Can We Find The Way To Break The Fast Fashion After The Triumph?

The fast fashion brand that once attacked the world and sang songs all over the world is now in the dark.

When the fast fashion industry is in a bottleneck, the trend of the fast fashion three giants represented by Zara, H&M and Uniqlo almost reflects and indicates the overall development trend of the fast fashion industry.

Betting online platform, increasing brand types, opening customized services, and increasing smart technology.

Fast fashion brands can say quite a lot in this year's new moves and initiatives.

However, can these strategies help the fast fashion brands who have never seen a fortune to escape the recession and get rid of their predicament and find a new way to break the situation?

Zara

After opening the third generation of Logo in spring this year, Zara has a lot of new moves and strategies. It is easy to see the courage and determination of this fast fashion giant.

In November 2018, Zara opened up 106 new global market for e-commerce websites. Now Zara is wired on the 202 markets in the world.

Inditex group said it would sell all the brands of the group through the electricity supplier to all the markets in the world by 2020, and then optimize the online platform, while increasing the offline shop services.

The group's store strategy in 2019 will be dominated by online, and the fast growing stores will expand. The general stores will be optimized or turned off.

In addition to developing online platforms, Zara's strategy also includes focusing on online and offline stores, developing intelligent operation systems, providing sound technology to track store customers, and providing virtual assistants for consumers.

Another big move of Inditex is to gradually integrate its furniture sub brand Zara Home into Zara, and home will become the fourth category of Zara business in the future.

Inditex said the move is aimed at enhancing synergy among brands, giving full play to the leverage of entity stores and online platforms in operation and brand management, in line with the group's full channel integration strategy, which is also the group's most important strategy before 2020.

In addition, the Zara brand TRF series will open the denim customization service, which is undoubtedly a major move to enhance and improve the offline consumer experience.

Zara cowboy custom service first landed in three brand stores in Barcelona, Spain, Holland, Amsterdam and Italy Milan in March 27th. Online customization services first landed on the electronic platform of Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Holland.

H&M

In addition to implementing online and offline store integration, strengthening and optimizing the store portfolio strategy, the Swedish fast fashion giant H&M has been making continuous efforts in sustainable development and environmental protection this year.

The group announced recently that it will launch a pilot project in Sweden to sell its brand & Other Stories's second-hand and antique costumes.

The partner of this pilot project is Sweden's second-hand trading platform Sellpy.

At the same time, H&M in April 2nd with the second-hand trading platform leisure fish to cooperate, launched the old clothes recycling service, and combined with online recycling mode.

H&M said the move is aimed at addressing the growing consumer concerns about the fast fashion environment, which will expand to other markets and brands in the next few years.

And in the April 5th global change awards, the H&M foundation invested 300 thousand euros to support a company that invented recyclable digital systems. This recyclable technology enables every garment to be recycled from design to dressing to recycling.

It is obvious that H&M is trying to save the bruising of fast fashion brands that wear several times.

In addition to overweight and sustainable development, H&M also has many new moves in AI, AR technology and other digital investments.

As early as July 2018, H&M launched the voice control intelligent interactive mirror at the flagship store of times square in New York, and put forward suggestions on clothing styles according to the needs of consumers.

Recently, H&M has opened a new Internet platform Itsapark to the public. It aims to provide consumers with a platform to solve fashion problems and seek new inspiration.

Itsapark adopts a visual layout similar to Instagram, which allows users to ask questions and answer. The website also provides links to all products.

H&M group said that the recent investment in different fields of digital technology, 3D technology and artificial intelligence also invested a lot of money, in the future group can predict these trends based on these data, to provide consumers with better quality and lower price products, provide a better shopping experience.

Uniqlo

The "Ming plan", which was launched in 2017, is changing the business model of Uniqlo to pform it into a truly digital consumer retail companies.

In order to cater for the needs of consumers in the digital age, Uniqlo constantly promotes digital pformation, effectively configuring all kinds of resources, integrating online and offline resources, and strives to improve the consumer experience.

In addition to opening digital experience in physical stores and implementing routine practices such as intelligent buyers, Uniqlo also launched intelligent robots and set up vending machines in many cities.

In the Chinese market, Uniqlo recently launched its flagship flagship store. Consumers use the "one click and buy with the heart" function to enter the online shopping mall directly through various channels such as WeChat, micro-blog, shops, etc., and choose to pick up goods at home or store, thus greatly reducing the intermediate links.

On line, Uniqlo continuously optimizes content, and "follow the heart" function to provide clothing recommendation for different occasions for consumers. The "heart to heart" function can choose to give clothes to friends around, so that the flagship store has the attributes of social networking + e-commerce.

In addition, Uniqlo parent fast marketing group has launched the production and retail pformation based on artificial intelligence AI to predict production demand and analyze customer behavior.

In fiscal year 2018, sales of Uniqlo in Japan amounted to 864 billion 700 million yen, of which online channel sales accounted for 7.3% of total sales. The Greater China market, as the main driver of Uniqlo's overseas market, accounted for 15% of the total sales.

The next goal of Uniqlo is to expand the proportion of online sales to 30% and introduce services that enable consumers to buy goods anytime and anywhere.

In addition to constantly promoting the pace of digital pformation, and constantly integrate online and offline channels, Uniqlo will have more new initiatives next.

In terms of channels, Uniqlo will connect the global distribution channels with a new website. In terms of products, in addition to strengthening the basic product line, it will also sell exclusive single products online. In terms of market development, Uniqlo plans to accelerate the expansion of overseas market based on Asia in the current fiscal year, with special emphasis on the 1000 branches in China in 2020.

Breaking the road

As we all know, the fast fashion brands who once attacked the world and sang songs all over the world were not very good in the past two years. They were more or less mourning. The small brands were out of fashion, and the big brands were fading away.

With the rapid development of the electricity supplier channel, the rapid development of high technology and social media, the saturation of the market and the slow development of the market, the fast fashion brands that have ever seen explosive growth are generally facing the bottleneck of expansion. Especially when products, supply chain systems and brand marketing strategies are difficult to get a breakthrough in a short time, Zara, H&M and other fast fashion brands are faced with the phenomenon of oversupply and loss of consumers.

Many fashion business operators like Asos, Boohoo and Misguided are rising vigorously. These online professional players who join the online digital experience join the fashion retail war. They are becoming more and more stressed by their fast developing fashion brands, not to mention the emergence of new brands and electronic business platforms.

So, betting online platform, increasing brand categories, opening customized services, upgrading smart technology, improving shopping experience...

In the face of slow sales growth and fierce market competition, fast fashion brands are doing quite a bit of new action and new initiatives this year.

It can be said that the trend of the fast fashion three giants represented by Zara, H&M and Uniqlo almost reflects and indicates the overall development trend of the fast fashion industry.

From the new moves and actions of the three giants, we can easily find that the new strategy of fast fashion brands is no more than stepping into new fields, expanding new businesses, developing new technologies and upgrading new experiences.

But it can be summed up in the following ways: improving the development status, seeking new market opportunities, finding new growth points, and exploring more possibilities.

But can these new strategies enable the once fast fashion brands to escape from the recession, get rid of the current predicament, reinvigorate their performance and reputation, and find new avenues of sunshine?

It's hard to say.

After all, changes in the market are like spring weather.

The consumption revolution is taking place.

Future development is hard to predict.

Opportunity is the same for any brand.

The fast fashion brands who have been rushing through the rivers and lakes have been able to break through bottlenecks and find new breakthroughs in the slow growth of the fashion brands. Can they reinvigorate their strength to cope with the surging wave of digitalization or redefine and write fast fashion? Let's wait and see.