The following is the third installment of a series looking at the tactics apparel firms are using to survive.
A host of clothing stores, ranging from posh brands to secondhand clothes, are clustered along Cat Street in a shopping district of Shibuya, Tokyo. When Jeanasis Scrapbook was forced to close for a month from early April, due to the novel coronavirus, its salespeople frequently shared stylish ways to wear its clothes via social media.
"One easy-to-wear style is all black! I recommend you wear slightly mature, pretty-ish clothes, for instance, by coordinating them with heels." Targeting women in their 20s, the salespeople themselves become models, coming up with suggestions as to which clothes to wear and how to coordinate them with other items. When a customer taps on an image that catches their eye, they are led to a screen where they can buy the products.
Jeanasis Scrapbook is operated by Adastria Co., a leading apparel firm. The company uses social media app Instagram, and even has one salesperson with more than 50,000 followers on the platform. The company also launched livestreams to introduce goods, with some having been watched tens of thousands of times.
Junichi Tanaka, **marketing department head** at Adastria, explained the aim of such a sales technique. "Showing clothes worn in a stylish manner by salespeople whose physical shape is closer to customers themselves, rather than a 1.8-meter-tall fashion model, should be more helpful to them." Including sales from online shopping sites such as Zozotown, its e-commerce sales have grown to account for about 40% of Adastria's total domestic sales, double the previous figure.
-- Synergy between online and off-line
"A salesperson with monthly sales of more than 90 million yen."
In the apparel industry, if a salesperson has monthly sales totaling 1 million yen at a brick-and-motor store, he or she is applauded. But in online sales, there is one charismatic salesperson who has chalked up a whopping 90 million yen a month.
IT start-up Vanish Standard Co. provides clothing retailers with apps that allow salespeople to easily upload images of themselves wearing clothes for sale on their store's website. Depending on how stylishly the clothes are presented, sales differ considerably. As sales at brick-and-motor stores have become more difficult due to the spread of infections, the IT firm has seen the number of its clients increase, supplying its apps to over 1,000 businesses.
Vanish Standard Representative Director Yasuaki Onozato said: "Salespeople who earn a lot have not only been brushing up their skills in clothes selection, which is a matter of course, but also figuring out how to take pictures. Their frequency of posts is also quite high." There have even been customers who show up at the store, saying they want to see a salesperson they spotted online.
By and large, the apparel industry lags behind other sectors in digitization. According to the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, the e-commerce rate in the domestic market for apparel stood only at 14% as of 2019, compared with 34% for books and 33% for domestic electrical appliances. An official at another firm that assists the apparel sector to adopt IT technologies, even said: "There are still companies where stock is checked manually. It's worth promoting digitization in this industry."
"Clothes are usually bought after trying them on." "We can't tell the shade, the details and the feel of the clothes unless we touch them in the store." Within the clothing industry, a prevailing view has had it that clothing is not suited to online sales. But such conventional wisdom has gradually been overturned.
All the same, brick-and-motor stores play a pivotal role in overall sales. Takaaki Komatani, president of consulting firm Itochu Fashion System Co., said: "Even in the apparel industry, digitization is inevitable. However, if a clothing brand eliminates its brick-and-motor stores, many fans would feel that they have been abandoned by the brand." How can the combined effect of online sales and sales at brick-and-motor stores be enhanced?
-- Change in staff needed
The coronavirus and e-commerce marketing have also changed the kind of workers sought by the apparel industry. According to Credence, a Persol Group company that assists people to make job changes in the clothing retail sector, the hiring of sales assistants is about to shift from a seller's market to a buyer's market.
Before the outbreak of the coronavirus, and partly due to an increase in the number of foreign visitors to Japan, there was a labor shortage in the customer service sector such that job offers were abundant. Companies would say, "We just want to get enough people." But since business at clothing stores began to pick up again in July, it has become difficult for someone who has, for example, worked as a salesperson for only half a year to get a job in a clothing store.
With a massive amount of information being shared via social media now, including on Instagram, the fashion cycle has gained pace. There are many people who buy clothes on the assumption that they can be resold via flea market app Mercari. Consumers have become ever more selective in choosing goods. On the front line, salespeople's keen fashion sense and retailers' methods of improving their products will be in demand more than ever.
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