Luxury Fashion Consultant Wanted

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Permalink Reply by Rachel Akilimali on January 29, 2010 at 6:44am

Hello Ahmed,

I will be glad to give you a couple of info if you´re still looking for them. I have both strong knowledge on international economy and the luxury industry.

There are a few things you´ll need to take into consideration:

- The luxury industry is a very vaste niche ( fashion, food and bev, hightech, automobils etc...) today more than ever anything can become a luxury item.The first thing i will ask you is to specifiy your sector of activity.

- More over, if luxury seems to be a universal concept, you should know that each country has a specific idea of what a luxury item consist of. So my second question would be to ask you in which country do you intend to develop your product? And what are the cultural caracteristics and influences of the country?

- As fa as the market is concerned, you have 2 distinct and opposite sort of developments. On the one hand you have companies/groups that go down the ladder, offering products available to the mass. That´s when you´ll here people talking about the democratization of the industry.. The second group goes the opposit direction, offering products for the very very Very rich people. Where do you position yourself? what kind of clients do you want to attract?

-I will end with the financial part and say that the luxury industry can to be very profitable if you know exactly how you´ll deal with a certain type of expenses. The most important in the sector being real estate and communication;If you want a boutique which street do you plan to have it? How much can you spend on communication?

Voila! these are very few pieces of information. The ones i would start with if i ever planned to lauch a luxury product.
for the rest you gave very little details on your project that it´s hard to give further information.

May your project be successfull!!

Rachel

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Permalink Reply by Fashion Business Designer™ on June 29, 2011 at 8:42am

I'm bumping here because I think Nouf posted an interesting question that could be further discussed by newcomers for the benefit of fashion designers starting their own brands.

 

I agree with Rachel Akilimali and I'm going to assume your are talking about luxury fashion clothes which I also known as high-end fashion, or designer/upmarket branded clothings.

 

So I believe each market has its own facts and can follow different directions depending on several factors like the current or future state of its economy, or changes in its consumers' attitudes towards buying luxury clothes.

 

In the UK luxury fashion clothing, for instance, is a hot sector today (2011) as it was back in 2009 mainly because of the increasing number of folks living in urban areas with good socio-economical status (they are better insulated against recessions). In general this sector perfoms above the average because of it's basic business strategy that leverages on perception (charging premium prices for "commodity" products like unbranded dresses, tops, trousers, handbags, etc.).

 

Yes, luxury fashion business health depend mostly in brand image (selling the air around a product as one friend says).  Luxury fashion products offers unique attributes (tangible or intangible) or that are valued by customers or are perceived to be better than or different from other non-luxury products. The value added by the uniqueness of a product may allow the label to charge a premium price for it (it can be the quality of the fabric or the signature vision of the designer-artist). Therefore two critical success factors define the success of a luxury fashion brand: to produce highly quality garments and effectively communicate the perceived strengths of them (this is the part where most emerging luxury fashion designers fail to pay attention).

 

To envision where this sector is standing and where is going we may have to look at basic definitions and principles. Luxury is related with concepts of scarcity (difficult to obtain or acquire), status, non-essential, etc. So as long as we have these ingredients (status-craving people, rare raw materials, talented craftmen products, etc.) the luxury sector should strive. Luxury fashion has been with us since the early days of our civilized existence (5000 B.C. to date).

 

But those are my two cents. What other fellow fashionistas think? Should emerging fashion designers focus on creating this aspirational and inspirational looks to compete against value retailers and big competitors? Where the fashion luxury sector is going?

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Permalink Reply by carlous palmer on February 23, 2012 at 2:58pm

 

Not completely clear on your questions ...can you refraise them

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