The Big Brand Theory
Ny times
By ERIC WILSON
“Argyles,” the designer Tina Lutz remembers thinking. “Lutz & Patmos doesn’t do argyles.”
Over the past seven years, Lutz and her partner, Marcia Patmos, have developed an impeccable reputation based on their collection of sublime cashmere sweaters — a reputation burnished by seasonal A-list collaborations with the likes of the artist Sarah Morris; the fashion photographer Inez van Lamsweerde; Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue; the director Sofia Coppola; and the architect Richard Meier, who act as “guest designers.” Lutz & Patmos cashmeres do not come cheap, but then again neither does the image of success in such a cost-intensive business — a struggle familiar to pretty much every young designer working today in New York City.
And so last spring, when Lutz and Patmos agreed to design a 10-piece collection for the Japanese retailer Uniqlo, a $3.3 billion company with more than 720 stores worldwide, the partnership had less to do with cachet than with good old-fashioned cash. Ergo, the argyles. And Lutz and Patmos are not alone. Countless young designers are now entering alliances, which would have been considered unholy a mere five years ago, moonlighting for mass retailers like Target, the Gap, and Payless ShoeSource. For designers like Alice Roi, Proenza Schouler and Patrick Robinson, the results — inexpensive variations on their signature styles — have raised their national profile among consumers who have never set foot in Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys New York. But they have also raised questions of whether that exposure doesn’t come with a hidden cost.
For brands like Uniqlo, the advantages are fairly obvious. In addition to hiring Lutz and Patmos, Uniqlo also commissioned guest collections from Phillip Lim, Alexandre Plokhov and Alice Roi, all timed to its expansion in the United States and the opening of an enormous New York flagship on Broadway in SoHo. The guest collections, mostly priced under $100 with limited runs, have typically sold out within a week, says Shin Shuda, the chief marketing officer of Uniqlo. “The returns we are getting go far beyond that,” he says. “People are noticing us as collaborators with designers.”
For fall, Uniqlo again hired Lutz and Patmos, along with the Paris-based designer Adam Jones and the Japanese designer Keita Maruyama, to consult on its cashmere sweaters. This time around, however, Uniqlo has tightened its design parameters, demanding more classic styles — like argyles. Lutz and Patmos devised a tonal scheme that fades slowly into lighter hues, a pretty solution (offered in navy, red, heather gray and brown varieties), if not one typical of their aesthetic. In other words, a compromise.
“It needed to be true basics that could appeal to a very big market,” Lutz says, sounding a little defensive. “We do worry about our integrity, but that is why we picked Uniqlo to do this collection. Because even at lower prices, their brand philosophy, in a funny way, kind of matches our own.”
First introduced in 2003, Isaac Mizrahi’s collection of cheap and cheerful preppy sportswear for Target — cashmere sweaters, jersey dresses and trench coats priced under $40 — is now considered a seminal moment in what has come to be known as masstige marketing. Since then, there have been more than two dozen examples of designers, both the world famous and the relatively obscure, entering partnerships with mass retailers. These have included the phenomenal, but ephemeral, installations at H & M of capsule collections by Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney and Viktor & Rolf; the Gap’s one-time sale of shirts and dresses by Thakoon, Rodarte and Doo.Ri (a trio of up-and-coming designers championed by Vogue magazine and the Council of Fashion Designers of America); and a rotating cast of talents hired for up to three-month stints in Target’s Go International program that, it is fair to say, most Target customers would have never before heard of. (Beginning Sept. 15, Target’s Go International pick will be the British designer Alice Temperley, who will be followed a couple of months later by the New York-based designer Erin Fetherston).
These younger designers are perhaps too young to remember Halston, whose collection was dropped by Bergdorf Goodman when he began selling a licensed line to J. C. Penney in 1982, effectively ending his career in the pursuit to “dress America.” Still, they would no doubt argue that the stigma of designing for the masses has been all but eliminated in the current era of democratized luxury and that such deals, while of minor benefit to their diminutive bottom lines, have provided invaluable exposure in the form of subsidized advertising.
While Target executives would not discuss details of its payments, people familiar with the arrangements said its Go International designers have been paid about $250,000 for each collection. But the real payoff comes in marketing dollars — first-class travel arrangements, big-budget promotional events, not to mention a blanketing of advertisements on television, magazines and bus shelters. For a Proenza Schouler promotion in February, Target paid to remodel the SoHo store Opening Ceremony as a temporary “pop-up” shop. Meanwhile, in Paris, to promote the same collection at the cult store Colette, models were hired to stand outside fashion shows with English bull terriers. The company has also bused magazine editors to its stores in New Jersey for shopping sprees with $100 gift cards and placed samples with various celebrities, as it did to introduce its collaboration with the Los Angeles-based label Libertine. And it worked: the actress Kate Bosworth was later photographed wearing a Libertine for Target tunic.
Target executives estimate that magazine coverage of its tie-in with the British designer Luella Bartley reached the eyes — if not the wallets — of potential consumers some 600 million times. But even less successful endeavors, like Todd Oldham’s dorm-themed home collection, which reportedly bombed, are of little real consequence to the retailer. Their sales represent merely a blip in Target’s overall revenues of $59 billion, while maintaining Target’s image as a store that sells great design rather than discount merchandise.
“For us, it is the added name recognition that is the most amazing thing,” says Lela Rose, the society designer who until now was most famous for dressing the Bush twins. For fall, Rose has designed a line of shoes for Payless, the retail chain of 4,600 stores that is trying to upgrade its image of selling very cheap shoes in a very orange environment to one that carries styles by famous designers at a fraction of the cost. Rose’s shoes for Payless can be seen in a full-page advertisement in the September issue of W, and her spring fashion show will be sponsored by the brand. Of course, that also means the models will be wearing Payless shoes rather than the expensive Rickard Shah and Jean-Michel Cazabat shoes the designer has used in the past. To make her Payless daytime pumps look expensive enough for her runway, she turned them out in men’s-wear fabrics like chocolate herringbone wool trimmed with patent leather, and frankly, she feels few people will be able to tell the difference. “It’s like I had an advertising budget, which of course I don’t,” Rose says. “It’s fabulous.”
A hot style at Payless may sell as many as 20,000 pairs, says Matt Rubel, the company’s chief executive, “so if you think about 20,000 people experiencing a designer, that’s better than an ad for the brand — they get to experience it and feel passionate about it.” Of course, a customer might indeed have such a positive experience if she happens to be shopping in a bright new Payless outlet like the one at Lexington Avenue and 58th Street, but at this point, fewer than 10 percent of the Payless stores have been upgraded from their junky-looking layouts, where the shoes are displayed in their boxes from the floor to the ceiling.
Rafe Totengco, the accessories designer, said several of his luxury accounts balked when he told them he was designing a collection for Target last year and dropped his high-end bag collection. (He would not name them because he said he did not want to further damage his future relationships with those stores.) And after Vera Wang began developing a multicategory collection that goes on sale at Kohl’s this month, Macy’s responded by dropping Wang’s lingerie line from its stores. Meanwhile, the ambitious efforts of Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, to roll out a fashiony line with Mark Eisen, as well as trendier home designs, did not resonate with its customers, ultimately weakening the company’s overall performance in the first half of this year.
“There is no blanket answer to this question,” says Jim Gold, the chief executive of Bergdorf’s. “On the plus side, you’re going to see better, more interesting design at much lower price points than we’ve seen historically, but that is a slippery slope for designers because cachet is a very intangible quality, and you can lose it quickly. If a name is perceived as overexposed, or overly accessible, it becomes less desirable.” (After Mizrahi’s career was reignited, thanks in part to his Target collection, Bergdorf’s welcomed him and his high-end collection back into the fold.)
Certainly an argument can be made that in the increasingly cutthroat world of fashion, young designers need all the help they can get. Behnaz Sarafpour, who designed clothes for Target, says that the experience was about more than being known. “It actually made me more aware of my look as a designer,” she says. “You very much work alone, in your own head, going through your own evolution, but when you see a giant billboard with your look on it, you really see the essence of what everybody else believes you stand for. It kind of focuses you in a way.”
Fortunately, those retailers who stuck by Totengco after his bags were sold at Target saw their sales go up, and Totengco’s online business at rafe.com increased threefold. What’s more, Target flew him to Los Angeles to attend a Target-sponsored pre-party for the Oscars, where he got to meet Cameron Diaz and acquaint young Hollywood with his work.
So on balance, Totengco would have to admit, “I think it was the best thing that I ever did.”
Ny times
By ERIC WILSON
“Argyles,” the designer Tina Lutz remembers thinking. “Lutz & Patmos doesn’t do argyles.”
Over the past seven years, Lutz and her partner, Marcia Patmos, have developed an impeccable reputation based on their collection of sublime cashmere sweaters — a reputation burnished by seasonal A-list collaborations with the likes of the artist Sarah Morris; the fashion photographer Inez van Lamsweerde; Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue; the director Sofia Coppola; and the architect Richard Meier, who act as “guest designers.” Lutz & Patmos cashmeres do not come cheap, but then again neither does the image of success in such a cost-intensive business — a struggle familiar to pretty much every young designer working today in New York City.
And so last spring, when Lutz and Patmos agreed to design a 10-piece collection for the Japanese retailer Uniqlo, a $3.3 billion company with more than 720 stores worldwide, the partnership had less to do with cachet than with good old-fashioned cash. Ergo, the argyles. And Lutz and Patmos are not alone. Countless young designers are now entering alliances, which would have been considered unholy a mere five years ago, moonlighting for mass retailers like Target, the Gap, and Payless ShoeSource. For designers like Alice Roi, Proenza Schouler and Patrick Robinson, the results — inexpensive variations on their signature styles — have raised their national profile among consumers who have never set foot in Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys New York. But they have also raised questions of whether that exposure doesn’t come with a hidden cost.
For brands like Uniqlo, the advantages are fairly obvious. In addition to hiring Lutz and Patmos, Uniqlo also commissioned guest collections from Phillip Lim, Alexandre Plokhov and Alice Roi, all timed to its expansion in the United States and the opening of an enormous New York flagship on Broadway in SoHo. The guest collections, mostly priced under $100 with limited runs, have typically sold out within a week, says Shin Shuda, the chief marketing officer of Uniqlo. “The returns we are getting go far beyond that,” he says. “People are noticing us as collaborators with designers.”
For fall, Uniqlo again hired Lutz and Patmos, along with the Paris-based designer Adam Jones and the Japanese designer Keita Maruyama, to consult on its cashmere sweaters. This time around, however, Uniqlo has tightened its design parameters, demanding more classic styles — like argyles. Lutz and Patmos devised a tonal scheme that fades slowly into lighter hues, a pretty solution (offered in navy, red, heather gray and brown varieties), if not one typical of their aesthetic. In other words, a compromise.
“It needed to be true basics that could appeal to a very big market,” Lutz says, sounding a little defensive. “We do worry about our integrity, but that is why we picked Uniqlo to do this collection. Because even at lower prices, their brand philosophy, in a funny way, kind of matches our own.”
First introduced in 2003, Isaac Mizrahi’s collection of cheap and cheerful preppy sportswear for Target — cashmere sweaters, jersey dresses and trench coats priced under $40 — is now considered a seminal moment in what has come to be known as masstige marketing. Since then, there have been more than two dozen examples of designers, both the world famous and the relatively obscure, entering partnerships with mass retailers. These have included the phenomenal, but ephemeral, installations at H & M of capsule collections by Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney and Viktor & Rolf; the Gap’s one-time sale of shirts and dresses by Thakoon, Rodarte and Doo.Ri (a trio of up-and-coming designers championed by Vogue magazine and the Council of Fashion Designers of America); and a rotating cast of talents hired for up to three-month stints in Target’s Go International program that, it is fair to say, most Target customers would have never before heard of. (Beginning Sept. 15, Target’s Go International pick will be the British designer Alice Temperley, who will be followed a couple of months later by the New York-based designer Erin Fetherston).
These younger designers are perhaps too young to remember Halston, whose collection was dropped by Bergdorf Goodman when he began selling a licensed line to J. C. Penney in 1982, effectively ending his career in the pursuit to “dress America.” Still, they would no doubt argue that the stigma of designing for the masses has been all but eliminated in the current era of democratized luxury and that such deals, while of minor benefit to their diminutive bottom lines, have provided invaluable exposure in the form of subsidized advertising.
While Target executives would not discuss details of its payments, people familiar with the arrangements said its Go International designers have been paid about $250,000 for each collection. But the real payoff comes in marketing dollars — first-class travel arrangements, big-budget promotional events, not to mention a blanketing of advertisements on television, magazines and bus shelters. For a Proenza Schouler promotion in February, Target paid to remodel the SoHo store Opening Ceremony as a temporary “pop-up” shop. Meanwhile, in Paris, to promote the same collection at the cult store Colette, models were hired to stand outside fashion shows with English bull terriers. The company has also bused magazine editors to its stores in New Jersey for shopping sprees with $100 gift cards and placed samples with various celebrities, as it did to introduce its collaboration with the Los Angeles-based label Libertine. And it worked: the actress Kate Bosworth was later photographed wearing a Libertine for Target tunic.
Target executives estimate that magazine coverage of its tie-in with the British designer Luella Bartley reached the eyes — if not the wallets — of potential consumers some 600 million times. But even less successful endeavors, like Todd Oldham’s dorm-themed home collection, which reportedly bombed, are of little real consequence to the retailer. Their sales represent merely a blip in Target’s overall revenues of $59 billion, while maintaining Target’s image as a store that sells great design rather than discount merchandise.
“For us, it is the added name recognition that is the most amazing thing,” says Lela Rose, the society designer who until now was most famous for dressing the Bush twins. For fall, Rose has designed a line of shoes for Payless, the retail chain of 4,600 stores that is trying to upgrade its image of selling very cheap shoes in a very orange environment to one that carries styles by famous designers at a fraction of the cost. Rose’s shoes for Payless can be seen in a full-page advertisement in the September issue of W, and her spring fashion show will be sponsored by the brand. Of course, that also means the models will be wearing Payless shoes rather than the expensive Rickard Shah and Jean-Michel Cazabat shoes the designer has used in the past. To make her Payless daytime pumps look expensive enough for her runway, she turned them out in men’s-wear fabrics like chocolate herringbone wool trimmed with patent leather, and frankly, she feels few people will be able to tell the difference. “It’s like I had an advertising budget, which of course I don’t,” Rose says. “It’s fabulous.”
A hot style at Payless may sell as many as 20,000 pairs, says Matt Rubel, the company’s chief executive, “so if you think about 20,000 people experiencing a designer, that’s better than an ad for the brand — they get to experience it and feel passionate about it.” Of course, a customer might indeed have such a positive experience if she happens to be shopping in a bright new Payless outlet like the one at Lexington Avenue and 58th Street, but at this point, fewer than 10 percent of the Payless stores have been upgraded from their junky-looking layouts, where the shoes are displayed in their boxes from the floor to the ceiling.
Rafe Totengco, the accessories designer, said several of his luxury accounts balked when he told them he was designing a collection for Target last year and dropped his high-end bag collection. (He would not name them because he said he did not want to further damage his future relationships with those stores.) And after Vera Wang began developing a multicategory collection that goes on sale at Kohl’s this month, Macy’s responded by dropping Wang’s lingerie line from its stores. Meanwhile, the ambitious efforts of Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, to roll out a fashiony line with Mark Eisen, as well as trendier home designs, did not resonate with its customers, ultimately weakening the company’s overall performance in the first half of this year.
“There is no blanket answer to this question,” says Jim Gold, the chief executive of Bergdorf’s. “On the plus side, you’re going to see better, more interesting design at much lower price points than we’ve seen historically, but that is a slippery slope for designers because cachet is a very intangible quality, and you can lose it quickly. If a name is perceived as overexposed, or overly accessible, it becomes less desirable.” (After Mizrahi’s career was reignited, thanks in part to his Target collection, Bergdorf’s welcomed him and his high-end collection back into the fold.)
Certainly an argument can be made that in the increasingly cutthroat world of fashion, young designers need all the help they can get. Behnaz Sarafpour, who designed clothes for Target, says that the experience was about more than being known. “It actually made me more aware of my look as a designer,” she says. “You very much work alone, in your own head, going through your own evolution, but when you see a giant billboard with your look on it, you really see the essence of what everybody else believes you stand for. It kind of focuses you in a way.”
Fortunately, those retailers who stuck by Totengco after his bags were sold at Target saw their sales go up, and Totengco’s online business at rafe.com increased threefold. What’s more, Target flew him to Los Angeles to attend a Target-sponsored pre-party for the Oscars, where he got to meet Cameron Diaz and acquaint young Hollywood with his work.
So on balance, Totengco would have to admit, “I think it was the best thing that I ever did.”
