No retail organization has a deeper bond with its customers than Neiman Marcus. Here, president Karen Katz and senior vice president and fashion director Ken Downing discuss The Fashion System in light of the customer’s buying preferences (wear now), her engagement in online fashion coverage and how fashion houses and stores can work together to better serve her.
Does seeing next season’s collections live streamed temper consumers’ enthusiasm for what’s in store now?
Karen Katz: It’s been just about 10 years since Style.com came on the scene and everyone could get the fashion shows the next day. It wasn’t live streaming, but it was almost the same effect, to see exactly what we all saw sitting in the front rows the next day. So, I think whether it’s live streaming or seeing the actual exit, I don’t know that there’s that big of a difference in the ultimate consumer’s mind.
Ken Downing: The consumer is so immediately excited about what she’s seeing on the runway at that point in time. It’s then [about] turning that message around six months from now and getting her reinvigorated and re-excited about things she’s already seen. It’s our duty as a retailer and certainly an editor’s duty to make sure that the stories are timely and relevant to when products are in stores. That’s why we send such a strong trend message to our customers early in the season. And it’s something that’s also come through in a very positive way with a lot of the pre-collections. It has been very beneficial that so many of the pre-collections are almost a precursor to what we see on the runway. We can start to tell that message early to the customer, and she can start thinking about those trends when she’s in the store, be it May-June or be it a resort collection in November-December. So, we’re doing our part to recommunicate to her the importance of the trend as we get closer to the selling period.
KK: I also think that there is a percentage of the consumers who are so tied into what’s going down the runways that it influences their buys. There’s a much greater percentage of customers, even our customers, who are the most fashion minded out there, who may see it, and give a passing acknowledgment that the runway collections are going on. But I’m not sure that they even have that clear a sense of the season — is that runway for spring or for fall? They depend on, hopefully, either the fashion magazines or their favorite retailer to help them determine what they need for the season.
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So, though the runway is now accessible to everyone, you don’t think that most customers race to their computers to see it?
KK: No, I don’t think so. And I think it’s probably a small percentage of consumers [who] actually follow the shows and make their purchasing decisions based on what they saw on the runway.
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As retailers, how do you define the purpose of the shows today?
KD: The purpose of the shows is to solidify the message and the trends of the season that we’re going to deliver to the customer, to help guide her with her purchase of the season ahead. That’s why I’m so pleased that we’re finding so much more fashion early in the pre-collections. Color stories, silhouette, just overall attitude and message are appearing early at many houses. [This helps] keep our buying teams more focused as we see the varied things on the runway. And honestly, [for fall,] there’s not that much of a difference between what emerged in the pre-collections and what is happening on many runways.
KK: The other important thing about the shows, putting aside for a minute the seasonality of the shows and the timeliness of it, I think keeping people’s focus on fashion, just in general, is extremely important for the life of the business. Fashion is so accessible through the Internet now, through blogging and all of that. I think that only serves to really help the business of fashion. And, that’s part of what we do [in] running the business of fashion.…The runway shows — yes, they’re directional — but I also view it as keeping in the forefront of people’s minds the topic of fashion. And so the shows are really good for our industry.
KD: It certainly keeps the dream alive.
KK: It keeps the dream alive. It keeps the mystique of the great world of fashion, and that continues to be so important to the consumer, especially since we’re in a time where there is so much reality TV and everyone knows everything about everything. I think the dream and the fantasy of the runway, and the mystique of the world of fashion, are what the runway keeps going.
Would you like to see the show schedule shifted to a consumer-oriented, retail timetable?
KD: The challenge is for the press. As retailers, [they] would actually welcome the idea of the big message of the fashion shows happening closer to the selling time.
KK: That’s what we do. All the events that we do in our stores around the country, we present our own version of the shows. We do it so that the customer can see the product that we’ve [selected], then they can buy it in the stores. We’re not doing it on the same scale as each of the designers, so [switching the collections schedule] would probably serve our purpose. I don’t know that it would serve anybody else in the industry, though.
Do you think the designers would be as motivated to stage major shows based on clothes designed six months previously?
KD: That’s a question for the designers. As Karen was saying, in our field, once I’ve seen these shows, I’m in stores, creating what I think are very compelling, creative shows with the product that’s in store. I think a designer could deliver powerful, impactful messages after the collection has already been created. I personally traveled to probably 15-plus stores this season, but with all of our stores, we do hundreds of shows, from very large-scale to very small-scale trend presentations, to customers throughout a season.
Let’s turn to deliveries. Has earlier and earlier been proven not to work?
KK: The early deliveries are how we get our business and our sell-through so that we make money. The early deliveries, pre-fall and resort, and specifically pre-fall for Neiman Marcus because our stores are so weighted in the South — resort is natural for us. If the [pre-fall] fabrics are lightweight, wear now, and the [clothes] look ahead towards the trends of fall, we have outstanding selling. The same with pre-spring. If it’s wear-now fabrics, and in the colors of what’s to come, we do significantly well. From a financial point of view, we could not get our regular-priced sales without those two major deliveries.
KD: It’s the strongest part of the selling season. The runway pieces that we see trotting up and down the catwalks right now are the last things to ship. They show up in stores closer to the period of being marked down. That’s why it’s beneficial when there’s good fashion, and there’s a good fashion message in the pre-fall collection.
You said that you found ample fashion in the pre-fall collections.
KD: I will give you an example. Olive green, military influences, men’s wear tailoring, the return of the pantsuit, outerwear — these were all messages that came across in the pre-fall collections. We determined early what we felt strongly about, and now on the runways, that’s exactly what we’ve seen.
Are the runway deliveries timed properly for Neiman Marcus?
KD: Generally, the runway delivers end of September, if it’s a very organized house. But truly, most fall runway delivers beginning-to-middle October. That’s really when the special pieces arrive in stores.
KK: But the problem with that is that it’s going to get marked down eight weeks later instead of the pre-collections, which get 16 to 18 weeks of selling. That’s why those pre-collections sell. Now, there’s a whole other topic that you could explore: Do we mark things down too early? Should we try to give more life to things and just move the whole schedule back some? Obviously, we can’t have those discussions as an industry because of the idea of price fixing. But that’s the idea. That’s why those pre-collections have become so important. If we’re going to mark down the goods the second [week] of December, or the second week of June, the pre-collections get the longest life in terms of selling.
It seems that for most of December, resort is the only full-priced merch on the floor.
KK: I wouldn’t say that. At Neiman Marcus, this last season, we took [pre-fall and fall] down the second week of December. That’s centered around ready-to-wear. We take shoes down a bit later, and bags [still] later. The boot category we held till late this last year.
Still, it seems that often, fall is marked down before the weather turns cold.
KD: That’s almost a different conversation. It speaks to the relevance of a designer’s collection, the modernity and understanding of the modern woman. Many designers are understanding this now, but some are more challenged by the concept: Designers love thick fabrics. They like heavier fabrics because they mold and they sculpt. But the reality is that the customer wants more buy-now, wear-now clothes, and she’s buying closer to the time of wearing them. And outside of Manhattan or maybe Paris or a major European city, customers live in cars. They go from air-conditioned environments to other air-conditioned environments. It’s really important that people think about the women who are wearing these clothes. The woman in Los Angeles, the woman in Miami, the woman in Dallas and in Houston and in Atlanta — not only the woman living in the Northeast. The women in Singapore and Tokyo. It doesn’t have to be a felted wool to deliver a fall message — it has to have a colorization that speaks to the fall season and [it has to be on] trend. That’s where it becomes a real challenge because sometimes there’s this old-fashioned idea of what fall clothes mean as opposed to how women are really wearing clothes in the fall seasons.
For fall, we’ve seen a lot of heavy fabrics. Does this concern you?
KD: We talk about fabric weight in showrooms 24/7. There is never enough color for our customer, and we can’t have the fabric weight conversation enough. That said, many designers are paying attention and accommodating us. Many times you’ll see a very heavy fabric on the runway, and then they will commercialize it in a fabrication that has the runway look but will work in a warm-weather climate. We’re finding enough great pieces in the showrooms that are going to speak to our customers. But if it’s something that is truly too heavy, it stays in the showroom. It does not show up on the floor of Neiman Marcus.
So pragmatism has to factor into the fashion decision.
KD: Here’s the question I always ask: Should spring collections include coats? I don’t mean on the runway, but should designers offer coats in their spring collections, or even in their resort collections? Because [those seasons] deliver when it’s cold, as opposed to making coat-heavy collections for pre-fall, which delivers in May, June, July? Is that the smartest time to be talking to customers about a coat? Maybe those coats should deliver in November-December, to be on and will be on the floors through January and February.
Big issues — flipping the show schedule. Specific issues — when to ship a coat. Do you sense all of these questions intertwining?
KK: The bigger strategic issue — in a way, it’s like solving world hunger in the fashion industry — is the whole cycle of things. It’s very complex. If you judge the month of February, [this year] we had more snow in February than most states had ever seen in February. Based on that, should we completely change the fashion cycle? I don’t know. Those are the kinds of things that we all wrestle with, and I don’t think there’s an easy answer. I do believe that customers want to buy wear-now [pieces], but pieces that look forward, so they feel they’ll be fresh and fashionable moving into the next season. In our mind, the challenge is: bring us an assortment of wear-now fabrics in appropriate colors each season and deliver them in these pre-fall and resort deliveries so we have plenty of time to present them to our customers and sell them.