saks gucci

Posted in Wrestling Forums by sucregst at 11:34, May 18 2013

Burberry's shaken off its chav image to become the fashionistas' favourite

Profitable fashion. It's a difficult balancing act, one only a handful of labels have been able to achieve: how to keep your brand exclusive and cuttingedge, but at the same time shift enough of your product to keep the accountants happy.

Make your brand too famous and it will inevitably fall into the wrong hands, ensuring your highend customers always in search of the Next Big Thing desert you in droves.

Become too niche, and while the girls who worship Vogue might hanker after you, the rich wives of Russian oligarchs will turn up their newly chiselled noses.

In the late Nineties, Burberry , once a staid store selling raincoats, decided it wanted Cheap Gucci Handbags a piece of the burgeoning mania for designer labels.

The day that former soap star Daniella Westbrook and her daughter stepped out head to toe in Burberry sounded the death knell for the company's credibility. It had to change, and it had to change fast.

News released last week confirms it has done just that. Burberry enjoyed a 25 per cent jump in profits to 196 million on the back of a 17 per cent rise in revenue to 995million for the year ending in March. It is now one of the top five luxury goods brands in the world.

It's interesting that the Burberry renaissance has been driven by two canny American businesswomen: Rose Marie Bravo, who left the most prestigious job in fashion as president of Saks to head up Burberry in 1998; and Angela Ahrendts, who took over two years ago having cut her teeth at Donna Karan.

What the women have in common is that they are both anglophiles who fell in love with the history of the company.

Founded in 1856, Burberry dressed not only Sir Ernest Shackleton for his exploration of Antarctica, but also provided Army officers with the raincoats they wore in the trenches of World War I (hence the term 'trench coat' and clothed debutantes in floorlength duchesse satin.

The straighttalking Bravo recognised that this unique slice of Englishness could be successfully marketed around the world. In 2001, she hired the downtoearth Yorkshireman Christopher Bailey to reinvent the label and put the chavs firmly off the scent.

Bailey grew up in Halifax, the son of a carpenter and a Marks Spencer windowdresser. His love of fashion came from his grandmothers, who were both seamstresses.

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1994, he worked for, among others, Donna Karan and Gucci. One of the first things Bailey did at Burberry was to spend months poring over the archives, before reinventing the classics, fashioning a military jacket out of gold sequins, say, or buttery soft leather.

With the younger label Burberry Prorsum (Latin for 'forwards', he has come up with numerous trends: the balloon sleeve, the cocoonshaped overcoat, the liberal use of metallics and, of course, the trench coat in ever more luxurious fabrics.

He was at the forefront of the moneyspinning mania for vertiginous shoes (Burberry sold more than 300,000 pairs at more than 300 a pop last year), and for the hugely expensive handbag, fashioned from exotic skins.

This spring's Warrior bag, which, despite its 13,000 price tag, sold in its hundreds, added nicely to the bank balance, while its success had a knockon effect: the dizzying height of the Burberry price range enabled the brand to increase the average price of its bags by more than 25 per cent, the resultant buzz helping to push Fake Gucci Handbags Burberry accessories to make up 31 per cent of total sales.

The ad campaigns have been instrumental in the brand's success, too. Shot in black and white by Mario Testino, they look more classically beautiful than ever before, use models who might actually be members of the British aristocracy such as Stella Tennant, granddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire or merely look as if they are, such as new Brit stars Agyness Deyn and Georgia Frost.

It is an inspired conceit. But that is exactly what it is: a conceit. The English countryside, as depicted by Testino, no longer really exists.

Secret to success: Selling in their hundreds The 'Warrior' handbag, costing 13,000, helped boost Burberry's record 995 million profits

Nobody in the countryside actually wears this stuff, or carries the new Burberry Beaton bag (only 8 per cent of Burberry sales are in the UK). But it is the illusion that we do that has helped propel the latest sales figures, and enabled Ahrendts to open 15 new stores in developing markets.

Burberry continues to trade on its 'Englishness', of course it discount gucci bags does. Bailey cites as his inspiration the warmlycoated figures depicted by the artist L. S. Lowry, and says proudly, 'We have two factories in Yorkshire in Rotherham, which we saved from closure, and Castleford, where we make the iconic rainwear. We still use fabrics from the traditional cloth mills. I love those solid English cloths.'

But you wonder how long it will be Gucci relica bags before Burberry which closed down its factory in South Wales last year, at the cost of 300 jobs is forced, or tempted, to move all its production to China.

The big challenge for the next few years will not be whether a Dlist celebrity has got hold of your clothes, but whether consumers will stomach the poorlypaid worker churning out ever more expensive 'things' that are supposed to remind us of a more gentle, bygone age, all in pursuit of that allimportant bottom line.