High Fashion at Street Level: Keeping Your Brand Story Relevant
By: Meghan Termat
Tags: Supreme, Fashion, Authenticity, Louis Vuitton, Brand Strategy

Think of the brands Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Dior and one word comes to mind: luxury. These brands have ruled the luxury market essentially since their founding and continue to carry strong brand recognition.

But just because everyone knows their name, doesn’t mean everyone wants to buy. Enter millennials. This demographic has quickly become the target whose market share many retailers, including luxury, want to capture.

The problem? The brand associations of luxury retailers don’t exactly mesh with the ideals of millennials. For example, millennials don’t value labels for labels’ sake. These consumers seek out socially-, environmentally-, and all the other types of conscious, conscious retailers. They want companies who share their interests and who communicate with them through their channels. They want to connect to brands that are trying to connect with them.

The solution? Reach millennials the way they want to be reached. For Louis Vuitton (LV), this came in the form of streetwear fashion — one of the fastest growing trends among this age group of consumers.

Luxury brands have an affinity for being of the traditional, old-fashioned and invite-only nature. Realizing that these qualities are not the ones this new wave of consumer seeks, LV sought external sources to draw attention away from these traits and up its cool factor.

The strategy involved a collaboration with Supreme, a brand known for its streetwear and athleisure apparel, and a fan favorite among millennials. Printing LV’s logo on Supreme’s red, the team created a new line of products ranging from bomber jackets to luggage. The line debuted in LV’s fall 2017 men’s runway show, to be followed by a public offering in the summer.

Afterward, LVMH, LV’s parent company, sales reports reflected a 23% profit increase, and credited the Supreme x Louis Vuitton collaboration for its contribution to this boost.

The collaboration clearly had an impact, but how does a brand that dresses Hollywood’s elite for elegant awards ceremonies begin producing streetwear and still maintain its brand identity? The key is through an “evolutionary process” rather than a pivot and total redirection.

First and foremost, a company must maintain its core values. If there’s anything a millennial dislikes more than stagnancy, it’s inauthenticity. Regardless of what it stands for, a brand has to be true to itself and consistent. In producing this line, LV never lost its exclusivity factor. The apparel was valued at similar price points to other LV merchandise and manufactured with the same high-quality standards. Similarly, the line harkened back to LV heritage by producing travel trunks, the original LV product, with the Supreme x Louis Vuitton pattern.

Second, seek partnerships that can fill in the gaps of your brand. Embrace change. Until this collaboration, LV was not known for athleisure, if anything, quite the opposite. Wanting to add more millennials to its customer base, LV had to find a way to bridge the gap. If LV started producing its own line of streetwear right of out of the gate, its credibility rating could have plummeted.

Instead, LV smartly tag-teamed with Supreme to capitalize on its brand identity. A titan of streetwear style, Supreme helped LV resolve potential cognitive dissonance among LV brand values and avoid the confusion of a traditional, haute couture brand suddenly offering athleisure apparel. With this collaboration, there is now precedent for LV offering streetwear so the door is open for the company to create its own line.

Third, find commonality. Though certain dress codes would dictate that one couldn’t wear traditional LV and streetwear LV to the same type of events, luxury clothing and streetwear are both exclusive in their own right (read: expensive). Luxury and streetwear may cater to different styles, but they both occupy the same space of exclusivity. Additionally, LV and Supreme lead their individual fashion worlds. As frontrunners in luxury and streetwear, respectively, merging the best of the best makes sense for doubling the brand recognition.

And finally, adopt marketing strategies to create consistency across the product and its audience.

Instead of selling this line in LV stores and department stores, LV sold the merchandise in pop-up stores. These mobile stores match millennials’ on-the-go lifestyle and their trendy shopfronts appeal to a younger crowd that values intentional engagement over leisurely browsing.

Tailoring the marketing strategy to the product positions the product in a relevant environment to reinforce the message. This type of experiential marketing makes the shopping experience more fun and memorable so that what a customer remembers is not the transaction, but how he or she felt while engaging with the brand. This emotional connection builds loyalty, which is essential to expanding and maintaining a customer base.

LV also advertised this collaboration through social media and uses influencers to carry out marketing campaigns. Using popular influencers helps LV reach potential customers they may not have otherwise encountered through their regular channels.

But why the pressure and effort to reach millennials at this moment in time? Why not wait until they align with the typical LV customer seeking an established, classic wardrobe?

Millennials are buying now. In 2017, millennial consumers contributed 85% to growth in the luxury market and are anticipated to represent almost half of total spend by 2025. If these spending habits continue, luxury retailers can score a solid customer base.

Brand relevancy. Collaborations. Millennials. What this all boils down to is customer lifetime value (CLV). Said Net-a-Porter fashion retail director Lisa Aiken of millennials, “If we are not talking to them now, we are not going to get their attention down the line.”

The very bottom line is this: businesses need customers to survive. And if you can secure the right customer base, you can project the success of your business in the future from each customer’s CLV. To stay relevant, what you’re really changing is not your brand, but your hook. Once you hook the client, use your brand to form a connection with them. Loyalty is a stronger bond than trend. Reimagining your brand with every season wears away at your core values. Customers will bounce from one trend to the next, but will stay loyal to their brands because they believe in the brand story. So you just have to be relevant, not revolutionary.

Having a brand story that is deeply ingrained in every decision a company makes leads to the success of that company. And if the company is rooted in strong values, the internal production methods can stay the same. All that changes is the output.