You & Yours is the BBC`s long running consumer affairs program on Radio 4. Modelling themselves as a champion, fighting largely ill informed battles on behalf of the put upon public, their investigations rarely lead to satisfactory outcomes where the fashion industry is concerned. The program’s partial attentions recently focussed on an OFT report during the 2nd December output. It concerned dubious marketing techniques such as “drip pricing”, an alleged favourite of the airlines and mobile phone companies as well as “baiting sales” where a Take That album and M&S champagne were used as examples of heavily promoted products that sold out in seconds due to severely restricted availability. The case study focussed on the recent H&M/Lanvin collaboration and inferred that this was another example of the practice and illustrated this by conducting a flawed interview with a mother of a wronged teenage victim (sorry customer). Much anguish was emoted, including the description of “rushing round the website” ( presumably from the comfort of a chair) and was given as psuedo evidence that the retailer had breached her daughter’s fundamental shopping rites by having the audacity to sell out of the limited edition products her little darling wanted. The equivalent of water boarding!
Of course in reality H&M like all the big groups have to fight for every sale from an unpredictable public, the Holy Grail being a box on the merchandisers computer screen saying 0 weeks cover. They (the retailers) make big investments to get the right product onto their selling platforms in the right quantities at the right time, whilst the spectre of a potential bad buying decision always hangs over them. H&M are not selling baked beans but high risk fashion and at the time of writing the Lanvin for H&M online pages showed two dress styles at £99 each and a coat at £199 available to buy, so even with an apparently successful campaign, money is still tied up in unsold stock and margins are potentially diluted. The program did not bother to seek out satisfied customers who were in possession of the special sold out pieces, special partly because they had them and their mates did not, this being the whole thrust of the ubiquitous marketing technique and something the program chose to ignore.
H&M are one of the more forward thinking fashion retailers, having practical non tokenistic strategies for the environment in place in areas such as textile dyes stuffs for example, however it is doubtful that a program like You & Yours would be interested in such a boring but important topic. What they could and should have done was to at least ask a more pertinent question instead of running the meaningless vox pop method. So if they had asked; “How many pieces of each style did you make?” the answer would be enlightening whatever the figures and this would have almost certainly forced additional questions to be raised about what the consumer actually gets in terms of designer input, quality and exclusivity. I would suspect that far from producing these items in relatively small numbers as the program inferred, it is instead normal mass production by a different name and H&M are just one of many that follow this business model. Even a passing glance at the garments shown in Lanvin’s own website strongly suggests that there is a world of difference between the real thing and their high street cousins (I intend to go into this in more detail in the next post) and instead of perpetuating the theory that high street giants are to be applauded for making designer fashion accessible to the masses, perhaps there should be closer scrutiny (by the trade not the BBC) of what these hybrid products actually are and what they represent for the industry as well as the consumer.
