William Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, explains why the business of luxury fashion retail, is still stuck in an analog mindset
The New Luxury Fashion Director – Version 2.0
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
William Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, explains why the business of luxury fashion retail, is still stuck in an analog mindset
A front row inspired editorial from both fashion and digital forward, Net-a-Porter
William Duke Greenhill, founder & CEO of Greenhill Partners, explains why the business of luxury fashion retail, is still stuck in an analog mindset.
In 2011, the luxury fashion industry saw unprecedented change, largely in the areas of restructuring and leadership. As the industry sits poised to collide with macro-economic uncertainty in 2012, we take a look at how this brave, new digital world is reshaping our understanding of luxury fashion retailʼs most important leadership position: the Fashion Director.
The advent of digital and social media turned the business of luxury fashion on its ear. Luxury retailers have been trying to catch up ever since. Naturally, most turned their attention to the media itself, and many have made great progress. Burberry, for example, mastered consumer interaction with “Art of the Trench”. Tiffany broke ground by cleverly integrating retail and mobile media with the “Engagement Ring Finder” app.
“ Marketing crews propel the fashion fleet toward digital realization, but the Captains may not know how to navigate the new space once they get there ”
The problem is, internally and operationally, the business of luxury fashion retail is still stuck in an analog mindset. The marketing and e-commerce crews are propelling the fashion fleet toward digital realization, but the captains of the ships may not know how to navigate the new space once they get there.
Perhaps more than any other position at a luxury fashion retailer, the Fashion Director (or Fashion Coordinator) is responsible for navigating the space between three key objects: creative and market trends, fashion marketing and branding, and the luxury retail experience. Indeed, the Fashion Director is responsible for honing in on these three bodies, which are perpetually on an imminent collision course, and is tasked with safely guiding the ship through the tiny hole between them, beyond which profit and brand equity lie.
Dangerously, however, most luxury fashion directors today rose through the ranks as buyers, forecasters or merchandisers. If luxury fashion retail wants to maintain the digital momentum its marketing departments are generating, itʼs going to have to consider a new breed of fashion director. A breed of fashion director who still has credible knowledge of and passion for the art and history of luxury fashion. A fashion director who is still skillful with public appearances and fashion thoughtleading. But, a fashion director who comes from a completely different professional background. Hereʼs why…
Tiffany & Co’s Engagement Ring Finder app. Offering users the opportunity to try on their favourite rings using augmented reality
CREATIVE AND MARKET TRENDS
Itʼs a Small World After All
The arrival of digital media restructured the “outgoing” process of luxury fashion retail – the way brands communicate with and sell to consumers. But many retailers have failed to see that digital media also demands a restructuring of their “internal” process – the way retailers (specifically, fashion directors) forecast and gamble on the market. In the analog age, the model of successful fashion retail was linear. That is, it followed a clearly defined chronological path.
First, designers strove to break creative ground while remaining commercially viable; second, researchers and forecasters predicted what would be popular; third, fashion directors bet on what items to carry based on that research; and finally, consumers purchased what they wanted, left the rest on the racks, and fashion directors did their best to manage inventories and learn for the future.
In the digital today, however, the world is much smaller. Information (like fashion trends) moves spontaneously. What designers are working on leaks to the public. What a celebrity or other influencer wears reaches millions of consumers over night via Facebook or Twitter. Trends now change at a moments notice, and predicting popularity becomes an impossible race against time.
“ Fashion directors of the future will have learned to sense the ever-changing rhythms of market trends and will react quickly and flexibly ”
Therefore, the once linear fashion direction model becomes a point of singularity, where the chronological steps collide and now occur simultaneously. Fashion companies have already recognized their weakness in these areas of trend forecasting and consumer insight. In fact, according to McKinseyʼs most recent “Digital Agenda” quarterly report, “71 percent [of luxury executives] say data-driven customer insights will be very or extremely important to their companiesʼ competitiveness during the next two to four years – but just 4 percent say their companies now have the required analytical capabilities to manage their businesses more effectively.”
In short, to be successful, fashion direction can no longer be approached as a systematic or statistical endeavor. And yet, most fashion directors today came up through the buying ranks, which is a largely statistical, systematic discipline.
The successful fashion directors of the near future will have to have a hair-trigger, broad view of our much smaller world. They will have likely cut their teeth in digital fashion branding and marketing, where they learned to sense the ever-changing rhythms of creative and market trends, and where they learned to react quickly and flexibly to them. They will not be former buyers or forecasters at all, but luxury fashion digital media veterans who understand how the 2.0 world creates and destroys trends instantaneously, and who know where to look to find them.
Burberry’s Tweetwalk, where models were snapped using Twitpic and sent out to Twitter followers before they hit the runway
FASHION MARKETING AND BRANDING
Between Bricks and Pixels
Luxury fashion e-commerce sales are up; brick-and-mortar sales are down. That e-commerce is an essential component of successful luxury fashion retail is a no brainer. And, obviously, a fashion director with experience in luxury digital marketing and commerce is better suited for this e-tailing world. But, ironically, a fashion director with a luxury digital background is also likely to be better for in-store sales, too.
In addition to forecasting and buying, a primary responsibility of the fashion director is to assist in developing a brandʼs marketing creative and strategy. A traditional fashion director, born of the buying and forecasting worlds, will have very limited knowledge as to what makes for effective digital marketing. A fashion director who is a digital native will be intimate with this new aspect of the job, and will likely be able to easily apply it to traditional channels as well. At a time when 75% of affluent shoppers report that digital advertising ultimately influenced their purchase decision (Google Ultra-Affluent Survey 2011) the value of a fashion director with luxury digital marketing prowess is inestimable.
“ Today it is not the products that luxury consumers want, but the experiences and emotions that buying the products conjures ”
RETAIL EXPERIENCE
The Importance of the Digital Story
The final and perhaps most compelling reason that future luxury fashion directors will come from digital branding and marketing backgrounds hinges on the concept of brand experience, or “story.” Today, more than ever, it is not the products that luxury consumers want, but the experiences and emotions that buying the products conjures.
These experiences and emotions are derived from one thing – story – and beyond forecasting and marketing, a successful fashion director must know how to leverage their seasonal lines to best tell the brandʼs story. Traditional fashion directors, reared on forecasts and spreadsheets, may know well how certain items fit in inventories and product offering diversification. They are unlikely, however, to have the ability to see how the lines fit into the overall brand narrative.
To a traditional fashion director, the litmus test for deciding to carry an item is whether or not the analysis of trend and market data suggests the item will sell. In todayʼs retail world, where the brand story may begin on a mobile phone or Facebook page, other considerations become paramount. How does this item or line reflect our brand values and narrative? What does it say about us? What medium is best suited for its message? Where do we want our consumers to “meet” it? In the context of our brand image, what does carrying this item or line mean?
Like words in a great novel, each item must have a purpose that is neither superfluous nor out of context, and it is up to the fashion director to “edit” those words. It is up to the fashion director to help tell that story, and today, the frontier of storytelling is in digital media. Only a fashion director with experience in luxury digital branding can leverage the imperative power of storytelling to the greatest effect, and to enhance the brandʼs value and grow the brandʼs profit.
Founder / CEO
Duke is a leading creative and strategist for luxury digital marketing and branding. With a focus on authentic brand narratives (the “stories” of brands), Duke has become recognized as an innovative, strategic and creative professional with the unique ability to drastically increase the value of luxury brands as business assets. From Hollywood to the White House to Ivy League halls and Madison Avenue, Duke’s experience and success in virtually ever media arena has taught him how to develop authentic, effective campaigns, and has led him to founding New York City’s premiere luxury brand-specific consultancy, Greenhill + Partners. He has created over 300 award-winning campaigns, produced three independent feature films, and written on assignment for publications like the New York Times, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Harvard Review, Media Maker Magazine, Filmmaker and many others. He has won Telly awards, Pollie awards, MTV awards and a film-short Academy Award nomination. As a chief creative at Washington, D.C.’s, illustrious Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm media agency, Duke worked on prestigious presidential and corporate image campaigns. As the principal producer for In Media Res Films, he produced and marketed Hollywood films. And as founder and executive creative director of Greenhill + Partners, Duke has worked in front of and behind the scenes on campaigns for such lauded clients as Chanel, Ritz-Carlton, the Government of Monaco, Adidas, Fairmont Hotels, HBO, countless fashion and hospitality brands and many more. Duke is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s school of Communications (Bachelors), and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Film and Media (Masters).