Speed-To-Market: How Luxury Brands Are Picking Up The Pace Of Production Cycles

In luxury fashion, speed matters more than ever. Labels like Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Coach, Helmut Lang, Burberry and Rag & Bone — all brands that could once call the shots around trends and fashion cycles — are adopting new strategies focused on increased flexibility and faster-paced production windows, in order to adapt to increasing competition and an in-control customer. “Speed is everything right now,” said Karin Tracy, the head of fashion, luxury and beauty industries at Facebook. “For luxury brands, whoever is the fastest right now will have competitive advantage, full stop. They need to step out of the comfort zone of perfection, think about how to move fast and build things to let them do so.” Fast-fashion brands like Zara — which releases new items four to five times faster than a traditional retail brand, according to the apparel consultancy firm Alvanon — and online-only retailers like Boohoo that can update their sites with hundreds of new styles daily, are guiding the quickening pace of trends, as well as customers’ need for newness. Within the luxury industry, brands have taken different degrees of action to deal, with some disregarding the traditional fashion calendar to bend to a see-now-buy-now approach and others adding more collection drops throughout the year. Read more at Digiday.