Alexander Wang The Brand Of The Same Name Should Be Financing. Where Is The Future Of Personal Brand?

After stepping out of the fetters of traditional fashion week, Alexander Wang also needs to put the idea into practice to solve the financial problems.

According to foreign media citing sources, designer brand Alexander Wang has worked with commercial bank The Raine Group to raise funds to open more stores and develop direct consumer oriented retail businesses.

It is reported that Alexander Wang sales amount of about 100 million US dollars, and the target amount of the financing is US $30 million, and we hope to find a partner who can help him achieve his business goals.

Up to now, Alexander Wang and The Raine Group have not responded to hearsay.

The brand name of Chinese American designer Alexander Wang was founded in 2005, and the first complete dress series was released in 2007.

The pursuit of tailoring details is integrated into the iconic black. Alexander Wang draws inspiration from the free and uninhibited Youth Street Culture and forms a unique American style.

After winning the CFDA fashion awards and the editor of Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, Alexander Wang entered the men's wear market in 2011, and won the title of "best men's wear designer" in GQ.

Alexander Wang himself has attracted the attention of luxury brand Balenciaga because of her excellent driving ability in fashion design and the popularity of young consumers. In 2012, he became the creative director of the brand and returned frequently between Paris and New York in the next three years, leading two design teams.

However, Alexander Wang did not take into account the development of personal brands and Balenciaga as the industry wished. In the autumn of 2015, it announced that it would not renew its contract with Balenciaga.

Informed sources said that Alexander Wang's performance pressure on the two brand businesses may be the reason for the termination of the contract.

After re entering the personal brand, Alexander Wang began to focus on strategic reform from personnel to business.

Because consumers believe that the men's wear series is no different from the T series, in order to simplify the brand to promote performance growth, Alexander Wang decided to combine menswear and T by Alexander Wang series. Although he refused to disclose the total sales of his men's clothing business, he revealed that the men's clothing series and accessories accounted for 15% of the total sales and sold in 195 shopping malls around the world, among which the most outstanding ones were the United States, Japan, China and the United Kingdom.

In terms of personnel, he first proposed the consolidation of three offices in New York, Paris and Hongkong, and unified management of nearly 300 employees.

After the departure of the brand's first president Rodrigo Bazan, Alexander Wang appointed Mary CEO Mary Wang as the brand executive director to take charge of global business, and hired Caroline Wang from IBM with 30 years of experience in the IT industry as executive director.

However, the new management team did not lead the brand to the stage of rapid growth. Alexander Wang ushered in a new round of adjustment.

Last March, vice president of global communications Tanja Ruhnke and vice president of retail marketing Souri Kim have officially left, and brand consultant Anjali Lewis will lead its team to replace two people.

After half a year's separation, Alexander Wang decided to replace CEO's position with the original fashion shopping website Goop CEO Lisa Gersh, while appointing the former fashion dealer Farfetch market planning director Stephanie Horton as the chief strategy officer of the brand.

This streamlined top management team has a clear digital orientation. The new experience and background of the new staff in the new media coincides with the pformation from entity to online direction mentioned by Alexander Wang.

Today, Alexander Wang, who has stepped out of its commercial operation, is committed to promoting brand creativity.

In January 2018, Alexander Wang suddenly announced that its brand of the same name will start from the spring and summer series in 2019. The spring and summer series, which should have been released in September, will be released to June. The autumn and winter series will be released from February to December.

The 2019 spring and summer series Collection 1, which was released from the fashion week, was released last month at the Manhattan port. This series is inspired by its Chinese immigrants' background to show the "American Dream". The single product also has more rich Street elements such as leather skirts, jackets, Indian printed scarves and so on.

It is noteworthy that this show also invited the following hot models, including Cindy Crawford's daughter Kaia Gerber, and Alexander Wang's friend net red model Bella Hadid to help, which wore last year's Met Gala wearing dress from the hands of Alexander Alexander.

Social media is subverting the fashion industry. The millennial generation's attention to supermodels and fashion bloggers is increasingly beyond the fashion show itself. Instagram fashion director Eva Chen points out that nearly 50% of young users are concerned about the Instagram accounts of many celebrities, models and brands, and will increase the consumption of fashion apparel.

Alexander Wang responded by saying that such an adjustment is designed to enable the brand to respond more flexibly to changes in consumer demand, while Stephanie Horton also supports NOWFASHION in an interview with NOWFASHION. She believes that Alexander Wang will no longer focus on traditional channels to communicate with consumers.

According to the statistics of social media analysis company ListenFirst, "autumn and winter New York Fashion Week" was mentioned 478000 times in social media, which was 31% lower than that in spring fashion week September in 2018.

Contrary to the trend, the agency ranked the top ten in the social media discussion on the number of social posts, fans growth and brand nominations in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Google from February 8th to February 14th.

In addition to trying to take the initiative of media publicity in the hands of brands, Alexander Wang also wants to strengthen control over sales channels to maintain brand image.

At the beginning of the establishment, Alexander Wang had established cooperative relations with a number of department stores in the United States, but in the trend of the cold retail industry, the brand strengthening of retail business is obviously more conducive to the stability of sales than that of wholesalers.

According to data from Alexander Wang website, the brand has 154 sales outlets worldwide, including independent flagship stores in New York, London, Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing, as well as stores in Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York and other general merchandise stores.

Its business is 60% from overseas and 40% from the US.

At present, Alexander Wang still has the independent operation right of the brand. However, the background of its traditional fashion colleges background, if it wants to further expand its business pformation, will depend on the injection of funds.

Since last March, there were rumors in the industry that the brand was seeking outside investment, and the designer himself might even sell a minority stake to help develop the brand business, but the negotiations with the private Holdings Company General Atlantic have not come to an end.

From the industry as a whole, with the fast fashion low pricing mechanism and the luxury brand younger "encirclement and suppression" independent designer's survival space, the designer brand similar to Alexander Wang is also facing the pressure of change.

According to people familiar with the matter, Opening Ceremony, a New York fashion brand, is looking for investors. In just 6 months this year, Stella McCartney, Christopher Kane, Dries Van Noten, Tomas Maier and other designer brand equity have changed.

On the other hand, the large luxury group represented by LVMH has no intention to invest in new brands. The current focus is on how to manage these brands and enhance the competitiveness of the first tier brands.

This means that designer brands rely on the strategy of the same industry giants in the early years or need to change.

Some analysts pointed out that unlike large fashion groups, ordinary investment institutions or investors are cautious about designer brand, because the profitability of clothing sales is uncertain.

However, with the establishment of a professional management team, Alexander Wang has more favorable negotiating conditions than a year ago.

In recent years, in the fashion industry, Gucci and Alessandro Michele and Marco Bizzarri have played a significant role in enhancing brand performance.

In fact, although the establishment of Alexander Wang did not catch up with the bonus period of Instagram, the brand was integrated with high fashion and street style at the beginning of its creation.

In addition, Alexander Wang is good at developing cross-border cooperation with brands such as Adidas Originals and H&M. If the brand can make good use of the role of social media in communicating with the millennial consumer value, maybe Alexander Wang can break the curse of designer brand acquisition.