H&M Find Young Consumers And Rent Their Clothes?

Find young consumers.
And online rental platform must rely on clothing rental earnings to maintain different survival, fast fashion involved in clothing leasing has more appeals.
Do you spend 260 yuan on a fast fashion dress?
H&M, a fast fashion giant in Sweden, raised this new problem to consumers. According to fashion business news, H&M recently opened a new Sergels Torg concept store in Stockholm, where its headquarters is located. In addition to ordinary commodities, the concept shop launched H&M rental service for the first time and opened a tailor's counter to repair damaged clothes.
H&M's clothing rental service is for members. Members can rent up to 3 items at a time. The rental period is one week. The rental price of each garment is about 350 kronor 260 yuan, and the original price of goods ranges from 600 to 3000 Swedish kronor. Consumers can try them in the store, advance booking online, and make an appointment with H&M's personal stylist to provide suggestions for wear.
It is worth noting that H&M's rental service is limited to high-end series, which is more expensive than ordinary products, suitable for activities rather than everyday use, including about 50 selected party dress skirts and wedding dresses. It comes from the Conscious Exclusive environmental conscious action limit series launched by H&M in 2012 and some new autumn products in 2019.
It is well known that the fast fashion discount force generally costs more than 260 yuan to buy more than one H&M garment in the discount season. Therefore, H&M's choice to rent high-end products is undoubtedly a wise move.
H&M's rental service is limited to high-end series, and the price is higher than ordinary products.
H&M "hot" to develop the clothing leasing business to China. According to the latest news released by H&M today, the Innovation Lab of H&M group will cooperate with the rented apparel platform two or three in the national line to test the garment leasing business in China for a period of three months. It is reported that garment two or three, founded in 2015, now has 15 million registered users.
Laura Coppen, head of innovation laboratory at H&M group's circular and sustainable business development center, said that H&M was inspired from the two or three green environmental cleaning plant and the sustainable fashion vision of garment two or three. The laundry two or three operation center is committed to the recycling of water resources and the technical input to improve recycling efficiency, which is in line with the expectations of H&M group for its partners.
H&M is not the only fast fashion brand to enter the clothing rental business this year. Gap, Urban Outfitters and other fast fashion giants have also launched similar businesses.
In September this year, the Banana Republic of GAP, the fast fashion group of the United States, launched the "Style Passport" online rental service for women's clothing in the US market, using the monthly subscription mode. Users spend 85 dollars a month, or about 600 yuan, to rent three pieces of clothes with a unit price of about 100 dollars, and enjoy free distribution, replacement and laundry services. If the user sees a particular item of clothing, he can choose to buy it and keep it.
Earlier than Gap and H&M was the parent of fast fashion Urban Outfitters and Free People, the US youth apparel group URBN. URBN formally launched the women's rental service website Nuuly in July 30th this year. Users pay $88 a month to rent 6 costumes, similar to that of Banana Republic's "Style Passport" mode, but it seems to be more cost-effective.
URBN also appointed chief digital officer David Hayne as Nuuly president, David Hayne expects to launch the first year Nuuly to attract 50 thousand subscribers, create more than $50 million in annual revenue, and will not affect sales of clothing.
"We do not think that customers will terminate their purchase behavior and buy products that are suitable for frequent use. Leasing is applicable to goods that they want to try."
Nuuly tries to approach the logic of the renter. Unlike competitors who choose to rent famous fashion brands, Nuuly offers many niche brands, such as Urban Outfitters and other "self" brands, to create a unique competitive advantage. David Haynere believes that people usually do not buy a brand name product but are willing to try it.
Urban Outfitters parent's rental service Nuuly has more than 100 brands and thousands of items.
According to the current introduction of Nuuly official website, the costumes for rent include classic brand, new designer brand, senior Cowboy brand, and so on. It covers more than 100 brands including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People and third party brand Levi, s, YUMI KIM, YUMI, UNBN, and so on.
In addition, Ann Taylor, American Eagle, Vince Unfold, Express and other American clothing brands have launched clothing leasing business this year. CaaStle, a renting business in New York, is a rented business operator of the above brand, providing technical and logistic support. Style Passport is also built jointly by Banana Republic and CaaStle. In the future, similar men's renting services will be launched.
Christine Hunsicker, executive director of CaaStle, has said that the clothing leasing business can bring more revenue to garment retailers, because consumers often buy clothes while renting clothes.
In fact, clothing leasing is not a new concept at all. There are a few of the costumes, gowns and formal rental shops under the line. As early as 2009, Jennifer Hyman, who graduated from Harvard Business School, has successfully developed the business through the Internet. She is the co founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, the originator of the online rental platform. When Jennifer Hyman saw her sister worrying about whether to buy an expensive dress for the wedding, she started the idea of founding Rent the Runway.
Rent the Runway pioneered the business model of online renting and became the emulated object of many platforms.
Rent the Runway originally only rented high priced dresses. Now the scope of the rental service has been extended to everyday clothing, which comes mainly from designer brand and light luxury brand. The rental price of garments and accessories is generally only 10% to 20% of the market price. Rent the Runway provides single lease and monthly subscription, which has developed rapidly, and accounted for more than 50% of the total sales in 2018.
Rent the Runway's monthly subscription offers a variety of package options, such as an unlimited package of $159 / month. Customers pay $159 a month, and can rent 4 garments from hundreds of brands at a time. The total monthly loan amount is unlimited.
What it means is that the Rent the Runway, which has been founded for ten years, has become the object of imitation of the longer fashion brand of the brand history. Banana Republic launched the Style Passport online women's rental platform and the URBN group's women's rental website Nuuly, all from Rent the Runway Internet clothing rental enterprises get some inspiration.
The Rent the Runway, which pioneered the online leasing business model, is favored by the capital. Ali (201.89, 1.89, 0.94%), Baba founder and former chairman Ma Yun and former executive vice president Cai Chongxin, invested 20 million dollars in Rent the Runway in March 2018 through the investment fund blue pool capital. At that time, there were comments that Ma Yun would like to make use of the experience accumulated by Rent the Runway over the past ten years to improve the layout of Alibaba in the "leasing business".
Rent the Runway announced in March this year that it would refinance $125 million from investors. At present, the market value of Rent the Runway has exceeded $1 billion, and has more than 10 million members.
However, unlike China's booming online rental platform, China's online apparel rental platform has changed rapidly from the expansion period of 2016 and 2017 to the market contraction period, and the whole industry has undergone several rounds of shuffling. At present, there are only a small number of survivors such as "two or three" and "goddess" in the market. More platforms such as "multi garment dream", "magic wardrobe" and "clothes" have been defeated in the fierce market competition, and have gone bankrupt or completely transformed.
The ups and downs of China's online rental platform have surprised investors, and even more people who are concerned about the rental of clothes realize that because of the huge difference in consumption concept, the experience of foreign online rental platform can not be simply transplanted to China. Considering that compared with European and American consumers, domestic consumers do not have too many formal activities and the demand for attending parties.
However, many people have overlooked the fact that although the frequency of the rental dress is not very high, the consumers who want to rent their daily clothes are in fact only a small number, or the demand that domestic consumers explore the taste of clothes on clothing has not been cultivated yet. Even consumers who like to try more on clothing, there are also a variety of inexpensive clothing stores that can satisfy their needs on Taobao. The online renting platform is just one of their options, and may not be the first choice.
In addition, the problem of quality control of renting platform has been criticized by users. On the one hand, the clothes and pictures received by the users are different. Although they are known as famous brands, the texture is similar to that of the one hundred or two hundred yuan Taobao style. On the other hand, if the platform selection can not meet the needs of consumers, the platform will not be able to cultivate users' habit of long-term use. From a cultural perspective, in the Chinese market of "wearing new clothes", clothes hygiene problems and strangers crossing will become the psychological burden of Chinese consumers.
The fast fashion brand that has just launched the clothing leasing business may be fortunate that compared with the limited market of rented apparel platforms in China, there is still much room for development of online rentals in developed countries such as Europe and the United States, and consumers are more interested in renting clothes.
According to data from research firm Allied Market Research, the global online rental market is expected to grow to US $1 billion 850 million by 2023, far exceeding US $1 billion 10 million in 2017. A survey conducted by Trent University in Nottingham and Westfield, a shopping mall in London, showed that 46% of respondents said they would ensure that they could keep up with the trend of fashion and ensure sustainable environmental protection by leasing clothes.
To put it another way, fast fashion giants may not intend to make profits by using clothing leasing business. And online rental platform must rely on clothing rental earnings to maintain different survival, fast fashion involved in clothing leasing has more appeals. After all, the $more than 1 billion global online rental market is just a drop in the bucket.
The biggest demand is sustainable fashion. Leasing instead of buying can reduce impulse buying. Over the past few years, fast fashion has been criticized for producing a lot of cheap clothes that can only be thrown away several times. The choice of leasing can ease the negative impression of fast fashion and save consumers from the moral level.
According to the latest report released by fashion agency Thredup, 25% of female consumers said they would no longer buy fast fashion clothes from 2019, most of them young consumers. Of the more than 1000 women surveyed by Thredup, 58% thought that waste should be reduced this year. Another 42% said they would reduce waste by buying second-hand goods.
In recent years, H&M, which focuses on sustainable development, will also launch the clothing leasing business as an important step towards a sustainable and recycling fashion future. Its rental apparel also comes from its Conscious Exclusive environmental conscious action limited series.
The Conscious Exclusive series and the cheap edition Conscious series are all H&M's sustainable clothing series, adopting environmentally friendly organic renewable fabrics, including men's and women's clothing. Conscious Exclusive is mainly wedding dress, with more texture and sense of design.
From this perspective, leasing business may also be a new way of H&M to expand the impact of high-end sustainable product lines. Previously, H&M mainly promoted the exposure of the series with celebrities and celebrity models. Model Liu Wen, actor Yang Mi and singer Jam Hsiao wore Conscious Exclusive series dress to attend public activities or photos to be released on social platform. The white wedding dress released by Chinese actress Hsu Chi micro-blog (44.17, 0.31, 0.71%) is the Conscious Exclusive limited product donated by H&M, priced at about more than 3000 yuan, which has raised a heated discussion.
The second demand is to reawaken the attractiveness of young people to fast fashion. For Banana Republic's new online women's clothing rental service "Style Passport", brand president and chief executive officer Mark Breitbard said Style Passport online rental service will attract more young users, allowing more young women to try and test those new styles at cheaper prices. In addition, this service can help Banana Republic get more interactive user groups. Banana Republic can create more user friendly design and experience by collecting user feedback and related data from renting clothes.
In other words, fast fashion brands want to close the relationship with consumers through the clothing leasing business.
The function of apparel leasing in enhancing the relationship between consumers and brands has been verified by Rent the Runway, the originator of online rental platform. According to statistics, 90% of consumers who had rented famous brand clothes in Rent the Runway bought the same brand clothing or accessories after 6 months, and 98% of the consumers began to try to rent the same brand dress on the platform.
Rent the Runway says the secret is to reduce consumers' experience of certain brands, and personal experience is one of the best ways to attract consumers.
But the premise of all these assumptions is that the fast fashion clothes are really rented out. If the leasing business is not going smoothly, the online platform construction, private collocation services, clothing cleaning, packaging and transportation around the lease will bring greater cost pressure to the fast fashion people who are in the whirlpool.
There are also worries about clothing leasing that is considered sustainable behavior. There is a saying that clothing leasing is not really sustainable. It's just a publicity stunt for renting the platform. The lease weakens the emotional connection between people and things, and makes people more disregard for the value of things and the emotional satisfaction of having an item. Consumers only cherish the emotional value of possessions from their hearts, so that they can not arbitrarily consume and waste.
Every item of rented clothing will undergo a cycle of cleaning, packing and transportation. The carbon emissions in this process can hardly be counted.
There is no data showing the real impact of the rental platform on cleaning, packing and transporting a large number of rents, and cleaning, packing and transportation are repeated cycles after each item is rented out. According to the data provided by the clothing rental platform, each garment can be rented 30 times, that is to say, after 30 cycles, plus the large quantity and water consumption of renting clothes, the final carbon emission may be quite huge.
Elizabeth Cline, the author of the two book Overdressed and the Conscious Closet, commented, "there is no in-depth study to support the fact that the rental platform is essentially sustainable. We need more data on their impact on logistics and dry cleaning.
Fast fashion hopes to promote the growth of brand sales through the clothing leasing business, and is also "seen through" by the commentators. Elizabeth Cline is worried that the clothing leasing business will encourage our desire for fast fashion, because getting new clothes is too easy.
Fast fashion, no matter how fast it flaunts its environmental stance and the pursuit of fast fashion, is essentially sustainable. According to McKinsey's latest report, more than half of the fast fashion apparel will be abandoned in less than a year. Rather than recycling old clothes, launching sustainable clothing series or clothing rentals, perhaps making clothes more durable is really sustainable for consumers.
It is also based on this view that H&M and other fast fashion sustainable development concepts have been criticized by some people in recent years as a kind of "green wash" marketing. While actively promoting the recycling of old clothes, H&M was exposed at the beginning of 2018. In 2013, 60 tons of unsalable clothing were burned in Denmark, averaging 12 tons per year. In the face of accusations and doubts, H&M said that the products were "defective", and they could not be sold or recycled under any circumstances, so they were automatically destroyed.
After the incident, Else Skjold, a professor at the Turin School of design in Denmark, rebuked that in the eyes of the industry, H&M's practice was very hypocritical, and under the guise of "sustainable development", it did not do much.
In fact, even the sustainable clothing series that H&M bought this time was itself questioned by the outside world as a false propaganda. In early August this year, according to foreign media Dezeen, Norwegian Consumer Authority, a consumer watchdog in Norway, accused H&M of its sustainable fashion series H&M Conscious suspected of false marketing, causing consumers to make a purchase decision that they would not have made and violated Norway's marketing laws.
The Elisabeth Lier Haugseth, head of the regulatory agency, said that the sustainability information provided by H&M is "not enough", which does not fully explain the actual environmental benefits of each garment, such as the amount of recycled materials per garment. At that time, H&M responded that it was discussing with the agency how to make H&M Conscious series advertising more accurate.
Clothing leasing is not a perfect business, nor is it the only straw for fast fashion choice. It is also difficult to quickly save the current trend of fast fashion. Fast wake up from the dream, fashion has realized that more new attempts must be made.
In September this year, H&M group unexpectedly announced that it would sell other clothing brands in H&M brand stores. The brand first said on a recruitment website that it would open to external brands to increase brand vitality. H&M has developed an implementation plan and will conduct tests at some shops in H&M.
Previously, H&M group's &Other Stories and Arket have tried to sell other external brand products in the store. Some analysts believe that this move marks the 72 year old fast fashion brand is making a major strategic change. It goes without saying that H&M is expanding its boundaries. In addition to Zara and UNIQLO, the future will be directly competing with multi brand online retailers such as Germany Zalando and British ASOS.
The transformation measures of H&M finally achieved results this year. Sales in the third quarter increased 12% to 62 billion 570 million kronor compared with the same period last year, and net profit rose 25% to 5 billion kronor. According to analysis, the recovery of H&M results mainly from the contribution of the group digital strategy.
It is noteworthy that the third quarter growth was the first time that H&M group had realized profit growth after its eight consecutive quarterly decline. On the whole, fast fashion is far away from danger. Topshop's parent company Arcadia group, New Look, Forever 21 repeats the recession Road, withdraws from the Chinese market and then applies for bankruptcy. Gap sub brand Old Navy recently announced the launch of the Chinese market. American Eagle announced that it would withdraw from the Japanese market after its temporary absence from the British market in 2017. The alarm bell is still ringing.
Clothing leasing, launching e-commerce platforms, and even selling other brands in stores are all means rather than the essence of the problem. Fast fashion hopes to turn over, and the core goal is still to establish contacts with young people.