Hitting reset on luxury fashion

The luxury fashion industry is undergoing an important phase of transformation, initiated before the pandemic and now accelerated by it.

The restrictions caused by lockdowns and the halt in international tourism traffic have forced luxury businesses to make organisational changes and have highlighted the limitations of an inefficient and expensive business model.

To better understand the changes luxury companies and their suppliers will need to make to their way of working in order to deliver a winning response for the end consumer we interviewed CEOs from leading luxury businesses in France and Italy. We asked them about all key aspects of their operating model, addressing issues across collection structure, collection development, sourcing, logistics and sustainability, and to rank their most important issues.

From this, four themes were identified as winning and differentiating factors for future operational models which we address in this insight.

• Reshaping seasons into a continuous offer
• Engineering flexibility into the production process
• Flow management: from ‘deadlines’ to ’appointments’
• Sustainability is the goal, but what does it look like?

The challenges for the future of the luxury sector have clearly defined directions and the ability for businesses to develop new business models will make a difference to success or not.

If you would like to discuss any of the themes covered in the report we’d be delighted to talk.