Economics or the dismal science was something I felt that I needed to include as it provides the context for business and consumption.
Prior to the 20th century, economics was the pursuit of gentleman scholars. The foundation of it is considered to be Adam Smith when he published is work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith outlined one of the core tenets of classical economics: each individual is driven by self-interest and can exert only a negligible influence on prices. And it was the start of assumptions that economists model around that don’t mirror real life all the time.
What really is a rational decision maker? Do consumers always make rational decisions? Do they make decisions that maximise their economic benefit?
The problem is that they might do actions that are rational to them:
Reducing choice when they are overwhelmed
Looking for a little luxury to comfort them over time. Which was the sales of Cadbury chocolate and Revlon lipstick were known to rise in a recession
Luxury goods in general make little sense from a ration decision point of view until you realise the value of what they signal
Having a smartphone yet buying watches. Japanese consumers were known to still buy watches to show that they care about the time to employers when they could easily check their smartphone screen
All of which makes the subject area of high interest to me as a marketer. It also explains the amount of focus now being done by economists on the behavioural aspect of things.
This section on AI search is largely down to Rowan Kisby’s observations over at LinkedIn. I worked with Rowan when I was her client at Unilever, super-smart, can’t recommend her enough. Now on to AI search: Google has looked to augment its web search in a more obvious way with generative AI providing ‘AI search’ features.
The AI search features have adversely affected publishers of non-time dependant evergreen content according to Authoritas. This has sparked concern amongst media publishers, but early feedback on IAC and Ziff-Davis shareholder calls indicated little change in traffic numbers. Google claims that AI search feature ‘AI previews’ actually delivers more, rather than less click throughs.
Dr Mike Lynch OBE | Obituary – Sound on Sound magazine cover’s Lynch’s music hardware career which happened before he started Autonomy. The bit that this story misses is how Lynch’s developments helped move forward digital music and affecting electronica during a particularly creative point in culture including house and the rave scene that spun out of it.
I can’t recommend Phoebe Yu‘s content enough, this video on colour, culture and user experience design is a great example of her work.
The Geopolitics of Wine | Peter Zeihan – thanks to increasing costs of capital, aging worker demographics and climate change New Zealand and Australia will do better than Latin American wines and most European offerings except France
Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC | The Feed – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.
How to connect offline to China’s Gen Z and Alpha? | Jing Daily – Young Chinese consumers are finding new consumer interests away from blind boxes and claw machines: ‘Guzi’ (谷子) stores. ‘Guzi’, derived from the phonetic English ‘Goods’, describes merchandise featuring popular ACG (animation, comics, and games) characters, including badges, standees, and posters. – China develops it’s take on otaku culture
Luxury beliefs is a term that I came across from the writings of Rob Henderson. Henderson has a similar kind of story to JD Vance. Addiction in the family and escaping his home environment by enlisting in the US Air Force.
After his service Henderson used funding via the GI Bill to go to Yale. He then got a scholarship to go to Cambridge to do a doctorate. Like Vance he had written a memoir: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class that highlights the challenges faced in working class American society including violence and addiction. In his book Henderson explores the idea of luxury beliefs, how they benefit the privileged and harm the most vulnerable in society.
What are examples of luxury beliefs?
The luxury beliefs Henderson cites are seen to be widely held progressive views including:
Defunding the police
Defunding the prison system
Decriminalising or legalising drugs
Getting rid of standardised exams – Henderson sees these as helping less privileged children get into college
Rejecting marriage as a pointless concept. – Henderson claims that one of the strongest predictors of success was if they were brought up in a nuclear family.
Henderson believes that the common thread that holds luxury beliefs together is that they are held by privileged people, the beliefs make them look good (and feel good about themselves), but harm the marginalised.
Luxury beliefs allow the privileged to look good by:
Playing the victim
Protest without penalty – which is less likely to happen to more marginalised protestors
Push the less privileged down
Henderson labelled this ‘saviour theatre’. Henderson reminded of previous generation protestors like Patty Hearst and participants in the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage which would seem to fit Henderson’s definition of holding luxury beliefs.
The store, which recently went viral on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, not only sells house-made essential oils – must-have souvenirs for visitors from mainland China thanks to the exposure – but recreates the signature scents of popular malls and other venues in Hong Kong.
On its shelves are familiar – sometimes odd – concoctions. Bottle labels reference K11, a shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, the five-star Rosewood Hotel, and the Hong Kong International Airport. Sportswear brand Lululemon has one too.
The consequences of the psychoboom are both logical and contradictory. As the Chinese economy has expanded and citizens have grown wealthier, the demands of everyday life have grown in number and kind, expanding from physiological and safety concerns to a desire for love, esteem, and self-actualization. At the same time, such desires run counter to traditional Chinese values like the age-old concept of Confucian filial piety and the relatively new ideology imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both of which place the well-being of the collective above the happiness of the individual.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Say Recovery in Private Equity Deals and Fees – Bloomberg – Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees. The private equity deal machine has been mostly jammed up for the past two years, leaving many investment bankers twiddling their thumbs while their bosses talked up green shoots that failed to flourish. There are plenty of potential road bumps ahead, but there’s reason to put more weight on the better outlook now even compared with just three months ago: The wave of debt refinancing that has led banks’ revenue recovery this year has also been helping to fix the prospects of many companies owned by private equity firms
Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning | TechSpot – Sony admitted it’s going to “gradually end development and production” of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued. – the big shocker is the issue for archival formats
“When launching products back then, we didn’t have to have a profit timeline for them,” said a former longtime devices executive. “We had to get the system in people’s homes and we’d win. Innovate, and then figure out how to make money later.”
To do that, the team had to keep prices low. Amazon sometimes even gave away versions of the smart speaker as part of promotions in a bid to get a larger base of users.
Another Danish biotech can help investors’ hunger for obesity drugs | FT – this probably explains why Zealand pivoted from taking its medications to market to becoming research and selling on as its not big enough to exploit this opportunity on its own. (Full disclosure, I worked briefly on the diabetic emergency injection product until the company pivoted).
Age of Ozempic: Predictions for the luxury industry | Vogue Business – Analysts agree that the pop culture influence of weight loss drugs is giving luxury labels and mass-market brands, alike, licence to refocus on straight-size. “Luxury brands have long been staunchly unwilling to cater to plus-sizes outside of the occasional token representation, but typically premium and mass players would invest more readily in plus-size,” says Marci. “Now we’re seeing the effects of Ozempic and weight loss culture on retail as a whole.”
Already, a host of US-based retailers and fashion companies including Rent the Runway are seeing boosted demand for smaller clothing sizes, and falling demand for larger sizes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Retailers have been investing in fewer products that offer larger sizing
EssilorLuxottica expands into streetwear with $1.5bn Supreme deal – the deal was a “no brainer” and had happened “very quickly” because VF was under pressure to divest its most “iconic asset”. EssilorLuxottica planned to use Supreme’s wealth of customer data and its Gen Z fans in China, Japan and South Korea to target new consumers – it shows how good a deal James Jebbia got with private equity and VF Corporation
Lewis Hamilton Named Dior Ambassador | BoF – formula 1 driver and pit lane dandy has also worked with Dior men’s artistic director Kim Jones to guest design a collection of clothing and accessories set to launch in October
Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It | New York Times – Researchers have learned a great deal about the misinformation problem over the past decade: They know what types of toxic content are most common, the motivations and mechanisms that help it spread and who it often targets. The question that remains is how to stop it.
A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere.
The IT director is seeing a return to power and its thanks to the power of hackers and AI. The smartphone, the resurgence of Apple and SaaS saw IT decisions become more organic thanks to increased access to online services that provided better features than traditional enterprise software companies and the rise of knowledge working. IT teams found management of mobile devices onerous and faced hostile users.
Michiko Fukahori of the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology at ITU TSB – 8th Chief Technology Officers (CTO) Meeting
This meant that the IT director became less important in software marketing. A decade ago marketing had pivoted to a bottom up approach of ‘land and expand’. This drove the sales of Slack, Monday.com and MongoDB.
Two things impacted this bottom up approach to enterprise innovation:
Cybercrime: ransomware and supply chain attacks. Both are not new, ransomware can be traced back to 1989, with malware known as the AIDS trojan (this had much cultural resonance back then as a name). Supply chain attacks started happening in the 2010s with the Target data breach and by 2011, US politicians were considering it a security issue. Over COVID with the rise of remote working, the attacks increased. The risk put the IT director back in the firing line.
AI governance: generative AI systems learn from their training models and from user inputs, this led to a wide range of concerns from company intellectual property leaving via the AI system, or AI outputs based on intellectual property theft.
The most immediate impact of this is that the IT director is becoming a prized target on more technology marketers agendas again. This takes IT director focused marketing from back in the 1980s and the early 2000s with a top-down c-suite focus including the IT director. This implies that established brands like Microsoft and IBM will do better than buzzier startups. It also means I am less likely to see adverts for Monday.com in my YouTube feed over time.
This doesn’t mean that the IT director won’t be disrupted in other parts of his role as machine learning facilitates process automation in ways that are continuing to evolve.
Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month | News | Campaign Asia – The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”
Chinese Firms Are Investing Heavily in Whisky Market | Yicai Global – Although international liquor giants have developed the local whisky consumption market for many years, the market penetration rate of overseas spirits in China, including whisky, is only about 3 percent. This means domestic whisky producers will need to develop new consumption scenarios, Yang said. Whisky consumption in China centers mainly around nightclubs, gift-giving and tasting events held by affluent consumers, Yang noted, but in these scenarios, imported whisky brands with a long history tend to be more popularly accepted,, so it will be difficult for domestic rivals to compete. According to the latest report from alcohol market analysts IWSR, China’s whisky market was worth CNY5.5 billion (USD758 million) last year, having grown more than fourfold over the past 10 years. It is expected to reach CNY50 billion (USD6.9 billion) in the next five to 10 years.
Yoox Net-a-Porter exits China to focus on more profitable markets – Multi-brand luxury clothing sales platform Yoox Net-a-Porter is closing its China operations, this against a backdrop of other brands also pulling out of Chinese e-commerce including Marc Jacobs fragrances. The corporate line from Richemont was “in the context of a global Yoox Net-a-Porter plan aimed at focusing investments and resources on its core and more profitable geographies”.
Ignite the Scent: The Effectiveness of Implied Explosion in Perfume Ads | the Journal of Advertising Research – Scent is an important product attribute and an integral component of the consumption experience as consumers often want to perceive a product’s smell to make a well-informed purchase decision. It is difficult, however, to communicate the properties of a scent without the physical presence of odorants. Through five experiments conducted in a perfume-advertising context, our research shows that implied explosion, whether visually (e.g., a spritz blast) or semantically created, can increase perceived scent intensity, subsequently enhancing perceived scent persistence. It also found a positive effect of perceived scent persistence on purchase intention. In conclusion, the research suggests that implied explosion can be a powerful tool for advertisers to enhance scent perception, consequently boosting purchase intention.
Mat Baxter’s Huge turnaround job | Contagious – interesting perspective on his time at Huge. What I can’t square it all with is what we know about marketing science and declining effectiveness across digital media
On my LinkedIn, I couldn’t escape from the Cannes festival of advertising. Partly because one of the projects I had been involved in was a shortlisted entry. One of the most prominent films was Dramamine’s ‘The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon’. It was notable because of its humour, which was part of this years theme across categories.
震災復興から生まれた刺し子プロジェクトをブランドに！ 15人のお母さんの挑戦！ – CAMPFIRE (キャンプファイヤー) – ancient Japanese craft – KUON and Sashiko Gals are part of a new generation of designers keeping the traditional Japanese technique of sashiko alive. And together, they are bringing the decorative style of stitching to our favorite sneakers (including techy Salomons!). Sashiko is a type of simple running stitch used in Japan for over a thousand years to reinforce fabrics. It’s typically done with a thick white thread on indigo fabric and made into intricate patterns.
Nationalism in Online Games During War by Eren Bilen, Nino Doghonadze, Robizon Khubulashvili, David Smerdon :: SSRN – We investigate how international conflicts impact the behavior of hostile nationals in online games. Utilizing data from the largest online chess platform, where players can see their opponents’ country flags, we observed behavioral responses based on the opponents’ nationality. Specifically, there is a notable decrease in the share of games played against hostile nationals, indicating a reluctance to engage. Additionally, players show different strategic adjustments: they opt for safer opening moves and exhibit higher persistence in games, evidenced by longer game durations and fewer resignations. This study provides unique insights into the impact of geopolitical conflicts on strategic interactions in an online setting, offering contributions to further understanding human behavior during international conflicts.
The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico | WIRED – “Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over. Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home.” – not terribly surprising, you’ve seen the professionalisation and industrialisation in theft across sectors from shoplifting, car theft and watch thefts so this is continuing the trend.
OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game – The Atlantic – The Scarlett Johansson debacle is a microcosm of AI’s raw deal: It’s happening, and you can’t stop it. This is important not from a technology point of view, but from the mindset of systemic sociopathy that now pervades Silicon Valley.
Apple Intelligence is Right On Time – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – Apple’s orientation towards prioritizing users over developers aligns nicely with its brand promise of privacy and security: Apple would prefer to deliver new features in an integrated fashion as a matter of course; making AI not just compelling but societally acceptable may require exactly that, which means that Apple is arriving on the AI scene just in time.
‘Rare, vintage, Y2K’: Online thrifters are flipping fast fashion. How long can it last? | Vogue Business – as secondhand shopping becomes increasingly commonplace, this latest outburst brings to light the subjectivity of resale. What determines an item’s worth, especially in an age of viral micro-trends and heavy nostalgia? Is it ethically moral to set an item that’s the product of fast fashion — long criticised for not paying workers fairly — at such a steep upcharge, and making profit from it? If someone is willing to pay, does any of it matter?
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. Zhang is a senior legal academic who works at the University of Hong Kong, which until recently got a front row seat to China disputes with both the European Union and the United States. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter if it was viewed to fall under the purview of ‘state secrets’. With the new security law that has come in, definitions have been left deliberately vague and wide-reaching.
So why is Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism of interest?
If like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Around the time I worked on one client, they were shamed on the evening TV news and some of their staff disappeared for questioning by the authorities. They then reappeared months later looking haggard and worn out. It is new important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines.
Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. The rise of antitrust was as much down to bureaucratic politics of the Chinese government.
What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit.
Zhang talks about how regulatory hostage taking and public shaming was a tool of the regulatory authorities from early on.
The book then looks at foreign reactions to Chinese government from EU investigations to current US-China trade restrictions and discusses how China weaponised its regulatory frameworks making ‘hostage taking’ trans-national in nature.
Last of it’s type?
Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. More on Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism here. More book reviews here.
The luxury sector is undergoing a transformation, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the world of boutique e-tailers. I am of a generation that grew up with boutiques, carefully curated fashion looks from multiple brands.
As a child, my Mam would get me jumpers as I grew up from different small stores like this. To this day, the ultimate compliment she would give any item of clothing was that it was ‘exclusive’.
As I started buying my own clothes I pivoted between sports shops for my footwear, Ellis Brigham for layers, Caran D’Ache – a menswear boutique in Birkenhead at the time for jeans and ‘going out’ clothing. (Having known the owner/manager quite well, I suspect that the store was named after the Swiss writing instrument company, rather than the pseudonym of French satirist Emmanuel Poiré). This was where I got my first down jacket (by Naf Naf), Oshkosh B’gosh dungarees and Champion sweatshirts. At the time Ellis Brigham was a sea of Polartec and Gore-tex with no down jackets in sight.
I started venturing further afield and went to Quiggins in Liverpool, Affleck’s Palace in Manchester and what’s now the Victoria Quarter in Leeds. I’d also started coming down to London with friends to find brands I couldn’t get at home.
Famous high-end boutiques like Browns built a reputation for championing up and coming womenswear designers like Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen. They also helped the likes of Ralph Lauren, Jil Sander and Calvin Klein start seeing in London. At their best boutiques moved culture as curators and taste makers. I got my love of American workwear from Caran D’Ache and Japanese streetwear from the late lamented Hideout which was just off Golden Square.
Department stores were the first aggregators of boutiques with a mix of single brand and multi-brand concessions under one roof. Brands like Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Isetan, Lane Crawford, Mitsukoshi, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, SEIBU and Shinsegae.
These established businesses have their place, indeed LVMH owns a number of selective retail businesses like DFS (often known as T Galleria), Le Bonne Marché and Starboard Cruises. So multi-brand distribution has a place in the luxury retail mix. Over time the premium department store brands and LVMH’s select retail brand would both have boutique e-tailers within their brands providing an omni-channel experience.
In the run up to COVID, multi-brand retail counted for 57 percent of luxury sales, management consultancy Bain expect this to decline to 36 percent of luxury sales by 2030.
Online
Online continues to disrupt retailing over a quarter century after it landed. The first casualties were book stores and music stores. Twenty years ago, one of the most enjoyable activities that I did in my spare time was rifling through record store shelves, digging for surprising or elusive vinyl records, CDs and DVDs.
Some of the places were I did this are long gone, like Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus. On the flipside, new businesses sprang up to be online first, or online only. Amazon started as a book store and eventually became the modern-day equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
Luxury was no exception and a variety of dedicated boutique e-tailers sprang up:
Matches
MyTheresa
Net-a-Porter
YOOX
Farfetch
In the same way that mobile operators were the key determinators of whether mobile phone shops were successful, luxury brands had the whip hand over multi-brand boutiques. Phones4U died when its relationships with EE and Vodafone came to an end. The FT article The implosion in luxury ecommerce implied a similar pivotal moment between Farfetch and Kering, but with Farfetch managing to sell itself to Korean e-tailing business Coupang instead of going into administration.
One brand / one store
Luxury brands have looked to gain more control over their customer experience and get closer to the customer overall. This has seen many brands open single brand stores. Up until the 1980s, Louis Vuitton sold mostly through department stores, now it’s mostly through its own brand channels. Some brands like Audemars Piaget, now only sell through their own single brand showrooms.
The big name department stores continued to hold a position in the marketplace due to their own brand power, even while smaller mid-market stores in provincial cities folded.
Over time, brands extended their shop front into the online sphere. This was done once two things were able to happen:
An all-up online and offline view of a given customer and CRM systems allowed this to happen. This wasn’t for efficiency reasons to go online only, but to provide an omnichannel service to match customer’s omni-channel lifestyles.
Getting this all-up view will also help with future EU legislation moving towards a circular economy.
The ability to provide a high level delivery experience for online purchases. This mattered less with fragrances than it did with watches and handbags. High security logistics providers like Ferrari were able to provide this to the main luxury brands.
One small chink of hope for multi-brand stores is that single brand stores may be forced to either change business practices, or insulate themselves from legal action via authorised dealerships. A court case brought by two women against Hermés in the US claims that having to buy other products to get a crack at purchasing a Birkin bag is a violation of antitrust laws.
The obligation to buy other products first, is what the women claim is an ‘illegal tying arrangement’ which is why Hermés might be in violation of antitrust laws. Other brand who have authorised dealers rather than their own showrooms are less likely to be at risk.
Compressed middle-class
One of the first things that I learned when doing LVMH’s INSIDE LVMH certificate was that the bulk of luxury purchases are made by the middle classes.
Robert Gordon’s Rise and Decline of American Growth outlined how the middle classes in America (but also many other western countries). Income inequality, automation and globalisation drove a stagnation and decline in middle class numbers, even as the number wealthy increased.
Globalisation elevated a new middle class in Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. Energy drove middle class growth in the countries surrounding the Persian gulf and Nigeria. Louis Vuitton opened their first show rooms in the US in 1914, in Japan in 1978 (though department stores had been selling their products for years). The first Korean shop opened in 1984 and China eight years later.
Over the past few decades this was compensated by new middle classes growing. They don’t necessarily have the earning power of a middle class westerner, but the purchasing power level may vary considerably. So a middle class consumer in a country like Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore might have more disposable income than someone in the UK.
Japan’s middle class quickly reached stagnation due to the lost decades of economic growth after their 1989 asset bubble. Korea has gone through a similar challenge, it has seen raised consumption, but recently this is driven by household debt rather than prosperity.
China
Quantity is a quality of its own, which is a reason why Chinese consumers have been so important to luxury brands since the early 2000s when China joined the WTO and its economy took off. Once there was even a small growth in middle class numbers that represented a big increase in global luxury sector sales. The decline in economic growth due to the property sector bubble has dampened luxury sales to China. It is not only about the decline in ability to purchase, but also the decline in being seen to purchase western luxury goods.
This less conscious consumption started early on during the Xi administration’s desire to combat corruption and aspire to a more equal society. Gifting declined. Economic decline accelerated this Chinese macro-trend.
COVID and after
COVID changed consumption. Money that would have previously been spent on experiences such as restaurant meals or travel transferred into things. Both single brands and boutique e-tailers got a lift in this environment. But a wider economic effect is still working its way through the economy. This effect is known as the bullwhip or Forrester Effect.
This resulted in a number of economic distortions:
Partial shutdown – Consumers no longer went to work or high traffic retail hotspots. Non-essential workers didn’t go to work. Logistics systems buckled under the weight of packages and luxury businesses diverted production to support medical needs such as LVMH’s perfumes businesses making hand sanitiser.
Unusual increase in demand – Home working drove an increase in demand from media consumption and home improvement to buying more stuff from all that money they saved from not going out.
Supply chain disruption – Air cargo prioritised medical supplies while existing stock sat in empty shops.
All of this disruption which drove inflation, this reduced demand as consumers had less to spend.
Luxury brands focused on their inflation proof ultra-high net worth customer base and raised prices to compensate for the reduction in sales volume. The fight for that reduced volume pitched multi-brand boutique e-tailers against their suppliers and the results weren’t pretty.
Boutique e-tailers are going to the wall, or consolidating to weather the fiscal storm until such time as middle class consumers can start spending aspirationally again.
Some of these businesses can’t be saved. Matchesfashion, which was bought out by Frasers Group didn’t have much chance.
