What Makes Peer Cooperation A Trend?

Lian Kai Fu * The Webster cooperation series shop display

According to the world clothing shoes and hats net, recently, if you have the chance to visit Shanghai, you can find many flamingo in the shop -- from doorway to rack, they can stand or rest, and the same prints or elements can be found on many single items on the new shelves.

These are all

The result of the joint efforts with The Webster, a Miami buyer's shop, is the symbol of The Webster.

"We agree with Lian Crawford that we can cooperate with a shop in Miami, which is very pleasant in summer, so it is natural to think of using Flamingo to represent Miami, and also represent the elements of our shop."

Laure Heriard Dubreuil, founder and chief executive officer of The Webster, explained to reporters the origin of these flamingos. "Although in the past, whether it was the shop itself or I have done many cooperative projects personally, the theme of Flamingo is the first time."

Lian Kai Fu * The Webster cooperation series shop display

The Webster, founded in 2009, now has 4 stores in Florida, Texas and California.

Prior to the establishment of The Webster, Laure worked in Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, etc.

The buyer Department has rich experience in goods and retail.

This also lays the foundation for her to start her own shop in the future, and to promote the cooperation of the shops with different objects.

In the 8 years since its establishment, The Webster has cooperated with LVMH's French boutique, Le Bon Marche, US Department Store Target and Paris Liz boutique.

Laure himself is also in the form of capsule design and Europe.

Brand Eres and other brands have launched cooperation.

"In recent years, the creative production process of the entire fashion industry has changed," explains Laure, who is interested in co operating with the brand.

With the development of social networking and the rise of fast fashion brands, the fashion industry has changed from the spread to the sales level.

On the whole, the earlier era of creating a trend by single brand or designer, or merely an authoritative fashion magazine, has become a thing of the past, and the barriers of consumers between different levels have gradually undergone different degrees of integration.

Just like Sabrina Fung, executive director of Fung Retailing, a private retail company in Hongkong's Li Feng Group, told reporters: "we no longer believe in one brand strategy, because single brand is too easy to be controlled by fashion trends."

In 2004, cooperation between H&M and Karl Lagerfeld shocked the outside world, but it also formally opened the prelude to the "joint" and "cross-border" cooperation in the fashion industry.

Since then, consumers have been surrounded and influenced by waves of cooperation, from UNIQLO, H&M, Adidas to Louis Vuitton, Vetements...

The brand positioning of different brands is becoming more frequent, and brands and individuals from different fields enjoy it: cars, cosmetics, art, architecture...

There seems to be no cooperation.

"A lot of people think this is a marketing tool, but it seems to me not only that simple," he said.

Laure said.

Cooperation with Juicy Couture in Vetements 2017 spring series

In the final analysis, all co operations can be classified into two broad categories.

If we discuss each other's cooperation, we may be able to see clearly the reasons behind the brand's passion.

Almost all cooperation can be classified into two categories.

The first category is the cross-border cooperation of other industry brands, IP, personal and luxury goods, fashion brands, designers and retailers. The form of A+B is the two party cooperation brand, and individuals are often in two different fields. For example, not long ago, Jason Wu designed bags for Cadillac's new models, the theme of world famous paintings by American contemporary artists Jeff Koons, and "Masters" series handbags launched by Louis Vuitton, and the theme afternoon tea set by Lssey Miyake and Park Hyatt Hotel Beijing.

Lssey Miyake afternoon theme tea set with Park Hyatt Hotel Beijing

The purpose of such cross-border cooperation is often more simple. The core goal is to carry out marketing through cooperation, and increase the weight of differentiated products with standardized products, such as beauty and automotive products.

This is especially useful for young people who are always seeking novelty.

More often than not, brands also value the brand of the other brand that is quite strange to themselves.

Taking Jason Wu and Cadillac cooperation as an example, Liu Zhen, Cadillac brand director of Shanghai General Motors Limited, told reporters about the cooperation. The first reason why Cadillac was willing to cooperate with fashion designers was to "cover, radiate and influence more outsiders, such as women who are more concerned about fashion information, through more channels and platforms, so that more people will have opportunities to contact, understand and even like Cadillac".

Conversely, for Jason Wu, cooperation with Cadillac will help to establish a recognition degree and reputation in a group of customers who are not very concerned about fashion, especially in male customers.

This brand, which is famous for its women's clothing design, needs to seize this opportunity.

Jason Wu attends promotional activities jointly with Cadillac

The second type of cooperation takes place in the same big category. Different brands, designers and retailers (A+A mode, that is, the two party cooperation brand is in the same field, but positioning and tonality are often different).

The collaboration between LC and The Webster, H&M and Kenzo, Balmain and other advanced garment brands, UNIQLO, J.W. Anderson, Louis Vuitton and Supreme all fall into this category.

The brand is the class, and the concretion of class is the consumer group of different cultural background and behavior. For different brands, through proper cooperation, it breaks the class and cultural barriers, achieves the "pleasant surprise" type of emotional resonance, and also brings the most crucial goal of retail links: exposure to the originally difficult to differentiate the level of consumer groups.

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Apart from being a market maker, what can co operative cooperation bring to fashion brands?

However, in terms of cooperation within the fashion sector, the partners expect more from it.

In addition to meeting different levels of consumer groups, there is often the purpose of supporting Rebranding.

In January 2017, Coach announced the launch of a joint venture with Rodarte, a niche designer who started in Losangeles, USA. It has launched 15 products including handbags and garments.

Rodarte has always shown itself in an independent, alternative, and avant-garde style. In fact, the poorly dressed shows often sell at a high price, making it difficult for outsiders to find the clue.

At first glance, the collocation between Rodarte and Coach is not harmonious.

But considering Coach's efforts in recent years, it is to get rid of the image of "aunt gas" in the past.

Then, cooperation with Rodarte, which emphasizes "value preservation", will make the brand more cool and rare. At the same time, it will establish goodwill among young people.

After all, for today's Coach, change is the pursuit of "scale" from the past to enhance the value of a single brand.

Of course, this kind of excess is not successful overnight.

This is why Coach, on the one hand, has been laying out various forms of cooperation. On the other hand, it has begun to accumulate more power through acquisitions. Not long ago, Coach has just acquired a high-profile brand Kate Spade, a young female consumer group.

This is considered to be an important part of Coach in building a luxury group.

Coach and Rodarte cooperation series

Similarly, UNIQLO has also made plans to update its brand image through various joint ventures.

Moreover, to some extent, cooperation has become a stepping stone to long-term cooperation between brands and famous designers and brands.

In 2013, UNIQLO changed its brand slogan from "Made for All" to "LifeWear" and promoted the company's strategy from "basic funds" to the past. The specific measures were to launch a brand or personal collaboration with multiple fields and dimensions in every season, including Jil Sander, Undercover, French supermodel Ines de la Fressange, former French editor, chief editor, and artists.

By the autumn and winter of 2015, Christophe Lamaire, the original creative director of Hermes, has become the newest partner of the brand. Now Lamaire directly enters the research and development center of UNIQLO in Paris. It has become the brand new art director and has set up a new U series. On its latest list, Jonathan Anderson, one of the hottest designers of the fashion industry in the past two years, is on the list.

From the perspective of pformation and upgrading, different positioning or high and low collocation, although it looks like the mass brand has been exposed to the brand of high light, but it is not.

Because often this side also has the advantages of supply chain and market channel.

As for Rodarte, its joint series with Coach is sold in Coach stores, official website and designated buyer stores, which is the scale of sales channels that the brand could not achieve.

So, we can also see that before Coach, Rodarte also cooperated with Target, an American retailer with a larger scale and a supply chain advantage.

With these two advantages, Target has become the favorite of designers.

Victoria Beckham recently launched a series of women's wear with Target.

Laure's first cooperation invitation after the establishment of The Webster is also from Target.

Adidas * Alexander Wang

If there are two brands that are evenly matched in their respective fields, there will be more possibilities.

The most typical example recently is Louis Vuitton and Supreme, though they are quite different in positioning, but no doubt they are the most consumerist symbols in their own.

In addition, brands can seek more practical reciprocity in cooperation.

The same is Supreme, in its cooperation with The North Face, Supreme can get the support of the latter functional fabric, and The North Face can also use the influence of Supreme to reshape the gold clothing for its brand tonality. This can also explain why The North can be penetrated into the fashion world gradually through functional culture, becoming a popular candidate for the joint venture.

The original intention of cooperation is to add icing on the cake.

It is worth mentioning that, whether cross-border or in the fashion sector cooperation, whether high and low complementary, or strong combination, brands will carefully select partners. In other words, brands know that cooperation must be convincing, so that customers can be convinced, otherwise no one will be willing to pay for cooperation.

"If I work for cooperation only, then I think it will fail.

The most important thing for us to cooperate is to seize the advantage of the other side without losing our own characteristics. The 22 combination is to achieve good results, "Laure said.

In collaboration with Lian Crawford, Laure not only blindly designed the Flamingo device to echo the theme of cooperation, but also played the experience accumulated by her buyer for many years. She selected a series of summer series recommended by The Webster from the products of link Crawford, making the cooperation between the two stores more attractive.

Look at the cooperation between Jason Wu and Cadillac.

Although Jason Wu was slightly more "farfetched" from the early stage, he participated in the design of Cadillac's new model. But more convincingly, he designed several bags for the model and placed them in the trunk of the car, thus achieving the purpose of "being a part of the car".

Lian Kai Fu * The Webster cooperation series shop display

Lian Kai Fu * The Webster cooperation series shop display

But now, the brand side also needs to pay attention to how to get customers to be fed up with the form of joint cooperation. It is no exaggeration to say that almost every day the fashion industry can tell the news of co operation.

From this perspective, brands are striving to enrich the form of cooperation.

In the past, most of the cooperation was centered around the visible and tangible aspects of packaging and product design. Now there is a collaboration between The and Webster, which is beyond the scope of design and takes retail management as the medium.

In addition, there are more and more cases involving three or more parties.

"I think it's still necessary to see the content of cooperation, which is good enough to be competitive," Laure said. "Customers know how to distinguish what is good, and they are still excited about good cooperation."

For this reason, compared with the competitive brands, UNIQLO is more suitable in choosing the partners, and in the final presentation, the senior vice president of global research and design, Sheng Tian Ji, has mentioned to reporters: "our cooperation is not a cheap copy of the works of senior designers. We are still studying and upgrading products according to the Japanese aesthetic point of view, so our cooperation series is more like inviting an expert to consult and discuss."

More interesting reports, please pay attention to the world clothing shoes and hats net.