Global Fast Fashion Brands Compete With Each Other, Who Can Win

Fast fashion comes and goes in a hurry for 20 years

The fast fashion market comes and goes fast, and no one can stick to it for a long time. Zara and H&M, the European and American fast fashion pioneers who enlightened the Chinese girls in the early generation of fashion aesthetics, are now unable to hold the market. Many players, such as Forever 21 and Top Shop, have already withdrawn from the Chinese market.

Uniqlo, which was later accepted, won by virtue of its gender free and size segmentation, and its scenery in the Chinese market did not continue to cross the hills. According to the latest data of Tmall 618 in 2022, the local fast fashion brand Urban Revivio will replace Uniqlo as the number one in women's clothing category.

Uniqlo's strong second half was accompanied by the retreat of Japanese fast fashion women's wear. In 2020, seven brands of Japanese fashion group Stripe International, including Earth Music&Ecology, E Hyphen world gallery and Samansa Mos2, will close their online and offline channels for sale in China.

Around the second half of 2021, Chuu, a trendy fast fashion brand from PPB Studio in South Korea, began to expand rapidly offline due to its prominent tonal style. There are more than 40000 notes about their fitting experience and clothing matching in Little Red Book, and the waiting line for fitting in stores in key business districts such as Shanghai Wujiaochang often lasts for half an hour. According to the official data, as of December 2022, Chuu has opened 146 offline stores in China, which will continue to rise.

SHEIN, which has not developed in the mainland of China, has made a living in Europe and the United States by virtue of the trend of small orders and fast turnaround in the supply chain, and has gradually become the most popular fast fashion brand among overseas young people.

Looking back over the past two decades, fast fashion players have come in and gone out, and the players who can maintain a high market share for a long time are rare.

Don't think that ZARA is outdated. So far, few players can surpass the penetration rate of this Spanish brand in the world's fast fashion and retail markets, and don't laugh at the fact that Uniqlo has been left behind. After all, the first place is easy to attack and difficult to defend. It is a commercial miracle that the basic model can continue to win * * for several years.

Generally speaking, fast fashion itself is fast coming and going, entering and leaving the free market. Old fast fashion brands in Europe and the United States have gone from being highly sought after to fading out in China. Japanese and South Korean trend brands are gradually trapped in this land, which to some extent shows the rapid change of the fast fashion market itself.

The surface phenomenon of consumption and cultural dimensions is always related to the hidden political and economic forces behind it. A Japanese style, led by EME, has retreated from the trend of fast fashion, and the popularity of college style and lady style based on the heroine of Korean dramas has declined, because the young meaning contained in Japanese and Korean style fast fashion is not enough to speak for the current young groups.

This also contains the side path of domestic fast fashion and the rise of national tide. The young generation of Chinese consumers have begun to believe in and attach importance to domestic fast fashion brands. They need a local fast fashion brand that belongs to the nation first and then can stand on the world stage to express their own aesthetic trends and fashion concepts.

In this process, clothing, which is externalized and dominant, has become the most publicized and direct visual carrier.

Who can win the battle among all the heroes

It is worth noting that the high degree of distraction of consumers and the rapid shift of aesthetic orientation have put pressure on almost all players in this market. Every brand is under pressure and trying to speed up the supply chain to keep up with the rapidly changing market.

However, the general environment of the past two years is that the pressure on the supply chain has reached its peak, and there is almost room for speed increase. Both machines and workers at the production end are fully loaded.

SHEIN is a typical player in this mode. At that time, ZARA and H&M compressed the period from design to new design to about one month, and the ultra fast fashion Asos, Boohoo and other hard and fast fashion players shortened it to two weeks. By the time we get to SHEIN, the fastest response speed has been increased to one digit days. Within a week, if you see a new style jacket in the store, it may be the newly arrived fabric in the factory a few days ago.

A supplier from SHEIN's statement to the media may be more practical. He said, "It only takes five days from receiving orders and fabrics from SHEIN to delivering the ready to wear clothes to the SHEIN warehouse: one day for fabric production, three days for cutting, sewing and finishing, and one day for secondary processes (embroidery and printing)."

Therefore, to surpass SHEIN in a short period of time is almost regarded as an "Arabian Nights" by the industry. In addition, SHEIN's shipments have given it a say in occupying a large amount of production capacity at the production end, and many resources are inclined to it, which is the explicit result of the "best state" of the supply chain.

This makes more players who want to compete for consumers have to turn their attention to offline sales scenarios. In addition to offline marketing, what value-added services can the store provide to retain consumers?

The answer given by Fast Fashion is the experience of clothing matching - a skill learned from higher priced fashion buyers' shops. If consumers can be equipped with enough clothing matching specialists and put forward professional suggestions when they try them on, consumers will naturally have a better brand impression, so as to establish deeper brand dependence and brand loyalty.

In Chuu's offline stores, in addition to the sales representatives, each store is also equipped with a professional clothing designer, who has a good interaction with young girls.

Of course, Chuu's popularity is also due to the local operation team behind him. A large number of Chinese women's wear brands that have grown up from the Taoshi line are the backbone of this group of Chinese local fast fashion forces. After entering China, Chuu began to cooperate with the Amoy brand "Handu Clothing House" in 2016.

"Handu Clothing House", which grew up almost at the same time as the post-85s and post-90s generation, obviously knows more about Chinese consumers. By virtue of the resources and experience accumulated by the operator, Chuu soon settled in the flagship store of Tmall Global, and on the day when it was launched that year, its sales reached the top five of Tmall Global's women's clothing category, five years after its large-scale outbreak between 2021 and 2022.

Urban Revivo did not hide its edge and ambition. Also in 2016, UR opened its first physical retail store in Singapore, and then opened offline stores in Thailand and London. To some extent, it can also be regarded as the addition of brand image and the promotion of brand life.

Fast fashion, fast beyond

If you look at these fast fashion players who once had stable head deals from a vertical perspective, you will find that there is no pure online fast fashion brand in the booming Chinese market of e-commerce. In essence, the sense of experience, comfort and matching of clothing are all "trial", and offline is a sales transformation link that is difficult to separate.

After UR topped Tmall 618 last year, many old fans wrote in small red books, microblogs and other communities that when they saw the brick red exterior wall on Shanghai Huaihai Middle Road, they knew that it must not be a special brand. The clothing display design seen from the shop window, together with the lighting design of the retail store, forms the initial impression of the brand of consumers who pass by even in a hurry.

Some analysts believe that UR has always wanted to take the middle and high-end route, not only because of the design of the store on Huaihai Middle Road in Shanghai, but also because its market is always concentrated in core cities such as Shanghai from a nationwide perspective. Even if we focus on the city of Shanghai, most of the stores of ZARA are concentrated within the Central after the reduction of stores.

In addition to the core of the inner ring, the middle ring and other stores within the outer ring, when these stores build a high density of offline exposure and penetration of the entire brand in various forms such as flagship stores and department stores, consumers' minds are being subtly reversed.

"It seems that wherever you go, there is UR. If you have not bought or know this brand, you are out of date.". So I turn on my mobile phone and instinctively search begins.

Uniqlo has also used this kind of intensive opening of stores, and cooperated with its subsidiary brand GU to brush its face in the shopping center crazily. This practice has also played a role in the short term. At least when consumers perceive the strong offline channel spreading and management power, they will trust the online operation capability and quality control of brands in turn.

Therefore, whether starting online or starting offline, the two goals for consumers' mental penetration are the same.

But as I said before, in three or five years, the top position still needs to be moved, and no one can be the top position. The fast fashion is the most distinctive symbol from beginning to end. If you can't make a contribution to the "fast", it may be more difficult for the brand.

This means that they must jump out of the existing thinking cognitive framework and do something beyond "fast".