Apparel / Textiles & Accessories

With the advent of summer, clothing companies have to abandon traditional practices when preparing new products. Normally, summer is the season for planning summer-themed marketing activities such as travel and vacation. Brands will use the summer craze to arouse people's desire to buy products such as new swimsuits or handbags.

However, due to the impact of the epidemic, the planning of brand new products and marketing activities needs to be reconsidered. Because consumers are expected to go out less this summer. In order to adapt to the changes, many clothing brands emphasized that their products are essential items for leisure and home when promoting new products this summer, and set out to introduce comfortable and exquisite clothing that can be worn in the home and office.

To a large extent, it is too late for the company to completely abandon the clothing they plan to launch in the summer. Larger companies may choose to hold inventory until next summer. But this does not make sense for seasonally high inventory such as shorts and swimsuits. Instead, companies must study how to make existing inventory meaningful.

Brands need to reach the same pace as customers and be able to sell new products, but customers won’t feel that you are taking advantage of their potential demand that they might have to shop. Not everyone can now afford discretionary spending. "

Melanie Travis, founder of the swimsuit brand Andie, said: "During the non-epidemic period, we tend to do a lot of marketing related to summer travel. For example, our product is advertised as'this is the best swimsuit of all time' (this is the history The best swimsuit), but in this case, we have to adjust."

Recently, Andie launched a new environmentally friendly swimwear series, which was already in design before the outbreak.

Under normal circumstances, Andie may shoot products with models on the beaches of the Bahamas or Mexico, and the company decides to use employees as models to promote the new series, although Andie can still hire models and manage photo shoots remotely. Melanie Travis said that she feels that there is no point in using professional models, because now many consumers buy clothes without a cult-like pursuit of models, but some real faces are closer to life.

Like Andie, other digitally native apparel startups are also reducing summer marketing activities. Cuts, a men's t-shirt brand, had to wait until May to start taking pictures for the summer series originally scheduled to be launched in April. Its founder Borrelli said: "We must shift the focus of the 2020 summer activities from travel and travel to the home holiday environment."

The company has been considering launching a series of polo shirts before the coronavirus outbreak. Borrelli said that the epidemic strengthened its decision to continue production because the company bet that the series will be popular among men who still work at home in the summer. Borrelli said his polo shirt looks professional, but it is still more casual than the shirts worn by some office workers.

Another option for digital clothing companies that want to sell products that are more suitable for people who stay at home is to form partnerships with other companies. For example, Andie buys products wholesale from other female-founded companies (including Supergoop, Case&Drift, and Brunna Co.), launches its "summer suit" for testing, and customers can buy towels, sunscreen, etc. from its official website.

For clothing retailers with physical stores, the question of what products to launch becomes more complicated because they must also calculate the inventory levels of physical stores and online stores. Their inventory may have been hoarding for two months, and most retailers want to clear their inventory first and launch some new products to attract customers. For example, Target recently released a new limited-edition designer clothing line. The company decided to publish it online instead of in a physical store to encourage people to go out less. The company's CMO Jill Sando said in an interview that in response to the coronavirus, Target has postponed the release of the series for two months.