Thousands of jobs could be at risk as the US clothing chain mulls closing its company-owned shops.
www.bbc.co.uk
I wonder how the high streets in Europe are doing? I expect they are less chain-heavy that the UK?
As some of you know I work as a freelance designer in the fashion trade. I went freelance about 20 years ago - I stopped working for the high street around 2005 - I might do the odd project gig for a long term client who supplys Next but thats it. The chain stores pay so badly I can't pay my bills on their rates. They're exploitative. And who can wait for 90 days net terms? I can't.
Anyway - wherever the virus has taken hold, the situation is pretty bad, but the big chains, many of them were already in debt up to their eyeballs so of course they're dropping like flies. It's bad in the states, big names have gone.
A mate of mine (another designer) went to a retail trade seminar about future trends where the speaker said - there's going to be a market correction, the market is going to really shrink down, you're going to have to accept it so decide what you're going to do. He said there was a lot of disbelief and nervous laughter. But a lot of us knew it was coming.
We're in late capitalism, the prices have deflated since the 80's. Go look on Pinterest at the old Next directories and the clothes - top quality made in Italy, look almost as nice as Stone Island. beautiful details, & finishing, quality buttons, jaquard knitted back neck labels and then look at the price. We're being sold absolute crap now. Profit margins are tiny and every few years something else has to be shaved off, in order to keep going.
Around 15-20 years ago, the chain stores began to stopped working with trading companies (middle men) on development and employed these teams themselves instead - but to save more cash, many jobs were recruited offshore near the factories instead such as merchandisers and shipping admin. But designers are best when they live in the marketplace that they design for, so they employed and based design teams based in their head offices. But this year, I'm hearing of entire design and development teams being made redundant. I would expect the product to suffer, they perhaps will just buy in and change things a bit. I've freelanced for Chinese factories before, perhaps this is how they'll be employed. Everything is changing fast now. I never thought I'd see the day that I'd stop working in China or make things in London again (I'd stopped that in the 1990's) but I'm doing more and more here, next steps is to try commercialise it more to bring the price down, that's done in design and machinery that you use.
And as well as getting rid of the design teams, what else is too expensive? Oh yeah, our shops, they need to be got rid of too. I wonder what goes next? Maybe they'll take the pockets off everything, like Primark does.
Gap going doesn't surprise me - who is it for anyway? Middle market chainstores, whats the point, people are skint and will go to Primark.
www.retailgazette.co.uk
uk.reuters.com
news.sky.com
