California Apparel News

During the past six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have greatly accelerated rollouts of digital services. A panel discussion produced by trade show Liberty Fairs on Sept. 25 gave advice on what fashion retailers need to do to produce successful omni-channel businesses.

Edwina Kulego, Liberty Fairs’ vice president, moderated the Zoom panel discussion, “How to Build a Successful Omni-channel Fashion Brand.” Panelists included Josh Kapelman, managing director of Hilldun Corporation, a factoring-and-financial-services company with offices in New York, Los Angeles and London. Also speaking were Tim Moore, Hilldun’s executive vice president of business development, and Syama Meagher, chief executive officer of Scaling Retail, a Los Angeles-headquartered retail consultancy.

Meagher said that there’s no going back to the way of doing business pre-pandemic.

“The strategies that you bring in today are not going to go away,” she said. “So, whatever it is that you invested in as a brand in the last six months is going to be required of you going forward as you continue to do business. You can’t walk away from personal shopping if that’s what you have been offering for the past six months.”

The panelists also advised not to throw away the old business playbook when developing new business strategies. There’s still a lot of opportunity for pre-digital strategies, such as developing bricks-and-mortar stores and even finding customers through direct mail, Meagher said.

“When you look at marketing, it is a suite of services. From a marketing standpoint, digital to me is just one component,” she said. “I’m a huge fan of direct mail, so when you are thinking of advertising and marketing, please don’t just think of a digitally saturated world—remember that most people are working from home.”

Kapelman also advised companies to develop as many means to work with their customers as they can. “If COVID teaches us anything, it teaches us that you need to have a diversified business model. If you sell all of your eggs from one basket, and that basket breaks, you are out of business,” Kapelman said. “As we look [at] what will come through COVID, it’s all about finding new ways to connect with your customer.”

It’s advice that Liberty Fairs is taking, Kulego said. “We are working on a digital and physical strategy for next year. We had conversations with buyers and our brands. They all want to go back to the show. We miss interaction,” she said. “Having drinks together. Talking about things that are happening in the industry. That is our new task, and we are really excited about it.”

Digitalization has also been increasingly important to companies’ back-office operations and logistics. Kulego asked Moore for perspectives on outsourcing these crucial tasks. He said that companies need to develop a way for outsourced operations to work in concert with the rest of a company.

“The biggest thing is control. You lose control every time you outsource something,” Moore said. “Nobody does it the way you need them to do it or with the timeliness that you need them to do it.”