LVMH is a global luxury empire with over €79 billion ($83 billion) in revenues for 2022, spanning several industries: wines and spirits, fashion and leather goods, perfumes and cosmetics, watches and jewelry, and selective retailing. It comprises brands like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior Couture, Fendi, Loro Piana, and many others.
Kering Group follows a multi-brand business model strategy. The central holding helps the brands and Houses part of its portfolio leverage economies of scale while creating synergies. At the same time, those brands are run independently. Kering is today a global luxury brand that made over €20 billion in revenue based on this multi-brand strategy. Within Kering Group are brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, and many more—the primary operating segments based on luxury and lifestyle.
Slow fashion is a movement in contraposition with fast fashion. Where in fast fashion, it’s all about speed from design to manufacturing and distribution, in slow fashion, quality and sustainability of the supply chain are the key elements.
Fash fashion has been a phenomenon that became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as players like Zara and H&M took over the fashion industry by leveraging on shorter and shorter design-manufacturing-distribution cycles. Reducing these cycles from months to a few weeks. With just-in-time logistics and flagship stores in iconic places in the largest cities in the world, these brands offered cheap, fashionable clothes and a wide variety of designs.
The Ultra Fashion business model is an evolution of fast fashion with a strong online twist. Indeed, where the fast-fashion retailer invests massively in logistics and warehousing, its costs are still skewed toward operating physical retail stores. While the ultra-fast fashion retailer mainly moves its operations online, thus focusing its cost centers on logistics, warehousing, and a mobile-based digital presence.
Real-time retail involves the instantaneous collection, analysis, and distribution of data to give consumers an integrated and personalized shopping experience. This represents a strong new trend, as a further evolution of fast fashion first (who turned the design into manufacturing in a few weeks), ultra-fast fashion later (which further shortened the cycle of design-manufacturing). Real-time retail turns fashion trends into clothes collections in a few days or a maximum of one week.
SHEIN is an international B2C fast fashion eCommerce platform founded in 2008 by Chris Xu. The company improved the ultra-fast fashion model by leveraging real-time retail, quickly turning fashion trends in clothes collections through its strong digital presence and successful branding campaigns.
With over €27 billion in sales in 2021, the Spanish Fast Fashion Empire, Inditex, which comprises eight sister brands, has grown thanks to a strategy of expanding its flagship stores in exclusive locations around the globe. Its largest brand, Zara, contributed over 70% of the group’s revenue. The country that contributed the most to the fast fashion Empire sales was Spain, with over 15% of its revenues.
Zara is a brand part of the retail empire Inditex. Zara is the leading brand in what has been defined as “fast fashion.” With almost €20 billion in sales in 2021 (comprising Zara Home) and an integrated retail format with quick sales cycles. Zara follows an integrated retail format where customers are free to move from physical to digital experience.
Wish is a mobile-first e-commerce platform in which users’ experience is based on discovery and customized product feed. Wish makes money from merchants’ fees and advertising on the platform, and logistic services. The mobile platform also leverages an asset-light business model based on a positive cash conversion cycle where users pay in advance as they order goods, and merchants are paid in weeks.
Poshmark is a social commerce mobile platform that combines social media capabilities with its e-commerce platform to enable transactions. It makes money with a simple model, where for each sale, Poshmark takes a 20% fee on the final price for sales of $15 and over and a flat rate of $2.95 for sales below that. Its gamification elements and the tools offered to sellers are critical to the company’s growth as a mobile-first platform.
Depop is a peer-to-peer shopping app founded by Simon Beckerman in 2011 at the Italian technological incubator and start-up center H-FARM. Depop experienced tremendous growth in the following years, thanks largely to word-of-mouth advertising and social sharing. The platform now boasts more than 21 million users. Marketplace giant Etsy has plans to acquire Depop in the third quarter of 2021 for a cash deal worth $1.625 billion.
Boohoo – sometimes referred to as Boohoo.com – is an English online fashion retailer founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane in the historic textile district of Manchester. Boohoo makes money by selling fashion items for more than the cost of manufacturing, advertising, marketing, and distributing them.
Urban Outfitters is a multinational lifestyle retail corporation with a company headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company was founded in 1970 by Richard Hayne, Judy Wicks, and Scott Belair.
Farfetch is an online luxury fashion retail platform founded by Portuguese entrepreneur José Neves, a stalwart of the fashion industry since the 1990s, with the vision of allowing anyone to purchase clothing from high-end brands in cities like Paris and Milan from the comfort of their home. The company makes money through commissions, fulfillment services, and wholesale distributions.
Zalando is a multi-national eCommerce company founded in 2008 by David Schneider and Robert Gentz, created under the name Ifansho, changed to Zalando as a reference to the Italian word zalare – or “making jokes”. Zalando generates revenues by purchasing stock and then selling it for a profit. Zalando also charges brands it partners with a commission for the privilege of selling on its platform. The commission Zalando collects on each sale is undisclosed. Zalando also collects advertising revenue from ads placed on its website and app.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
