Shopping Mall vs Online Retail

The growing number of consumers who are turning towards buying online has significantly decrease the customer traffic flow amongst all brick and mortar retailers.  Sales momentum is perceptibly slowing in most retail stores. These tepid numbers reflect consumer apathy and general economic concerns.

Shopping malls still hold sway among many shoppers but not as before except during back to school, summer time, christmas and 3 day sale events. Reports indicate that the Internet is making up for some of the lost store traffic. It is increasingly evident that the shift from shopping in stores to shopping online is permanent and still rising.

In the past year more and more people felt comfortable with Internet shopping.  Special values and free shipping incentivized them to fulfill their need for basics and their family fashion apparel online.  One wonders what will happen in the future as even more sales shift to online.  

In the Philippines, there is still positive growth in the retail sector but these are being competed by Divisoria and Baclaran marketplace where people tend to look for great bargains and have their money felt like having more peso power.  The positive year in year sales is  not as significant as a few years back where most earns double digit growth, these days most retailers are striving to go beyond a positive 6-8% growth.

The recent surge in online shopping has even attracted international investors such as german-incubator Rocket Internet GMBH that set up across Europe, Asia and Africa online retailers such as Lazada, Zalora which in some way reduced the traditional mall retailers customer flow.   Though most online shoppers require payment through credit cards, these innovative online retailers have come up with ways to target non-credit card holders by offering Cash on delivery payments or deposit payments for the items the buyers are getting from these new retail concepts.

Retailers may still sell the same quantity of many items and goods, but the sales will occur outside brick and mortar stores.

Philippine Fashion

Just got home from another busy Philippine Fashion Week, I find this year's event level up to new breakthroughs in the Philippine Fashion and designs.  Old and new designers emerged with more and more creative works than ever before.

Compared to New York, Paris and Milan Fashion weeks, definitely theres a long way to go but with consistency and innovation, I am certain the Filipino designers can be at par with international creative fashion.

As a retail merchandising manager myself, I place top quality in the works of my vendors and here in this event, I can see many potential future suppliers that can make big names and bucks in the store racks.  Though in my many years, I rarely see these fashion designers take the opportunity to enter the mainstream retail since most of them being creative as they are wants to preserve their independence and would want to focus mainly on their couture works.

Even if the big bucks remain in having their works become part of the mainstream retail for the mass consumers, they tend to cocoon and thrive in mainly targeting custom-made clientele.  For me one would be their limited understanding of how big the potential of their works becoming part of a bigger platform rather than producing one dress at a time.  Secondly, most of these young and old designers have very limited resources to expand their works to enter mainstream retailers, they must be backed by financial backers inorder for them to take the bigger stage of massively producing for the bigger consumers of retailers.

Lastly, I supposed there have been perception that when these fashion designers mass produced for major retailers, they have to take the loss of non-saleability of their clothesline if their merchandise perform dismally in a given fashion season.  For me this can be a two-edge sword.  For one, merchandise are saleable if truly they can come up with designs that hits through the core of what the consumer needs, secondly, its not right to say, retailers have this heartless way of returning unsold goods after a period of time since these can be negotiated with other means to compensate a win-win for both retailers and fashion designers.

I wish to one day see the works of these very hard-working and creative designers be in most retail racks and that there will be a collaborative work in enhancing each of their potentials of improving the retail landscape.