NEW YORK — Invista is asking retailers and manufacturers to take up The Lycra Challenge.
That is the name of the company’s new multimillion-dollar advertising campaign for Lycra, which was unveiled Wednesday night at the Première Vision trade show in Paris.
In a phone interview, Bill Ghitis, president of Invista Apparel, said the new trade-driven campaign “challenges retailers to participate in in-store market tests” by merchandising and selling Lycra-branded and nonbranded apparel at stores. The ads, which broke this week, will appear in trade publications worldwide.
“The message in our advertising is you choose the category and tell us how you would measure success,” said Ghitis. “We’ll make a proposal to demonstrate how we believe Lycra-branded products can create greater profits than comparable unbranded garments on equal floor space.”
He noted the concept behind the ads and the apparel tests is based on two characteristics of business emerging in the international marketplace, which he described as “volume and value.”
“You could say there are two kinds of apparel industry today,” said Ghitis. “The volume business will be Asia-centric because Asia will continue to be the low-cost supplier in the foreseeable future. More important, Asia is set to become the world’s foremost consumption region, with U.N. statistics forecasting a global population increase of three billion by 2050, most of this in Asia.
“The value opportunity exists because of another set of statistics that show increasing consumer affluence in more parts of the world than ever before. According to a recent Global Agenda report, spending on discretionary items will increase by a whopping $3 trillion between now and 2020. Invista aims to succeed in both the volume and value markets. The trade advertising we’re currently running reflects this.”
Ghitis said the company decided to aggressively push a collaboration with retailers and Lycra spandex-branded underwear, intimate apparel, hosiery and denim following initial consumer tests at European and American stores this year and in 2004 that featured the Lycra name on nail polish by Coty.
“The power of the Lycra ingredient brand is valued outside our industry by category leaders such as Coty cosmetics and Henkel in hair care,” said Ghitis. “Coty’s most recent nail product with Lycra branding gained 5 percent market share at a dollar premium in its first month.”
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Coty’s Lycra brand nail polish was sold at Wal-Mart in 2004, and was expanded to other mass channels this year, including Target and Walgreens. Coty is launching a line of lip gloss and mascara bearing the Lycra name this fall, Ghitis said.
‘This alerted us, and because of the tests we ran, we are getting very aggressive and getting the same response with apparel,” he said. “For years, we’ve had marketing data showing consumers will pay more for garments that have Lycra, 15 to 25 percent more and sometimes higher.”
Ghitis would not identify participating retailers nor give figures, but said: “One European retailer displayed identical women’s jeans at 29 euros [$34.50] with a Lycra hangtag, and 25 euros [$30.50] without. The Lycra-branded products sold more units and sold faster at the higher price point. This retailer has committed to a further half-million Lycra-branded garments.”
He added that an e-commerce site featured a similar offer with Lycra identification for 12 weeks, and 12 weeks without.
“Overall [Lycra product] sales increased by 40 percent and revenue by 60 percent,” he said.