Fast fashion begins to figure out how to slow down.

Nowadays, market demand and consumption concepts are changing rapidly, and fierce market competition forces fast fashion brands to say goodbye to “ golden age ”. New Look, the British Fast Fashion Brand that once threatened to open 500 stores in China, has withdrawn from the Chinese market and closed all 130 stores in the Chinese market. Similarly, Topshop, a fast fashion brand from Britain, has closed its Tianmao store and its agent channels in China due to the adjustment of its international business strategy.



Globally, GAP, the American Fast Fashion Brand, withdrew from CBD in New York in 2018. Zara, the Spanish fast fashion brand, closed its first store in New York. Swedish Fast Fashion giant H& M shut down its Cheap Monday and took back its new brand Nyden. American brand Forever 21 has completely withdrawn from the French market.



This surge of stores & ldquo; tide & rdquo; can not help but make people sigh, once the scenery of fast fashion brand is now collectively cold?



The only way to fail is to break fast < br />.


Success and defeat will lead to failure. Fast fashion industry has only used a short decade from its birth to its growth. It is a product of dramatic changes in the garment industry and consumer demand. Its unique feature lies in & ldquo; fast & rdquo;. With the increasingly close relationship between design and consumer terminals, & ldquo; Fast Fashion & rdquo; has evolved into a fast response of apparel enterprises to the fashion design of the show.



Traditional clothing brands release trends from the T stage, design products, and then market clothing through channels, usually takes several months, high-end brands even take half a year. Fast fashion brands, however, can transform product concepts into consumer goods in a very short time. From design drawings to consumers'hands, H&M takes two to five weeks, while ZARA takes only 15 days.



But everything has two sides. Fast fashion brand is a global strategy, but to a certain extent, quality has become & ldquo; soft rib & rdquo;. Due to the shortening of production time, the quality and details of products are prone to problems, & ldquo; & ldquo; & ldquo; & ldquo; & unqualified quality; & rdquo; and other incidents, some rational consumers gradually abandoned.



At the same time, the consumption pattern shows the characteristics of diversification, individualization and popularization, and consumers are paying more and more attention to the sense of quality and design. Mature consumers focus on designer brands, light luxury brands and even luxury brands, while post-90s and post-00s consumers prefer personalized, fashionable and prominent design ideas such as Supreme, Off-White and Champion, which are more in line with young people's pursuit of personality and independence. More importantly, the preferences of the new generation of consumers are changeable, and there is not too strong brand loyalty, which also leads to the rapid rise and fall of fast fashion brands.



Therefore, after the dividend period of rapid expansion, fast fashion brands have encountered development bottlenecks. The old method of converting growth space by scale expansion has gradually failed. The market of fast fashion brands has been gradually divided and occupied by the attack of light luxury brands, fashion brands and sports fashion brands.



New retail concept of adding code



In order to reverse the decline and restore the market, Fast Fashion brand will focus on the new retail concept. As Fast Fashion & ldquo; Originator & rdquo; Zara chose Shanghai Times Square as the first new retail concept store in China, which is Zara's third concept store in the world. It has been presented in the form of flash stores in Tokyo, Japan and London, UK. Unlike previous stores, this concept store has two layers: ldquo; WEAR FUTURE & middot; Time to the Future & rdquo; with different sizes of LED screens installed inside and outside the store. It is full of high-tech interactive experience devices to create immersive shopping experience and build a new retail concept.



Dutch fashion retailer C& A has also chosen to launch a new upgraded C& A concept store in Hongyang Square, Nanjing. The shopkeeper combats black technology to highlight the store's personality. The store can manage all the screens and audio systems of the store through the unified cloud background; there is also a buried anti-theft system based on geomagnetic field, which embedded the RFID chip in the anti-theft buckle, in order to meet more business needs, such as collecting data of which products customers are more interested in, providing data support for R&D products, and also facilitating inventory management of products. In addition, through Beacon technology + Weixin Shake application, we can detect the customer's movement in the store, at the same time obtain the user's OPEN ID, can dock with CRM and POS payment environment, and understand the customer's portrait in the store.



Uniqlo, which has always been good at quality, has also made bold attempts to open a global concept store in Shenzhen. The store covers an area of about 2600 square meters. It is the largest store in Shenzhen that Uniqlo has opened at present. For the first time, the store has launched a combination of online and offline, through physical and virtual & ldquo; Digital Experience Hall & rdquo;. Combining with the characteristics of Shenzhen, which integrates science and technology with innovation, Uniqlo has launched four major costume scenarios: ldquo; classical quality wardrobe & rdquo; & ldquo; & ldquo; & healthy life gas station & rdquo; & ldquo; & Chaoqu Wenchuang Museum & rdquo; & ldquo; & 24-hour living space & rdquo; and four major costume scenarios. Not only that, Uniqlo held a large installation art exhibition during Paris Fashion Week in 2018. Liujing, president of Uniqlo Mother's Fast Sales Group, was repeatedly stressing at the opening ceremony that the distinction between fast fashion and fast fashion would be thorough.It will use high-quality basic style - ldquo; Welcome & rdquo; Fashion and fashion.



It has to be said that in order to get rid of the old image faster, Fast Fashion Enterprises are no longer trying to transform, but will digitalize and technology as the main driving force for the future. This dual-driven model of “ product + Technology & rdquo; will help enterprises to re-shape their brand image in the process of consumer change.



Cross-border Layout Competing for Market

In addition to efforts to change the brand image, in the case of weak growth in the main industry, Fast Fashion Brands also try to add new product lines to focus on trying to maintain the competitiveness of young consumers.



In 2018, two new MUJI HOTEL; GAP set up a three month POP KIT cosmetics store in Shanghai; Zara released the first lipstick series Zara Ultimate, officially entered the make-up market; H& M joint Moschino test water pet clothing. This year, C&A will also enter the wedding dress market, aiming at the mid-end market. Not only C& A, but also many fast fashion brands are targeting the wedding dress market. Shu Qi chose H& M's environmental conscious action limited series dress when she took wedding photos; ASOS, the British fast fashion brand, launched the wedding dress series as early as 2016; TOPSHOP, the same British fast fashion brand, launched the wedding series in 2017, including wedding dress, bridesmaid's dress, underwear, headwear, wedding shoes and other categories.



According to the forecast of Global Industry Analysts, the global wedding dress market will reach 80 billion US dollars (about 551.9 billion RMB) by 2020. According to the data, the wedding dress market is undoubtedly a big cake worth trying. However, some analysts say that it is not feasible for fast fashion brands to boost their performance by increasing their wedding dress series, and the marketing gimmicks in the short term are more than the actual sales results.



For fast fashion brands, adding new business sectors across borders can undoubtedly disperse risks, and at the same time, help brands to find and cultivate new performance growth points as much as possible. But in order to truly stand on the market and share a piece of soup, besides relying on its own channel advantages, we need to carefully consider the enrichment of product lines, quality improvement, brand image and so on. It is the most urgent task for fast fashion brands to recognize the new changes in the market and adjust the direction in time.



In fact, no matter fast fashion brand or popular clothing brand, after the brand effect and market scale have reached a certain level, they all need to further cultivate, so & ldquo; slow & rdquo; come down is the inevitable result, which is also a reflection of consumer upgrading driving market changes. When the market tends to be rational, smart consumers fostered by consumer upgrading will pay more attention to the product itself; the rich and diverse online and offline channels also urge consumers to have higher requirements for consumer experience. Faced with these changes, how to find a new self-orientation, find a suitable path for their own development, and continue to attract young consumersFast fashion brand will face an important issue in the future.