Calculating the fashion quotient - discount stores - includes related article on discount store fashions

Discount Store News, May 6, 1996 by James Mammarella

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Fashion starts with an "F" and so does "fickle." When it comes to style, people say one thing and do another. Few women say they go to Kmart or Wal-Mart to shop for clothes. But that hasn't stopped Wal-Mart from becoming the largest apparel retailer on Earth; together these two chains sold about $30 billion in apparel in 1995. On closer examination, women say they do indeed look to discounters for some types of clothing--much of it in categories once considered "commodities" but now certified as fashion: jeans, underwear, leggings and bodywear, and licensed T-shirts. Kids' clothes are also a discount store destination buy, often fashion- and gift-oriented.

Meanwhile, consumer demographics are creating a major boom in home furnishings and domestics, as both the baby boomers and younger consumers just forming households seek ways to express themselves fashionably through home decor.

Impatience is a key motivator for consumers, who more frequently demand to see real upstairs, upscale, on-trend fashions translated down for mass consumption instantaneously.

Fashion is tied to the clock. A style in clothing obsolesces as quickly as the minimum megabytes of RAM you feel you can tolerate on your desktop computer.

In licensed apparel, shirts showing the Tazmanian Devil must be updated constantly in graphic appeal. The demand for fashion newness even affects perennial icons like Mickey Mouse and the Dallas Cowboys. Combining sports and character licenses--Looney Tunes and the Olympics, for instance--gives consumers with image fatigue the fresh approach they desire.

Consumers, exposed to heavy helpings of rapidly mutating graphics through magazines and TV, will spend a little more money a little more quickly when they see they're spending on something that looks new--that not everybody else already has. People like to one-up each other. Fashion is a means to that end and thus can be the retailer's friend.

Forces affecting consumers' willingness to acquire fashion include household income, price expectations and time available for shopping. When fashion is compelling enough, it moves consumers to lower their guard; resistance to perceived high prices and inconvenience will acquiesce to pronounced desires for on-trend merchandise.

Apparel is not necessarily the best broad indicator today of consumer inclinations toward acquiring fashion in this sense, because with a few exceptions (denim shirts, light gauge sweaters, mini-backpacks) there has been a cycle of less-compelling fashion in recent years.

Instead, look at toys. When a toy is hot, it's hot. A decade ago, consumers who went into convulsions over the talking doll Teddy Ruxpin at $125 weren't interested in waiting for a discount--because to satisfy the primal trend-hunger of their kids, they wanted Teddy now.

Toys scored dead last out of 16 categories tested by America's Research Group (ARG) in an April 1996 consumer survey of steep discounting as a motivator. Only one in four respondents said toys must be discounted 40% to 60% before they would "definitely" or "most definitely" be motivated to get out and buy the product.

Chris Cooper, vp, marketing for ARG, noted that consumer expectations are key: Toys "R" Us has taught shoppers to buy toys based on an everyday low price expectation--not big discounts. Thus consumers feel less resistance to acting immediately on the trend when it comes to this category.