Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes has announced a partnership with Woolmark Gold, a seal of approval granted by the Woolmark Company for the Chinese region.Launched in China in 2011 by Australian Wool Innovation, owners of The Woolmark Company, the Woolmark Gold symbol guarantees that the standard of cloth or fabric used is made of one of the world’s finest natural fibres...Read more
London Fashion Week designer J.W. Anderson is rumoured to be in talks with LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate group behind brands including Louis Vuitton, Céline, Givenchy and Bulgari...Read More
REPORT_ For the first half of the year Next sales were 2.2 percent ahead of last year. Pre-tax earnings per share were up 14 percent. Retail sales were down 0.9 percent on last year. New space added 2.7 percent to retail sales. Retail operating margins improved by 0.2 percent...Read More
REPORT_ Richemont sales for the five months ended August 31, 2013, increased by 9 percent at constant exchange rates. At actual exchange rates, sales rose by 4 percent negatively impacted by the weakening of the US dollar and the yen against the euro...Read More
Well-known women’s ethnic fashion wear brand ‘W’ from TCNS Clothing has assigned its creative duties to Focus Circle. The agenda is to create brand and season's campaign, retail communication apart from handling collection-specific announcements and trend news...Read More
Asos is to stop selling Primark clothing on its e-commerce site, as the 12 week trial for the fast fashion brand comes to an end.
Primark has said that it will not renew the option nor launch its own transactional website. Primark's finance director John Bason stated: the trial had provided some insight into online retailing but "the best way to get profitable growth is on the high street"...Read More
Australian Fusion Retail Brands, former Colorado Group, is up for sale as its private equity owners want to deinvest in the brand. The fashion label will be portrayed as a pure-play footwear retailer after it sold its clothing brand JAG for an undisclosed sum, as reported by Australian media...Read More
Blue Harbour Group, a hedge fund based in Connecticut, presented a 13D filing on Chico´s Fas, Inc. on Monday, disclosing a 5.6 percent stake (around 9 million shares) in the womenswear company...Read More
The Outdoor Industry Association (OIA), the US trade association of the outdoor recreation industry based in Boulder, Colorado and Washington D.C., has come up with a Social Responsibility Toolkit (SRT) developed to “help brands and suppliers start and improve their social responsibility programs”.
The just released guidelines are one part of the SRT’s three created by the Social Responsibility Working Group (SRWG) and the Fair Labour Working Group, which includes retailers such as New Balance, The North Face and Timberland. Billed as a “guidebook with strategy guidance, tools and resources that can be adapted to suit any company’s needs”, the first part addresses basic awareness and any compliance issues a company may have.
The remaining two parts will look at the improvements and aspirational levels of social responsibility practices and programs that a company may want to incorporate; part two and three are scheduled for release within the next year. Dozens of outdoor industry companies worked on the toolkit, which is set up as an open-source working document so that it can evolve with and respond to the growing needs of the outdoor industry in terms of improvements in supply chain operations and management.
“It’s important to outdoor industry companies to promote and monitor safe and fair treatment of the workers who make our products, yet it can be challenging to figure out exactly how to go about implementing a program to achieve this. We encourage companies to use this toolkit to establish new social responsibility programs, as well as to assess and improve the programs they may already have,” said Mary Bean of Columbia Sportswear, SRWG leader in charge of the development of the updated Toolkit.
The US outdoor industry is a 646 billion dollar industry of which the OIA is the leading trade association, serving more than 4,000 manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, sales representatives and retailers. Though some of the recommendations and practices may be country specific, the SRT has been developed keeping any company’s needs in mind.
The Tookit is a result of one of the four key areas – social responsibility and fair labor issues – that the OIA’s SWG is currently working on. The three others working toward sustainability and responsibility in the outdoor industry are index development for apparel, footwear and equipment; responsible chemicals management and materials traceability throughout the supply chain.
The British high street can't seem to attract shopkeepers as the vacancy rate has stagnated at 14.1 percent, only slightly down from 14.2 percent in February. The results come from a published report by the Local Data Company, who have shown that in the top 650 UK shopping centres there is a considerable issue with empty shop spaces...Read More
