To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
for a minute, and imagine the likely scenario. If she is too addicted to acquiring new pieces to curtail her fashion buying altogether, Sarne’s customer could just take her spending spree down the price chain.
Doubtless, value retailers, from Peacocks and Primark to Tesco and Asda and everything in between, will be hoping that this proves to be the case. At the time of writing even more brands are battling to join the value-retailing fashion fray. Argos, the famous catalogue purveyors of toasters and tents, is reportedly intending ‘to stage a land-grab87 in the fashion market in a challenge to established clothing retailers’. Then there’s Japanese fashion chain Uniqlo, that has the fast/cheap alchemy off to a fine art and is currently seeking to ‘strengthen its position088 in the UK market’ by planning huge 20–30,000-square-foot stores across London (double the size of its average existing store). It has the rather scary stated intention of becoming ‘the biggest global089 casual-wear company by 2020’, according to an interview which Daisuke Hase from Fast Retailing, Uniqlo’s parent company, gave to the Japan Times in October 2010. He rather laboured the point by adding, ‘We call ourselves Fast Retailing. We move things very fast. Please keep an eye on us; we will change the world very quickly.’ Yes, Mr Hase, I am watching. And let’s not forget a foray from US fashion giant Forever 21, opening any day in Birmingham’s Bullring and expecting to do well as, according to its Executive Vice-President, ‘Forever 21’s fast-fashion concept090 perfectly suits the European consumer’s appetite for trend-led fast fashion at value prices.’ No doubt.
Rather than a return to slower fashion, with its natural blowholes and steam vents to ease the many pressures on the system, so far the downturn in global finances seems merely to have consolidated the alliance between ever faster and ever cheaper fashion. This is Big Fashion (its closest relatives being Big Agriculture and Big Pharma – as in pharmaceuticals), where the power of a whole sector becomes concentrated in the hands of a few major players whose primary aim (arguably to the exclusion of all others) is to make money for shareholders.
Unless we do something to break it, we will remain bewitched and in the grip of the alchemy of the cheapest, fastest fashion we’ve ever known, all the while continuing to squeal with delight, ‘How do they get it that cheap?!’ It’s a question that retailers are understandably loath to answer. When they do provide a response, expect smoke and mirrors and the determined obfuscation of big business that isn’t ready to admit a missingingredient. It’s to do, they will say, with purchasing power, efficiency and leverage over the supply chain. Ever hopeful, I decided to ask Big Fashion players again, ‘No, really, how do you make clothes that cheap?’
So I wrote and asked them. Here’s a typical example of my letters.
Dear [Chief Executive of a high-street chain],
A recent trade magazine’s review of the high-street stores stated categorically that ‘You won’t find a cheaper aviator jacket at £25 or military-style coat for £29, while jumpsuits and winter maxi dresses go for £13 and £15 respectively.’ The researcher in that case was unable to find any item over £30. My own experiences of several of your outlets tallies with this. I would be very grateful if you could give me the definitive answer to how you are able to offer garments at such a low cost. In short, how do you get them so cheap?
Many thanks
Lucy Siegle
Despite repeated requests, some retailers apparently felt no compulsion to share the secrets of their alchemy, and did not reply. Uniqlo, George (Asda) and Tesco, however, all showed the good grace to do so.
‘UNIQLO is a SPA retailer; “Speciality store retailer of Private label Apparel”, meaning our activities are fully integrated from manufacture through sales, including material procurement, design, product development, production, distribution, inventory management and final sales,’ explained Amy Howarth, head of marketing for Uniqlo UK. ‘We control all elements of manufacture, meaning we can pass on the great price to our customer, avoiding the middle man.’
She then outlined the sheer size of Uniqlo, and how its 965 stores in ten different countries globally (as of November 2010) meant that ‘we are able to offer customers excellent value based on scale of manufacture and production’. So far so clear, but towards the end of the letter the reasons for Uniqlo’s ability to retail at super-low prices become more oblique, and frankly more mysterious: ‘Everything UNIQLO does is deeply rooted in our Japanese origin. We always aspire to ensuring the highest excellence in quality, design and technology.’ The accompanying sheet explaining Uniqlo’s ‘Made for All’ philosophy gives few actual clues: ‘We believe that everyone can benefit from simple, well-designed clothes. Because if all people can look and feel better every day, then maybe the world can be a little better too.’ No doubt. But surely there is an omission here? I saw no reference to the people who actually physically make these garments. From Uniqlo’s response, you’d be forgiven for thinking these clothes materialise on the rails by some Japanese design osmosis.
The letter I received from Fiona Lambert, brand director of George (the clothing arm of Asda, which is in turn the UK arm of Walmart), is clear on the central purpose of George clothing: ‘George was established by George Davies more than twenty years ago with a simple purpose. He wanted to design and sell clothes that represented Style, Quality and Value. For the past twenty years, we have been working hard to deliver that promise and make fashion affordable for our customers.’
She is quick to correct an apparent assumption: ‘It is often wrongly assumed that George’s low prices are simply a result of how we source our garments. In fact, it is because of a consistent focus on efficient operations, and margins that are considerably less than those of the high-street fashion retailers. Reducing costs is not achieved by one single measure but instead demands a holistic view and rigorous examination of all of our processes, spanning everything from supplier relationships to reducing the size of swing-tag labels.’
There follows a further explanation of Asda’s ability to sell clothes so cheaply: it does not need to spend ‘vast amounts of money advertising its George range in order to attract people into its stores’. And as its stores are predominantly based on the outskirts of towns, they enjoy lower rents. Fine. All plausible stuff. But what about the actual making of the clothes?
‘The largest cost in a garment is fabric,’ Ms Lambert continues. ‘We centrally source high volumes of materials including cotton, fabric, buttons and zips to drive cost savings which are then shared with factory owners. In many instances we leverage our scale with Walmart to globally source. We also centrally source all packaging, hangers and swing tags and have even reduced the size of swing tags to cut costs. We have, through our in-store garment hanger recycling process, recycled over 65.5 million hangers to date. The second largest cost is freight. The ways in which we transport our clothing ranges allow us to reduce costs. So, by planning our ranges well in advance, expensive air freight is used only as a last resort.’
Again, all good logistical planning. But it is disconcerting to read, spelled out in black and white, that fabric and freight are the biggest costs of these clothes. Surely we are missing somebody here? There is no reference to the remuneration of the garment workers who actually make them.
Garment workers are not explicitly mentioned in Ms Lambert’s letter at all until near the end, where the fact that Asda has ‘an ongoing relationship with GTZ’, a German NGO working on a pilot productivity scheme focusing on ‘worker skills’, is highlighted. So, high volumes, intricate planning, and at least three mentions of swing tags, but no reference to garment workers as an entity. Tesco’s response comes from commercial director Richard Jones. ‘We work extremely hard to ensure we are more efficient – and more fashionable – than our competitors. We source directly from factories where others go through agents. We leverage our scale and increasing volumes so that suppliers get good-size orders and we get lower unit costs. We employ great staff in the UK and around the world who get to know the suppliers personally, and work out who can offer the best prices with