Today'S Luxury Industry: Global Aesthetics And Localized Sales

Mini Le Chiquito is the hottest bag in autumn and winter fashion week in Paris this year.

It's only 5.2 centimeters long, and even a credit card can't be blocked.

Many people sitting in the showroom brushed Instagram, only to notice that the model used to hold such a thing: the package is trapezoidal, purple, red and orange, and it can be clutched into the hand, and can be linked with the small handle with fingers. The right bottom corner is embroidered with the letter J, the short name of the French designer brand Jacquemus.

It is a pleasure to guess what it can plug.

"What would you fit inside?" (what do you put in it?

) after the show in February 25th, Jacquemus official account issued this question.

Tens of thousands of people came to answer: floss, nail tablets, enzyme pills, and Judy Law's hair.

Soon, this mini bag was made into "Meme" - "it can take all my budget". "Today I have patience for all people here."

Two days later, the topic "Jacquemus Mini package" also appeared on micro-blog, reading 18 million 891 thousand times.

Taobao has already had the same price of more than 100 yuan.

How many people will buy this bag is not important. The important thing is that it has caught the attention of the global fashion enthusiasts at a very fast speed.

It is not even the leader of the trend, but the terminator. Since the 2015 Fendi fist Peekaboo bag was named "it bag" by Vogue, the mini bag became popular.

Before the appearance of this finger bag, the media enjoyed the bags that could be hung on the chest, and the people who hung the bags on the chest.

Which is the bag?

It doesn't matter whether this matter matters.

If you want to replicate the fashions of fashion trends, someone will quickly release their whole body brand labels and tell you the price of goods.

Without considering financial constraints, the electricity supplier will deliver the goods to you at the fastest speed.

Or some people want to change, do not do the same bag of silly things, but just like this casual young style.

Ta has also found substitutes: minimalism, functional money, or quick fashion.

The point is that, like many people in the world, Ta accepts a possibility of hanging a bag around his neck.

Finger bags are just pushing them to the extreme.

It does not lack imitators, nor does it lack topics.

The topic is the light of life in today's fashion industry, the fire of desire, or the sales engine.

Thanks to social networking and opinion leaders, today's audience of a fashion topic is neither national nor hierarchical.

The important thing is style. The style determines the circle.

Even if you do not belong to any circle, just a fashion viewer, you will find that more and more single products become popular instead of the overall brand communication itself.

The US electricity supplier Lyst mentioned a typical example in its 2018 annual fashion report: Kylie Jenner, the Kardashian family member, the youngest list of Forbes's self-made rich list this year, wore a pink miniskirt to the birthday party, and after 48 hours, the search volume of the global business platform "pink dresses" increased by 107%.

The same fashion report also mentioned the most popular single items in the world last year, including the Paris family's shoes with fire, Gucci's red pockets and the Fendi Logo stockings.

Driven by these topics, the global luxury market reached 260 billion euros last year.

According to Bain consulting, the Chinese contributed 33%.

Other large consumers include the United States, Europe and Japan, which account for 22%, 18% and 10% respectively.

The instant nature of massive information shapes consumption desire.

Rihanna posted a self timer on the instagram account, and fans immediately asked for the red number.

Hector Espnal, the global makeup director of her own cosmetics brand Fenty, confidently told the media, "anyone who knows Rihanna wants to know what lipstick she is wearing.

This is her field.

And because of its fashion appeal to young people, the 31 year old female singer has also been accused of working with LVMH group to launch her own luxury brand.

In a more digitalized China, the characteristics of immediacy, homogenization, youth and middle class are more obvious.

You may notice similar fashion bloggers in micro-blog, WeChat, B station or small red book business platform.

Their ideal life scenes are highly similar: studying abroad, regularly exercising, eating salads often to lose weight, arranging some green plants and incense candles in the room, like Matisse's paintings or Haruki Murakami's novels. Daily life scenes are mainly cafes, art galleries and shopping. Some of them are also good at photography. They like to mix and match fast fashion and luxury brands with Logo, but are also willing to explore some niche designers.

The similarity between brands is pushing the homogenization of global aesthetics to a new stage.

Last year, Celine, Burberry, Balenciaga, Calvin Klein and so on changed the brand Logo to a sans serif typeface that looked almost the same.

Although they all claim to be inspired by brand history (a wave of minimalism actually started in the 60s of last century), font designer Chris Wu said in an interview with Fast Company that this change is mainly for adapting to the present: Logo appears in small size products such as lipstick or mini bag, and it needs to be clearly seen; even if it is placed in video or only in a few seconds long motion picture, it can also be identified; in addition, it has to be convenient for fans or black powder to pull out to make "Meme" and increase the amount of discussion.

You may also notice that Gucci and Hermes are beginning to make make-up like Chanel.

"This can keep our brand alive," said Axel Dumas, chief executive of Hermes, in an interview with French media Le Monde last year.

Since the real estate agent Bernard Arnault acquired 64 brands in 21 years since 1985, luxury goods have entered the various middle class families in the form of collectivization, daily life and globalization.

European fashion houses such as LV and Dior seek to make profits or expand production, increase product categories, or authorize their designs to American fashion manufacturers.

Also in the 80s of last century, the fast fashion brand Zara was born in Spain. The Swedish Stefan Persson took over the management of H&M from her father and joined the slogan of "popularity and quality".

Driven by them, the fashion of T is further democratized.

Pyramid, the top luxury product maker, creative fashion department store and fast fashion brand, has become a fashion.

These facts tell us that globalization is an inevitable matter of aesthetics.

But the speed of information flow still has decisive power. As mentioned earlier, it has more strongly shaped desire than ever before.

This is, of course, the trend of luxury goods.

Up to now, luxury products only maintain scarcity in brand sense, and spare no effort to promote sales: beauty, perfume, scarves, Keychains, sunglasses, sneakers, early autumn series, holiday series, cooperative capsule series...

Everything sounds like a chance to sell.

In terms of consumption upgrading, "better for yourself" and a more harsh saying, "premium mediocre" -- blogger Venkatesh Rao used it to describe "economic activities created by marketers and let the masses consume luxuries in the hallucinations" in 2017. Consumption has become a goal of life than the trend of dozens of brewers, hundreds of Chanel lipsticks or thousands of Gucci belts.

The appeal of global aesthetic will have a weird collocation at this time: localized sales.

There is no profound theory. In order to make consumers faster, more convenient and more powerful enough to buy their own goods, luxury companies must tap local consumers' consumption habits, cultural characteristics, and create more emotional proximity marketing methods.

For three consecutive years, localized consumption has been classified as one of the four consumption engines by the annual luxury market report released by Bain consulting, while the other three are younger, middle class and digitalized.

The best market for this portrait is China.

The picture is from Bain's 2018 China Luxury Market Research Report.

The picture is from Bloomberg. The data source is OC&C report.

A report issued by DDT in 2017 has pointed out that people in emerging countries have more consumption budgets than those in developed countries (70% vs. 50%).

Young people in western countries are less prosperous than their parents or grandparents. As a whole, their consumption is more low-key and more casual, avoiding the consumption of large luxury goods. The opposite is happening in emerging markets: young people have a better life than their grandparents, and are optimistic about the future.

Compared with other markets, Chinese luxury consumers are younger, more optimistic and prefer online shopping.

Their average age is only 25 years old, 10 to 20 years younger than the luxury consumers in the mature market.

OC&C, a consulting firm, surveyed the luxury consumption of nine young people in February this year. It also found that the consumption of luxury goods by Chinese Z generation accounted for the highest proportion of household income, reaching 15%.

Of the 2000 young Chinese respondents, 41% were optimistic about the future, compared with 26% worldwide.

But a key factor in promoting the localization and sale of luxury goods in China is consumption reflux.

This has led luxury brands to realize that the low fruit has been picked up - whether it is the grey gift market, which is spawned by corruption, or a wave of purchasing agents willing to run for the difference.

Bain consulted the 2018 China Luxury Market Research Report released in March 20th. Last year, 27% of Chinese luxury goods purchases occurred in the mainland, an increase of 2 percentage points over 3 years ago.

By 2025, this proportion will increase to 50%.

This phenomenon is mentioned in the 2018 financial year performance report of luxury companies such as LVMH, Kai Yun, Tapestry (Coach parent company) and Tiffany.

The peak group even said its sales in mainland China increased by two digits last year.

Consumption reflow actually occurred since 2015, but the external macro factors since 2018 accelerated this process.

On the one hand, the luxury retail center such as Paris has been hit hard by the yellow horse armor movement; on the other hand, although the new e-commerce law has been formally implemented since January 2019, individual buyers are required to pay taxes, but the customs have begun to be strictly checked during the eleven golden week in 2018.

In the first 3 months, China reduced import tariff, and the average tariff rate of clothing, shoes and hats and physical fitness supplies dropped from 15.9% to 7.1%.

The brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Herm s, Burberry and so on lowered the price of some garments and bags in China by about 3-5%.

According to the statistics of the Institute of wealth and quality, the overall average price difference of luxury goods in China and abroad decreased from 68% in 2011 to 16% in 2017.

The picture is from Bain's 2018 China Luxury Market Research Report.

Pictures from China industry information

After the consumption reflux, the localization strategy of luxury goods is much more than before.

This is mainly reflected in digitalization - 70% of China's luxury consumers live in the two or three tier cities after GDP ranked 15, and the luxury stores in these cities are relatively small, which also makes the development of e-commerce business particularly important.

One of the most direct ways is to get the storage, logistics, technical support and traffic resources of local companies quickly through capital operation.

Last September, LVMH's L Catterton Asia, an Asia consumer goods private investment company, and Jingdong invested $175 million in the Chinese luxury e-business platform Temple database.

The company's managing director and CEO Ravi Thakran said they saw the high-end consumers and e-commerce channels behind the temple library.

Last October, the Yoox Net-A-Porter (YNAP) of the group of YNAP of the peak group officially announced the establishment of a joint venture with Alibaba, and Net-A-Porter and Mr Porter will also enter the Tmall luxury platform.

The British luxury electric business Farfetch accepted Jingdong's 400 million financing two years ago, compared with its 2015 visit to China, which only received local attention in sponsoring Shanghai fashion week.

This month, it merged with Jingdong's Toplife and won the entry of Jingdong App.

Besides local market cooperation, luxury companies are also accelerating the pace of supply chain reaction.

"It must adjust its supply strategy, and adjust more products that Chinese people like to buy from stores outside China to stores in mainland China."

Bain consulted global partner Bruno Lanna and told curiosity daily.

At the recent analyst conference, Burberry announced that it had set up a logistics center for China to expand its e-commerce channels.

CEO Jean-Marc Duplaix of Kai Yun group also said at the analysts' meeting in the fourth quarter of 2018: "we need more products to go to China because the retail sales are faster.

This is also a top priority for us to develop online business in China.

Limited money in China is not new, even from the Tanabata Festival in 2016.

But they are never as big as they are now, and new year's Eve and Tanabata are the two most important nodes of time.

If you go into the high-end shopping centers in China's first tier cities (such as Shanghai's iapm or Beijing's SKP) before and after the new year, you will find that almost all luxury brands have launched the special products for Chinese new year, which are mainly made of handbags with higher profit margins: the three piglets series of Gucci and Disney, Dior's "Toile de Jouy" printing handbag, Mulberry's "Seaton" handbag, Longchamp Longchamp and Mr. Bo's bag.

Some brands such as Hugo Boss even printed the cartoon patterns of pigs directly to the store light boxes.

In terms of daily contact with consumers, luxury brands are also learning to use localized languages.

The most typical example is the choice of spokesperson.

Besides youth and personalization, traffic is considered to be the most important factor.

The signing period of these star endorsers is also very short, usually only one year, in order to maximize the use of their fans the most powerful golden period, while resisting the risk of fast changing traffic stars.

Angelababy has just become the first Chinese female star to be on the cover of the US Edition of "Vogue" this month.

In the introduction of the 7 cover female stars, the description of Angelababy only emphasized 6 million 900 thousand fans and 98 million fans on Instagram and micro-blog.

Wu Yifan just concluded his contract with Burberry last year and became a spokesman for LV brand in November.

Wang Jiaer acted as the brand ambassador of Fendi in early 2019. Almost at the same time, Zhang Yixing became the first spokesman for Valentino in China.

Dunn has recently endorsed Bally, while Liu Haoran is not only a brand friend of LV, but also a spokesperson for Tod s shoes.

On Tuesday, Loewe launched a picture album entitled "Z.TAO, Me and Myself 2019" for Huang Zitao, "exclusive and limited to 1000 volumes in China".

These brands also speed up the emergence of new social platforms.

If Chanel and LV advertise on vibrato, it is a new attempt. The Dior and Fendi under LVMH group will be put in the official account, but it will be "put down", which is closer to the younger, more potential consumers, though not currently in high spending power.

They also learned to distinguish the style of painting between micro-blog and Instagram accounts.

Fendi and Gucci's Instagram posting is full of art, but to micro-blog, they are keen to pmit photos of Chinese celebrities wearing products out of the street, but on the contrary, they are no different from ordinary fashion brands.

Z.TAO, Me and Myself 2019 album of paintings

It is worth noting that although the luxury industry seems to have gone through the process of localization, globalization and localization, the right to speak creatively has not yet been pferred.

It doesn't matter if you put the pig year pattern on the bag or turn the handbag into a big red color.

This is still a kind of localization in marketing, which is simple and crude in aesthetic sense.

Shandong Ruyi group, Fosun international and ICICLE acquired French luxury brand Lanvin, Swiss luxury brand Bally and France high-end brand Carvin only as an investment.

Their creative ability can not be fully measured through the financial statements, and they still need to be certified on the international T stage.

Indeed, there are more and more Chinese brands on the four fashion week, whether they are wealthy young designers who have just graduated from Saint Martin or Parsons, or Tmall and Jingdong, and the local brands they take with them through the cooperation of CFDA and the British Fashion Association.

After returning to China, young designers have to face the problem of how to balance their independent creativity and commercialization for a long time. What they face is a complex environment changing from LVMH, Kai Yun and Li Feng to big companies.

For those commercial brands, despite the constant concept of "combination of Chinese and Western" and "rising tide of the country", their positioning determines that they are very difficult to attempt in challenging the inherent design discourse system. Instead, they choose to integrate into the existing discourse field by replicating the aesthetic appreciation of globalization.

For example, in the past New York fashion week, Taiping bird found Gucci Ghost graffiti creator and artist Trouble Andrew co printing, and found Gucci's photographer Colin Dodgson filming Lookbook.

This is more about copying popular elements than recreating them. You can say that they can tell stories more, but it is hard to say that they will design more.

PEACEBIRD MEN 2019 Summer Campaign, the photographer is Colin Gucci Dodgson photographer Colin.

For luxury companies trying to penetrate the local market, they need to deal with more risk of "cultural insensitivity", and treat cultural taboos and national sentiments more carefully.

Prada and Gucci have recently learned lessons in this matter. The latter even set up a multi-dimensional development fund to prove their respect for colored people.

The D&G incident in October of last year caused the brand to suffer heavy losses. The aftermath of the incident has not yet been eliminated. Apart from the fact that commodities are still being erred by several big electric providers, the D&G fashion show of Milan fashion week just past has no Chinese media to attend.

Its sales fell by 20% in 2018, and the two founders also fell out of the newly released Forbes rich list due to shrinking wealth.

Although the important way of fashion evolution has always been to draw inspiration from different cultures, the digitalization of information and consumption channels has drawn into the distance of all other people, making the digestion, recreation and consumption of culture become more fast food, and also makes people's demands for cultural understanding and respect become more immediate and strict.

In the words of BoF columnist Liroy Choufan, "on the one hand, the world is more open than the original; on the other hand, many things can not be used without compensation.

In terms of form, business, logic or industry, fashion is a modern western way of creation based on take-and-use or take-and-abuse.

Now it needs to squeeze itself into the postmodern globalized state of mind, but the variables of this state are more and more closely scrutiny.