There have been instances where famous designers (Versace, Gucci, etc.) have designed clothing items for mass-market stores, like H&M, Target, etc. Does this activity “cheapen” their brand? Or does it actually popularize it?
Anybody who pays $800 for a Versace shirt, then sees the name on a $19.00 shirt at H&M, would be a little upset, I would think!
The ones at Target are not “the exact same shirt”. Every time I’ve seen a designer at Target, it has been with an item created specifically for the promotion. The item is typically not of the same quality as a non-promotional brand. The Missoni products were cute but I’d never think my coat is the same as a “real” Missoni. It seems that anybody that can afford an 800 dollar shirt will feel the same.
As someone who knows nothing of designers or fashion or labels, it doesn’t affect how I view any brand, since I probably wouldn’t know the difference anyway. As to the designers - it’s a business decision. Not everyone can or will spend $800 on a shirt, but I’m sure there are more than enough who care about brands and will shell out lesser bucks for a fancy-pants logo on their clothing or accessories. These consumers are the ones the designer is going after.
They may be *artistes *of style, but in the end, they’re in the business to make money.
The real question is why does a “designer” coat or purse cost 100x times a serviceable one.
Designers make items to be sold at H&M or Target, with their name on them.
It’s been my experience that when I go to one of these stores, I find other people have been there the moment the doors open. Sweep the shelves and racks and buy everything up - to be sold at a profit on eBay.
This happened with Target’s line of Liberty prints. I went to take a look and there was virtually almost nothing - NOTHING - left.
:(:(
Goddamn.
Part of the cost is that the designer coat is better styled, has better material and workmanship, etc. Part of the cost is the prestige of the label, that is, people will pay more for a coat that has that designer label on it than they will pay for a coat with exactly the same qualities, just not the label.
Most likely the clothes are all made in the same sweatshops in Asia. You just get ripped off a lot more by paying $500 instead of $20.
I am not that familiar with the crossover type of stuff, but various luxury goods will differentiate the selfs with different levels of quality in one way or another.
For example, Ralph Lauren has upper end black and purple label lines
I think designers, brands, companies - whatever - always take a risk when they take a well known name that was traditionally upper end and then open it up to the masses. You certainly do want your existing customer base to not feel like you are cheapening the brand too much. You might save the “hand stitched” or “super special virgin leather” to only your high end products.
Then hopefully you will get people in through target that will end up wanting some of your nicer stuff, but even if they don’t - they are certainly selling a crap load more through target than they ever will at their boutique stores or high end retailers.
I think the really bad sin is if they take something that was popular in the upper end part - and make an almost exact copy of it.
They might be made in the same sweatshops, but generally the higher priced items will be made of better quality materials.
They might use slightly better quality stuff, but it’s not 20x more expensive. Lucky for them Americans don’t seem to mind getting ripped off.
You really think so? I mean, designer vs. good-quality non-designer, not designer vs. Wal*Mart. I’ve never found a designer label to bring notably better quality materials or finish than quality-maker but non-designer products.
I think this has a great deal more to do with it - if most Gucci and other buyers knew that only the top-tier products were made in Europe and the rest (including the very pricy middle-tier stuff) was made on Asian production lines next to the bottom-line stuff and in between runs of no-name product and even knockoffs, they might not think they’re getting much for their $500-800-1,000.
So it’s still about the designer-label stuff being horribly overpriced rather than the Target-made stuff being cheap or devaluing the name.
IMHO you’re gonna be very hard pressed to find a run of the mill brand that makes leather products as varied and on the level of quality Coach does.
There can be a difference between the twenty-dollar clothes and the five-hundred-dollar clothes. I’ve linked to it before, but here’s a 2010 article from The New York Times that describes a pair of $550 men’s trousers and explains why they cost that much. The slacks are made from two yards of fabric that costs $24 per yard, along with $3 per yard to import. Each pair takes about four hours to tailor at a cost of $13 per hour in a union tailor shop in Brooklyn. That brings the cost to about $110. The manufacturer doubles the cost to get a wholesale price of $220. And then a retailer like Bergdorf Goodman marks up the cost by 2.5, which arrives at the $550 retail price.
Does it diminish Mercedes’ high end models that they also make Smarts?
Not for me, and if I cared about clothing labels it wouldn’t there either.
Yes, and BMWs are the only car worth buying.
I don’t buy much leather (a wallet every ten years), but Mrs. B. has had two Coach purses and a Coach wallet in the last ten years, every one of which had half the lifespan and twice the wearout rate of selected, no-particular-brand equivalents. She bought the first bag and wallet, paying IMVHO way too much for them, and had two other bags before she was gifted with the second bag, which she would not have bought herself.
My own experience is with Filson, which hypes itself as the ne plus ultra of outdoorsy clothing. I acquired quite a few shirts from them before I realized they had about one-quarter the wear tolerance of plain old LL Bean at less than half the cost, not to mention the LLBs fit comfortably while half the Filsons had weird flaws like extremely small and tight forearms and cuffs.
It all confirmed my sense and second-hand opinions that most designer brands are not all that well made and grossly overpriced; a little careful shopping can find quality equivalents with one-tenth the cachet and ten times the utility and lifespan. Buying Coach or Gucci or Prada or Filson or BMW by the brand alone is pretentious, ignorant nonsense.
Mercedes is only a luxury brand in the US. In the rest of the world, they are GM, making everything from econo cars to heavy trucks, and their range of luxury vehicles does not define their image.
All I can say is that this is the exact opposite of my experience and of everyone I know. I have a Coach belt and gloves I’ve used for 20 years. I needed to get the gloves relined once because the fabric eventually wore out and Coach did it gratis. My wife has Coach luggage and bags and has never had a single problem.
Just curious, With the problems you describe did you bring the items back? The Coach store I deal with would have replaced them if they were of the poor quality you describe.
I think it’s complicated. Designing for the low end can cheapen the high end brand, sure, but it could also bring more overall recognition and lend cache indirectly. It’s obvious to everyone that you’re not getting the same product for that price, but rather that a designer brought high-end sensibilities to a lower-cost product.
It’s also probably good for designers to have different challenges and a way to stretch themselves. One of the selling points of the “generic” Mujirushi stores is that they hire some pretty well-known designers to create inexpensive products for them.
Even within brands, there are higher and lower product lines. Lots of luxury brands have spun-off low end product lines, and vise versa. Toyota created Lexus as their high-end offering, and for every “single-cask Madeira-aged heirloom sipping whiskey” distillery, you’ve got a corporate owner that sells at least one or more labels more often associated with spring break and/or hangovers than tasting notes and dram glasses.
Sometimes there is a quality difference, sometimes not. Banana Republic, Gap, and Old Navy are all under the same corporation, and almost certainly use some of the same materials, mills, and sewing factories. There is some quality difference between them, as anyone who has shopped at those stores can attest to, but probably not to the degree that the clothes are priced.
Clothing is notorious for being hugely marked up, partly because there are so many middlemen who get a cut in most distribution channels. Some of the store labels were created to get a bigger cut while being able to offer a lower market price. Many years ago I worked at Miller’s Outpost. They created their own clothing lines to piggyback on the appeal — and higher prices — of the name brands. Their jeans were the low-cost alternative to Levis. They were slightly lower quality, but often half the price. Even though the two lines were sold in the same store, the sales weren’t really competitive, but more often synergistic. Someone would come in looking for Levis and find that MO brand was “good enough,” or they’d wander in because of “CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP!!!” sales on MO jeans and fall in love with a particular fit or style of jeans that was only offered by Levis.
The markup on name brands was typically 1,000% or more. Even house-brand stuff was sold for prices like $60 new, $40 on sale, $25–30 on clearance, $20 on end of season absolutely must go everything on the same shitty picked-over four racks at the back of the store give-away sale, $10 factory outlet credit, and damaged-out at $7. What were the materials and workmanship worth? Probably half that. What were the added costs for retail? A big chunk of that 8–9x original markup.
The overhead in retail presences is huge. Marketing is expensive. Personnel costs are significant even when hiring dirt-cheap high-school drones. Theft (termed “shrinkage” by corporate) was always a problem, whether from employees or customers. I’m sure the margins were actually pretty small despite what looks like a ridiculous markup if you just compare the starting and end prices, and don’t think about all the associated costs with maintaining a retail presence. Still, even damaging an item out at $7 means that they were expecting to make some amount of money on it, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth sticking back on a truck to ship to a warehouse somewhere.
So, what are things worth? What you’ll pay for. I look for quality above all. Increasingly, I’m unwilling to buy something unless the quality and design are good enough. Brand labels are meaningless to me. I’m hard to fit, so I can’t buy most suits off the rack. I could probably afford an Armani (justifying the expense is a whole other issue) and get it tailored to fit fairly well, but why bother when I could probably get bespoke for the same price? I’d get perfect fit, comparable or better material, and more attention to detail, for the same amount of money.
Some things are too expensive to buy cheap. I’ve found that “cheap” shoes in particular cost me more in pain and wear than they’re worth. I bought a pair of “nice” shoes for $40 last year that only lasted a few months before the pseudo-leather material started to split in a way that real leather would never have. I have a pair of hiking boots that I’ve absolutely abused for over a decade. I paid nearly $200 for them new; amortized over the years, they were less than half the price of those shoes, and I still don’t need to replace them.
Yes, I know. But it does in this segment.
Huh. Back when I cared about such things, in school, I saved up and bought expensive real-leather shoes that were as painful as they were beautiful. They hurt so badly it wasn’t funny, but I wore them anyway. Now I try things on and if they’re plastic cheapies from Payless, I couldn’t be happier - if they look nice and feel good… And I don’t ever want to tote around the same tired overpriced pocketbook my whole life, I don’t CARE if it cost as much as a car payment. I am unimpressed.