The future of apparel retail. Business models of the IEM Paradigm.

 
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The future of apparel retail. Business models of the IEM Paradigm.
Dramatic changes are in store for the mainstream: clothing retailers who inhabit medium-level shopping malls. They are to disappear as unnecessary.
Let us divide all the mass of rags  on sale worldwide into three categories (depending on the target audiences and distribution techniques):
  1. Class A brands;

  2. Mainstream brands of medium quality and price; 

  3. Cheap run-of-the-mill articles.

Expensive brands are and will be sold like now, in expensive street retail outlets and luxury malls, or tailor-made by fashion houses.

Cheap no-name things will be sold in megaton quantities as part of the ​overall "Unimart" merchandise flow (like they are now lying in heaps at Walmart or any other hypermarket).

Dramatic changes are in store for the mainstream: clothing retailers who inhabit medium-level shopping malls and mega malls. They are to disappear as unnecessary.

Clothes  will be sold to customers directly on the manufacturer’s website (the designer’s rather than factory owner’s) and tailor-made to measure taken as the order is booked. The finished garment can be delivered to the customer by mail, like now, or via the unified logistical system of unimarts.

P.S.  Curiously, the world’s most successful garment retailer owned by the richest man in the world is yet another example of a hybrid transitional form: the business model of Inditex straddles the fence between classical clothing retail and the format described above.

And the Inditex model’s incompleteness (that is currently obvious) was objectively caused by the lack of the required IT infrastructure 40 years ago.

Under those very conditions Ortega made his revolution.

November 03, 2016