What Fashion Retail Professionals Need to Know Today

Opens in new window

Discover the most relevant industry news and insights for fashion professionals working in retail, updated each month to enable you to excel in job interviews, promotion conversations or perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distills business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events — to deliver key takeaways and learnings tailored to your job function, listed alongside a selection of the most exciting live jobs advertised by BoF Careers partners.

Explore global job opportunities in retail on BoF Careers today, from a department manager at Paul Smith in London, a sales associate at Citizens of Humanity in Aspen, to a store manager at Carhartt WIP in Munich, or a sales team manager at Gucci in Seoul.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for retail professionals today:

1. Inside Luxury’s Slowdown

Soaring prices for familiar designs — such as the Lady Dior bag, which now retails for €5,900 ($6,500) or 76 percent higher than in 2019 — combined with macroeconomic headwinds in key regions have put significant strain on the luxury sector in recent months. Dior-owner LVMH is no exception. The French luxury conglomerate’s third-quarter results, announced after market on 15 October, were expected to be grim.

After gradually cooling off from post-pandemic highs, the global luxury market has slipped into a proper downturn, which could be both longer and more severe than initially forecast. What began as consumer fatigue with heavily logoed products and slowing sales to less-wealthy “aspirational” clients has since spread across price points and aesthetics. Sector leader LVMH saw sales fall 1 percent in the first half; Gucci owner Kering reported a 20 percent drop.

2. Why Men’s Retail Is Booming in Manhattan

Angelo Baque says he never envisioned opening a store for his 12-year-old New York-based streetwear label Awake because of how challenging it is to run a brick-and-mortar business in Manhattan. But in June last year, Awake opened the doors to its first physical shop, on the hot retail strip of Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side.

Awake is part of a wave of menswear brands opening stores across downtown Manhattan at a moment when young consumers are eager for in-person shopping, social media marketing feels stale and less effective, and menswear and streetwear brands are trying to appeal to a changing customer looking for something new. While CBRE reports leasing in Manhattan has slowed this past quarter, with fewer vacancies available and post-pandemic rents rising, new-to-market brands are still signing the most deals. And for new menswear retail specifically, downtown New York remains foundational.

3. How Brands Make the Most of Sample Sales

Sample sales aren’t just coming out of hiding; they are increasingly viewed as another tool in brands’ marketing arsenal, especially now that they routinely go viral on TikTok. But they still retain enough of their in-the-know sheen to serve as a more glamorous way to offload unsold inventory. Brands looking to hold a sample sale often go with a specialist. The biggest in the US is 260 Sample Sale, which began running the logistics of sample sales for designer brands in 2003, and held 346 samples sales this year.

Meanwhile, a crop of social media-savvy start-ups such as Sensoria, Sample Sale London and Alfargo’s Marketplace have also entered the scene, moving the experience online, improving customer service with sales floor personnel. Some sample sale platforms are pitching themselves to brands as elevated alternatives to off-price channels, breaking the stereotype of disorganised, chaotic sales floors with minimal customer service.

4. The Glory Days of the Pop-Up Store Are Over. What’s Next?

Pyjama-maker Petite Plume’s real-life marketing strategy is to insert itself into buzzy locales rather than try to build one of its own from scratch. The brand has partnered with the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and developed a collaboration with Veronica Beard that was stocked in 30 of that brand’s stores. “The whole idea is meeting the customer where she is but finding a relevant way to do it,” said Fanny Quehe, Petite Plume’s chief marketing officer. “These partnerships help us capitalise on brick-and-mortar experiences without the massive investments that go into them.”

The glory days of pop-ups are long gone, however. Retail vacancies are at a decade-low in the US and landlords are less willing to accept short-term leases. The expense is another hurdle: in the part of SoHo where Rhode had its pop-up, asking rents rose 27 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2024, according to CBRE. A few blocks over, another shopping corridor saw rents soar 60 percent in the same period. That doesn’t consider the cost of actually building out a temporary store, or staffing it.

5. Why Mytheresa Bought Yoox-Net-a-Porter

This month, Mytheresa announced it would acquire its distressed competitor Yoox Net-a-Porter (YNAP) from Swiss conglomerate Richemont. The deal, slated to close in the first half of 2025, aims to bring together Germany’s Mytheresa, which has built a profitable business catering to ultra-high-net-worth shoppers, with the larger Net-a-Porter, which set the template for online luxury retail when it launched in the early 2000s. The companies will continue to exist as two standalone e-commerce sites.

The hope is that bringing the two firms under one roof will break the cycle of escalating customer acquisition costs, brand defections and similar-seeming product offerings that have dogged luxury e-tailers for years. Mytheresa shares spiked more than 50 percent on news of the deal, ending Monday at a four-month high.

6. Nike’s Declining Brand Heat, in Five Charts

This month, Elliott Hill arrived at the starting block for his new role as Nike’s chief executive with a long row of hurdles in front of him. There are Nike’s challenges rebuilding its relationships with wholesale partners, the rise of brands like On and Hoka drawing away customers and Nike’s lack of innovative new products to help it fend off the competition, to name a few. But one of the biggest issues facing Nike right now is its declining brand heat.

For years, Nike was the hottest sneaker brand around, a status built on the popularity of a handful of retro models such as Jordan 1s, Dunks and Air Force 1s that customers clamoured to get their hands on during and after the pandemic. But those shoes have cooled considerably. Data from sources such as Google and the resale market show how interest around them has declined, suggesting a broader cool down for the Nike brand.

7. The BoF Podcast | How Zac Posen is Reenergising Gap Inc.

Zac Posen burst onto the fashion scene in the early 2000s, gaining acclaim for his glamorous designs and dressing Hollywood’s elite. After nearly two decades, Posen closed his label in 2019, finding himself at a crossroads that eventually led to a meeting with Richard Dickson, the new CEO of Gap Inc., and the chance to join the company as creative director. Now, he’s on a mission to bring cultural relevance and excitement back to brands like Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta.

“Within five minutes [of meeting Dickson], I knew that there was something very special. It was a cosmic moment where there was like a magic connection, where I saw that I had met my dreamer,” Posen says. This week on The BoF Podcast, BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed sits down with Posen to explore his journey of redefining success, his transformative role at Gap Inc., and his vision for the future of fashion.

8. The Holiday Shopping Season Begins

Deloitte is predicting US retail sales between November and January to rise 2.3 percent to 3.3 percent, to just under $1.6 trillion. Sales grew 4.3 percent in the same period in 2023 and 7.6 percent in 2022. These low-single-digit increase predictions should be a warning for brands that were already struggling to hold consumers’ attention. Where there were mostly just winners in the holiday seasons immediately after the pandemic, that likely won’t be the case when people are watching their spending more closely.

It doesn’t help that holiday spending will be packed into a shorter timeframe, as Black Friday falls on Nov. 29 this year, a full five days later than in 2023. Few retailers will be waiting until late November to appeal to shoppers. Boston Consulting Group estimates that 29 percent of holiday spending occurs in October. Amazon’s touting holiday deals that will start Oct. 8, and beauty brands flooded the market with Advent calendars starting in September.

Opens in new window