Amazon confirms strong bet on Fashion sector while launching the new private label FIND in 5 european countries (including Spain) during this AW 2017
- After 5 years selling external clothing Brands Amazon and testing around 7-10 different private labels targeted to specific Market segments has officially launched this Autumn-Winter a full women/men collection under the private band “FIND”.
- MHE, retail consultancy, has analysed in a detailed way using the proprietary benchmarking tool “Market Mapping” the FIND women clothing product assortment vs the main clothing specialist chains in Spain such as Zara, H&M, Mango and Primark. The scope has been the assortment width, product mix, price architecture and colour architecture. In addition an objective end use and fashion style position segmentation has been elaborated. This report contains the main conclusions when comparing FIND with Zara, H&M, Mango and Primark.
Assortment Width
- Amazon-FIND position in terms of number of options and average selling price is very close to the Market leader ZARA
Pricing
- It is not the case that FIND only offers basic product at entry prices. FIND proposition is FASHION (not only commodity clothing) and a price range equivalent to the one in H&M
- Tshirts is one of the strategic product category where FIND covers the full range of selling prices.
- In terms of number of different price points, FIND has the highest number among the analysed competitors.
Product Mix
- Product mix offer proposed by FIND makes a higher emphasis on Dresses and Tshirts vs other retail chains
- Top/bottom ratio is substantially higher in FIND vs total market taking advantage of better suitability to sell online these product categories
Colour Architecture
- Only 25% of FIND options are represented in “fashion” colours. In this way, fashion risk is mitigated and it plays fashion image perception against reality game. By far, black (with 30% of the total options) is the most frequent colour
- This colour architecture matches the policy implemented by other global players (Zara, H&M and Mango)
End Use and Fashion Style position Segmentation
- MHE has defined and objective visual images grid segmenting end use and fashion style positions. The it has been applied to the assortment online of the different retail operators analysed.
- Amazon-FIND assortment is clearly concentrated on casual and soft casual segment and updated style position in a much higher proportion that the other operators.
- In this way FIND avoids dilution and impact when discarding other market segments while concentrating on a reduced number of segments.
Importance of design/style/taste and other qualitative attributes. Centralization
- To have a good strategy and assortment planning is an important step but not enough to succeed. Operational centralizations of companies such as Amazon may face some difficulties to adapt, specially women fashion, a single design and managed European assortment to such a different local tastes of countries like United Kingdom and Spain.
- This difficulty is not unique for Amazon, in fact other global clothing specialists have gone already through this process.
- Taking into account that Amazon gets the best results in new products/services after a period of 5-7 years of activity from the start we forecast that FIND has come to remain in the Market. This will continue…
MHE, retail consultancy, works for major Brands and Retailers in commercial strategy and operations in an Omnichannel environment.
More Info: carlos.dominguez@mheconsumer.com
