In My View by Eric Musgrave. Hello New Beginnings.
It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it?
The extraordinary situation we have found ourselves in since March 2020 certainly has been challenging but I do not agree with those that claim, “It has changed fashion retailing forever”.
Selling clothes has been a lucrative occupation for centuries and it will continue to be so. The changes caused by COVID-19 might be less permanent and less revolutionary than some imagine. Before we come to the micro-world of clothes, footwear and accessories being sold and bought, we need to consider the macro-world of the British economy.
Right now, I am not very optimistic about how equally the 64 million or so inhabitants of our not-so United Kingdom are going to fare once we “get back to normal”. I fear we will have a nation that is polarised between the haves (who might have quite a lot) and the have-nots (who might not even have that basic necessity, a job).
We have witnessed colossal losses in retailing jobs due to the pandemic. The figure of 175,000 for 2020 calculated by the the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has been widely quoted. Since then we have to add at least Arcadia (c13,000) and Debenhams (c11,000).
That’s before we look into jobs gone from the hospitality sector. CRR reckons 30,000 roles rolled no more in 2020.
Where will all these people find replacement employment, I wonder?
People out of work do not spend very much, so the current situation looks promising – if that’s the word – for any brand or retailer operating at the budget, discount or value end of the market (please select your own adjective for purveyors of cheap stuff).
Conversely, figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal that (last year at least) almost 28m in the UK were employed and a further 4.5m were self-employed. Even allowing for a drop off in those numbers due to the COVID-19 and even the Brexit fall-out, that is still a lot of consumers with more or less money to spend.
In very simple terms, some retail destinations – whether they are high streets, city centres, shopping centres, retail parks etc – are going to do very well, others may not recover in a hurry. I fear quite a lot will not recover at all.
Success attracts success. Retail evolution is irresistible. We have not seen the end of fashion shops, but I will agree we will have fewer of them, in fewer successful locations.
As for online sales, I believe we will see a slowing of their growth, but their share of the overall market is hardly likely to diminish. The online challenge for many, however, will be to make money from ecommerce alone. In this sector too, there will be haves and have nots.
Let’s remember, online companies fail too.
(Just as an aside, I suspect that when things “get back to normal”, more questions may be raised by some pressure groups about the damage to the environment caused by millions of online parcels being delivered to individual addresses. Is this method of distribution sustainable (in all meanings of the word)?
Although it seems heartless or even naive to say it, I am not sure the past 12 months has been the worst time ever experienced by the industry. It has been a calamity, to be sure, but has it really been worse than, say, the Great Depression of the 1930s or the six years of the Second World War (and the resulting eight years of clothes rationing)?
In my own attempts to make some sense of the calamitous year we’ve had and what might await us in the relatively near future, I keep thinking about several conversations I have had with Bernard Lewis, patriarch of the family that owns River Island.
In my 40-plus years of observing and commenting on the fashion industry, Mr Bernard (as he is known within the company) is quite simply the most impressive individual I have met. The story of how he started with a wooden shack – and I mean a wooden shack - on a bomb site on Holloway Road, north London in 1948 selling handknitting wools and ended up with River Island is told in a fascinating official biography he commissioned from business writer Catherine Blyth.
A Family Business – The story of River Island, Chelsea Girl, Bernard Lewis and his brothers is a privately-published 460-page hardback that I raced through recently, having been sent a signed copy by Mr Bernard.
He was a remarkable innovator, creating three successful retail concepts – Lewis Separates (from the early 1950s until the mod-1960s), Chelsea Girl (from 1967 for about 20 years) and then River Island (from the late 1980s). I can think of no one else who oversaw the creation of three winning concepts from scratch.
Bernard Lewis was 95 on February 10. My abiding lesson from my talks with him is that, as a retailer, you just have to get on with it. Whatever the situation, the economic conditions, the overriding climate, Mr Bernard says, you just have to get on with it.
As we “get back to normal”, that will be good advice to heed.
Eric Musgrave has been a writer, consultant and commentator on fashion since 1980.
Image of Eric by Laura Lewis.
