Nelson 2015 global sustainability report, which we have reported before, 2/3 of the world's consumers (including 73% of 80 and 90%) expressed willingness to pay more for their sustainable brand.

However, the challenges faced by UO are somewhat different from those of H&M.

Its audiences are mainly 18-28 year old students, closer to A&F, Amercian Eagle and American Apparel, and the tastes of these people are changing.

According to a report released last October by Piper Jaffray, the proportion of teenagers' spending on clothing shoes has dropped from 45% to 38% in the past 10 years, while spending on electronic equipment has increased three times.

They care more about personality and experience.

This change is also reflected in the sluggish sales volume of UO.

Its three sub brands, Urban Outfitters, Anthropolgie and Free People, have fallen in volume and retail sales. The annual sales of US $3 billion 300 million last year did not meet Wall Street expectations.

CEO Richard Hayne attributed the decline in sales to "too many product categories and too fragmented".

In order to stop losses, UO once adopted a low price strategy, taking 30-40 US dollars as the main price range.

This led to a discount of 42% of the brands, compared with 24% of American Apparel and 13% of Topshop.

Obviously, these problems can not be solved once and for all, the product line of "anti fast fashion" with higher price and higher cost.

Quantity changes of new products to stores

From this perspective, a series of changes that UO started from last year deserves more attention.

The first is to reduce the number of new products to shops: from the first quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2015, the number of new products dropped by 30%, and the first quarter of this year continued to cut by 18%.

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Another is keeping up with the popular aLeisure.

For example, the introduction of sports Without Walls in 2014, last year with Fila cooperation, increased the number of high-end sports products of Adidas and Calvin Klein at the beginning of this year.

Despite all the growth in the UO quarter from online sales, the brand is still expanding its offline stores and making them more like department stores, opening more restaurants and joining household products, and has become one of the largest sales outlets in the United States, focusing on black gum sales in the US 8.1% (after 12% of Amazon).

Richard Hayne said that 24 new stores will be opened this year.

Volume changes in stores

Whether these measures are effective will still need to be tested by the market.

But for consumers, the questions they need to answer are always the same whether they can provide differentiated products for a long time and provide a unique shopping experience.