The Business of Fashion Podcast

After years of analyst anticipation that the leg-squeezing silhouette would soon go out of style, market research firm NPD Group found sales for the skinny jeans fell behind straight leg jeans in 2021. Skinny jeans are far from dead though — still accounting for 30 percent of sales. Retailers have already felt the effects of the shift: Pacsun pulled the style from its stores because no one was buying it.

“It really just speaks to the changing of the times and how styles are evolving within fashion,” said BoF correspondent Chavie Leiber.

Key Insights:

• Skinny jeans are no longer the most popular denim silhouette, according to data from NPD Group. But, that doesn’t mean no one is buying them.
• As consumers come out of the pandemic, they don’t just want comfort. Shoppers are either skewing toward raw denim with no stretch or athleisure and leggings — but jegging and stretch denim styles occupying the in-between have started to fall to the wayside.
• The world is in the midst of a “denim Renaissance,” says Marie Pearson, senior vice president of denim at Madewell, who added she’s never seen so many different types of fits and shapes selling.

Additional Resources:

• The Style That Finally Dethroned Skinny Jeans
• Why Skinny Jeans Will Never Die
• Fashion Drives New Denim Momentum

Join BoF Professional today with our exclusive podcast listener discount of 25% off an annual membership, follow the link here and enter the coupon code ‘debrief’ at checkout.

Want more from The Business of Fashion? Subscribe to our daily newsletter here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The multitasking entrepreneur joins BoF founder and chief executive Imran Amed to discuss the personal and professional journey that led him to co-create the category-disrupting brand Skims with Kim Kardashian.

Background:

Jens Grede has built some of the most successful direct-to-consumer brands in American fashion. Alongside his wife Emma, he launched Brady with Tom Brady, Good American with Khloe Kardashian, and, of course, Kim Kardashian’s category-disrupting Skims. This week on the BoF Podcast, the Swedish-born former ad man joins BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed to discuss his journey through the fashion industry — from realising one of his early dreams of creating an ad for Calvin Klein to to elevating Skims into a once-in-a generation brand in the vein of Lululemon or Nike’s Jordan brand.

“I've waited my whole career to be part of a moment like this, and I'm very scared of messing it up,” says Grede. “At the same time, I know that if we stop experimenting, if we stop innovating, that is the fastest way to mess it up.”

Key Insights:

• Cultivating a sense of community is one of the only ways to scale a brand now, according to Grede. Great community starts with creating for yourself: products you like, want to buy and can afford.
• Grede describes one of his biggest mistakes — attempting to trademark the brand name “Kimono” with Kardashian — as one of the most important moments of his career because of what he learned about community and partnership. He said the Skims team listened, owned the mistake and pivoted.
• Fashion is at the cusp of a huge change in distribution due to pivots in culture, algorithms and the outsized role of social media. Grede thinks every major fashion brand that has scaled successfully was born in the cracks of a major distribution change.

Additional Resources:

• Skims Plots Its Next Moves: ‘We Don’t Have the Luxury of Failing.’ Skims recently raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, in an exclusive interview with BoF, explain how the ‘solution wear’ empire plans to prove it’s more than a pandemic fad. First up: swimwear.
• The BoF Podcast: Building Disruptive Direct-to-Consumer Brands. The entrepreneurs behind Allbirds, Hims and Hers and Good American outline the keys to their brands’ success.
• Building a DTC Challenger Brand | Download the Case Study. Fashion entrepreneurs need a new playbook to launch, scale and differentiate their companies, as regulations and rising costs mean performance marketing can no longer serve the critical role it once did for DTC brands.

Join BoF Professional today using the link here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Background:

Anna Wintour is arguably the most recognisable name in fashion media. In her new biography of Wintour author Amy Odell sets out to paint a nuanced and meticulously researched picture of Wintour’s life based on hundreds of interviews and sweeping archival research.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Odell joins BoF’s Imran Amed to talk about the process of biographing the complicated fashion titan, and provides some insight as to what she learned about Wintour’s life and career, as well as what the future holds for Vogue in a post-Anna Wintour era.

Key Insights:

• Even amid a number of industry shifts, including the decline of print media, Wintour has maintained her power in part because of the strong network of people — in fashion and beyond — who value her advice and her ability to bridge the business and creative sides of fashion.
• Former colleagues and friends have described Wintour as future-focused and hungry; she hasn’t stopped working because she enjoys the work.
• Whoever succeeds Wintour as editor-in-chief will inherit lots of sway that comes with the role. Odell theorises that a Vogue veteran will be tapped next as has always been the case in the past.

Additional Resources:

• What Anna Wintour’s Big Promotion Means for Condé Nast: As the publisher focuses on returning to profitability, a new unified content strategy under Anna Wintour, more powerful at the publisher than ever, aims to make its strategy more efficient and intertwined.
• Org Chart: Vogue’s New Global Editorial Structure: The heavyweight international Vogue editors who once filled the front rows at Paris Fashion Week were gone this season, a stark sign of the restructuring that has consolidated power in the hands of global editor Anna Wintour and her regional deputies.

Join BoF Professional today using the link here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The CEO of the online peer-to-peer marketplace believes the platform’s ability to connect people sets it apart from typical fashion e-commerce.

In June 2021, online marketplace Etsy announced plans to acquire Depop for $1.6 billion. The move was yet another sign of growing interest in the burgeoning fashion resale market, which according to BoF Insights, is now worth $130 billion globally.

CEO Maria Raga describes Depop as “combining elements from Instagram and eBay”. The platform is skewed towards lower-priced product exchange between younger traders, almost all of them 26 and under. Raga believes that it’s Depop’s community aspect — facilitating not just online transactions, but also person to person interactions — that attracts these all-important Gen-Z shoppers.

Raga’s insights are featured in the fifth episode of The BoF Show, now streaming on Bloomberg Quicktake.

Watch the fifth episode of The BoF Show here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The founder and CEO of retail pop-up marketplace Appear Here shares his entrepreneurial journey and advice for young founders looking to break through.

Background:

Ross Bailey’s love of entrepreneurship didn’t start in business school or a corporate job, but at the hair salon his parents owned in London.

“I watched my parents take this little shop and it became their livelihood,” he says to BoF’s founder and editor in chief, Imran Amed, describing himself as a “busybody” who rearranged furniture and conducted customer satisfaction surveys from a young age. “To me, entrepreneurship was a game. It was about ‘how do I get people involved and have a bit of fun?’”

That mindset eventually led him to found Appear Here, “the Airbnb of retail,” in 2014. “The story of the world ... was that the high street is dead, nobody wants it. And we had a contrarian view on that. When you have small high street stores and streets, people want to be on them ... our data has always backed it up.”

By 2019, Appear Here was a global business with 250,000 entrepreneurs signed up to the platform and 30,000 stores launched. The company has facilitated pop-ups for fashion giants like Louis Vuitton, Loewe and Supreme, a bookstore for Michelle Obama’s autobiography, as well as Harry’s House for pop superstar Harry Styles.

Then the pandemic hit. Appear Here went from having its best year ever and closing a funding round with a nine-figure valuation, to losing 95 percent of revenue with just months’ worth of cash left.

On this week’s episode of The BoF Podcast, Bailey shares his lessons and advice from the early days of founding a business and the role leaders play in leading employees and stakeholders through challenging times.

Key Insights:

• The traditional world of commercial real estate and retail is inaccessible and opaque, creating systemic barriers for entrepreneurs from marginalised backgrounds. But small independent stores are also the backbone of entrepreneurship for immigrants and other communities. “Whether it's the local takeaway restaurant, whether it's the local shop, all of those places... were people who were entrepreneurial, who were doing something, who were trying to build a livelihood.”
• Despite Covid’s impact on retail, Bailey doubled down on Appear Here’s mission. Seeing people returning to streets, even when non-essential retail was curbed, and queuing for coffees highlighted the human desire for in-person community. “I just felt that this wasn't the time to pivot, this wasn't the time to relax on our idea or rein it in. Actually, Appear Here would make more sense coming out of this than ever before.”
• The future of retail is hyper-local, says Bailey, citing examples of global brands playing into cultural niches, like Adidas and Gucci’s takeover of a working men’s social club in Peckham. “It's no longer about Fifth Avenue and Regent Street or the Champs-Élysées, it's about neighbourhoods and interesting places.”

Additional Resources:

How Temporary Pop-Ups Became a Permanent Strategy

What Happens When the E-Commerce Boom Ends

How to Open a Store in 2022 | BoF

To subscribe to the BoF Podcast, please follow this link.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.