Noshokaty, Döring & Thun's blog on marketing co-operations

High street fashion and couture designers. A lasting romance?

Susanne_NDT | 13-10-08 | comments (0)

Fashion retail chains collaborate intensely with designers and celebrities to create additional product lines that increase store traffic and eventually generate sales. By now, co-branding and design collaborations have become an established marketing instrument within the retail fashion industry with great sales and brand differentiation potential.

In the fast-moving and highly competitive, global high street fashion business, retailers face a lot of challenges. They need to regularly provide special incentives and occasions to draw customers to their shop floors. They need to strengthen brand awareness and their fashion positioning. They need to enter new markets and address new target groups. Thus, they need to differentiate themselves constantly from competitors. In the last years, fashion retailers have increasingly turned to “high fashion” designers and trendy/famous celebrities to address these challenges.

H&M might not have been the first fashion retailer to collaborate with fashion designers, but they were the ones who rolled out this strategy most consistently and professionally. Four years have passed since their first seasonal design collaboration with the iconic Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. While H&M announced one collaboration after another with impressive frequency (e.g. with Italian desiger Roberto Cavalli, pop icon Madonna, Stella McCartney, Dutch designer duo Victor & Rolf, pop princess Kylie Minogue, and now even with Comme des Garçons), other retailers started to follow H&M:

Karstadt & Kostas Murkudis
Gap & Pierre Hardy
Karstadt & Kaviar Gauche
Topshop & Kate Moss
Mango & Penelope/Monica Cruz
EASTPAK & RAF SIMONS
s.Oliver & Anastacia

H&M seems to be uncontested with their strategic and long-term approach to partnering with couture designers and celebrities while other companies experiment with one-off collaborations. They launch new seasonal collaborations regularly and activate them comprehensively (e.g. promoting the collaborations on a global scale with billboard posters, TV- commercials, dedicated websites, press events/fashion shows, videos of the respective designers/celebrities, etc.) creating a huge buzz in the fashion world.

The question for them and others is how long this concept will remain successful. I believe these forms of collaboration will continue to be a popular tactic within the fashion industry’s marketing mix. In the short run, we will see many more fashion retail chains engaging in this field. But it gets increasingly difficult to create an equal amount of awareness with design partnerships compared to the early collaborations. They benefited greatly from their first mover advantage, and the PR effect and store traffic/sales impact were huge.

Nowadays, it is more challenging to capture the public imagination with another cameo by a famous designer, model or actress. The seasonal collections with designers will need to be increasingly distinct from the mainstream collections and should clearly reflect the signature style of the collaborating designer. They require an even more powerful activation and present a clear value proposition to the customer. On the other hand, fashion companies are running the risk of confusing customers with too many design partnerships in the market. In the long run, new innovative partnership concepts are required to achieve a similary high impact. A famous name will hardly be enough…

H&M + Karl Lagerfeld (Key visual):