The Micro Level The Clothing Store Industry Is Influenced By Discount Supercenters, And Online Retail Stores Essay

A lot of competition. Such fashion stores as Dotti, Tempt, Valleygirl, Wish etc are proving to be very competitive as they offer similar clothes and market at the exact target audience.

Substitutes: The threat of substitutes is high. The threat of online apparel stores has the potential of destroying the traditional retail industry business model (Bandt, 2000). The ecommerce platforms allow retailers expand their consumer base across national and global markets with lower capital requirements and improved efficiency.

Marketing. Because of the large number of suppliers selling similar products, apparel-retail firms must stimulate demand with attractive store layouts, colorful product offerings, and various sales promotions.

Technology has almost become a necessity in life every day. With social networking, the need for entertainment and even in some cases for work purposes; the variety of services are close to endless making it a high demand outlet. Causing people to look and crave for high quality products. Examples are when a consumer looks for a particular

It is impossible to beat a cheap price. In today’s world, finding a sought after item at a dirt cheap price is one the main motivation American’s get in the car and battle the craziness in the mall. And as the basic American human beings that we are, it is never possible for us to be complacent with the amount of stuff we currently have. Eventually, we will come across a friend that has the next must have item that will cause us to run to our local mall and purchase a similar item at the lowest price possible. With all that said, it is no wonder why the industry of fast fashion has taken off over the past decade. Felipe Caro and Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, researchers for UCLA’s school of supply chain coordination, define fast fashion as “a business model that combines four elements: (i) fashionable clothes mostly for consumers under 40; (ii) affordable prices in the mid-to-low range; (iii) quick response; and (iv) frequent assortment changes”. Retailers like H&M, Forever 21, Target, and Wal-Mart have been able to take this business model and make a fortune. But while all these quick trends and cheap prices are great for the consumer, its cost on the foreign worker and the environment does not go uncovered. In the book Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline, she presents many arguments supporting the claim that fast fashion is unethical based on

Of the hundreds of named brand clothing that form part of the retail and fashion industry I chose to compare, for my analysis, Abercrombie & Fitch, Forever 21, American Eagle, and H&M. These stores are prominent, well-known for selling apparel, shoes, and accessories by the means of offering sales and promotions to their customers. This is a clever strategy for attracting customers, allowing them to believe that they bought goods at affordable, convenient prices – and not to mention the prestigious name prescribed to the clothing brands. Using keyhole.co as my main source, I obtained relevant and valuable information regarding the status of these brands. My intentions were to compare a period of 14 days, however, due to the limited access that I received from my free trial, the program only allowed me to see fewer of the dates than I anticipated. I want to take this opportunity and mention ahead of time that due to the various and distinctive products that are sold from these stores, when looking for the “spending capacity” I decided to focus on shirts/ jeans for men and women and compare the prices among them since each of these retailers carry those items and as a way to make this report easier to contrast and comprehend. Also, when approaching the section of “setting”, I screen-shotted some of the images on Instagram and made them into a collage to separate the type of clothes and trends that each of these brands sell currently. In the following modules

Threat: Forces shaping the Nordstrom’s strategy is that it is operating in highly competitive environment, where apparel sold by it is not only competing with large organized departmental chains but, also from small independent boutiques in the U.S. As a result competition has become very stiff in retail

The U.S. women’s apparel industry market is mature, given that the average growth rate from 2005 to 2007 was 4.66%. Within the industry, there are 6 categories of clothing in which companies compete: haute couture, designer, bridge, better, moderate, and budget. Each category targets customers with different needs and different price ranges, with haute coutre and designer clothing ranging upwards from $10,000 and moderate

According to Turban and King (2003), internet technology renders retailers an additional channel for branding, transactions and customer relationship management, the adaptation of which may drive down retailers’ transaction costs, and ensuring faster and higher quality of customer interactions, resulting in enlarging the existing markets and consumer base. M&S realizes this and have tried to sell clothing via high street stores as well as via internet though they have experienced cost cutting, rationalisation and management changes in order to revive their business in recent years. Internet technology might enable sustainable competitive advantage, but problems remain on how to physically organize their online retail operations.

The clothing industry in the US entails more than 100,000 stores with combined revenues of over 150 billions dollars a year. The giants within this industry include Abercrombie & Fitch, GAP, Urban Outfitters, and TJX Companies, which I shall be concentrating on

2. Richard M. Johns (2006). The Apparel Industry. 2nd ed. UK, London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.. 1-124.

In effort to bring in consumers, Abercrombie and Fitch uses indirect strategies to attract and persuade its customers. Large wall photos, uplifting techno songs, and dimmed lighting make for a relaxing ambiance to draw in its buyers. Apart from its in-store attractions, Abercrombie and Fitch use commercial advertising, e-posts, and online music to bring in its consumers. With all of these unique strategies, the Abercrombie and Fitch industry has been proven successful for over 100 years.

Rivalry among existing competitors: The apparel industry is highly competitive with a great number of both local and global competitors. As the market is mature, its growth is small. Accelerated growth and expansion to new markets are not easy goals to achieve. The barrier to get out of the industry is quite low for distributors, but high for producers. Most fashion manufacturers moved their production base to low-cost countries like China as wage and raw materials in developed markets like Western Europe are high. Besides, there is no great discrepancy in terms of quality of products, so customers make their purchase choices based on price and brand recognition.

The continuous development of Internet leads to the growth of e-commerce. The electronic commerce is growing constantly due to the continuously increasing number of mobile and online users in the market, primarily the emerging markets. Besides that, the development of the Information Technology (IT), such as the advance of paying processes and the improvements of shipping method also the main reason to cause the growth of electronic commerce (John Ingham, 2015). Most consumers accept e-commerce as their feasible alternative in the purchase of goods and

of these along with other factors, ASOS was able to grow. With the growth of