The store has opened in London’s Covent Garden, next door to a traditional Zara shop. It was previously an accessories and apparel shop and has its own entrance and fascia.

Childrenswear is a lucrative market for retailers such as Gap, H&M, Next and Marks & Spencer, and is one of the more recession-proof sectors, because parents stop spending money on themselves before their children.

The market has also opened up further following the collapse of Woolworths, which had a large share through its Ladybird brand. Problems at Adams, which fell into administration and closed 147 shops before being rescued by its former owner, have also had a bearing on the market.

Research firm Verdict estimated the clothing sector as a whole will contract by 1.4 per cent this year, but that childrenswear will only fall 0.7 per cent, to be worth £4.6bn.

A Zara spokeswoman would not comment on possible roll-out plans. The retailer has around 200 Zara Kids stores globally, mostly in Spain, and sells childrenswear in many of its larger Zara shops.

Verdict senior retail analyst Maureen Hinton said the UK launch could be a shrewd move. “Zara Kids has been fairly low key – often downstairs in stores and not displayed in windows.” She added it could pose a threat to other mid-market players. “There is the possibility of taking share from Next, M&S and Gap. It is an attractive offer,” she said.

Bernstein senior research analyst Luca Solca said there is room for Zara to build its market share. He said: “The market is still fragmented and Inditex can certainly gain share. On the back of its Zara stores there could be an opportunity to make more of kidswear.” He estimated that Zara’s childrenswear offer generated sales of between €225m and €250m (£202.2m and £224.7m) in the year to January.

Chinese apparel group Baoxiniao has announced plans to open about 100 new specialty stores in 2009.

The company announced the plan during its 2008 annual general meeting and it was revealed that Baoxiniao will invest CNY107.94 million to build its chain marketing network in 2009. Under the company’s principle of prudence in opening new stores, it will limit the growth rate of its business suit specialty stores to about 7%. For fashion brand specialty stores, after the closure of poorly-performing stores, the total number of new stores will be around 100.

Zhou Xinzhong, the chairman of Baoxiniao Group, told local media that in 2009, its headquarters will start to build a modern distribution center and the company will select sites nationwide to open its specialty stores. It will develop at least as many sites in 2009 as it did in 2008.

Founded in 1996, Baoxiniao Group is a group that combines industrial management and capital management, and is involved in designing, producing and selling up market garments and acting as agent for international brands. The company currently operates apparel brands such as Saint Angelo, S. Angelo, and Bono.

The new format will feature a wide range of clothing, shoes and products under one roof, with collections of good, better and best products merchandised by lifestyle. With a 12,000-sq.-ft. footprint, the stores will carry product assortments in a range of very broad sizes starting at XL in tops and a 42-inch waist in pants for the bigger customer and a 38 inch waist for the taller customer.

The Casual Male superstore concept was created following a six-month consumer research study conducted by L.E.K. Consulting that found that big and tall men are looking for more options in a “one-stop-shop” environment and are willing to travel longer distances for a place that caters to their specific needs.

“DXL is a new and innovative retail concept that is attuned to our customers’ needs,” says David Levin, president and CEO of CMRG. “Our target customer wants choices, value for their dollar and the convenience and unique shopping experience DXL offers. We are confident that our new lifestyle superstore concept will offer the unique shopping experience that many big and tall men have been seeking.”

The DXL superstore concept also will be supported by an all-inclusive e-commerce site, launching in 2011, which will offer the same breadth of apparel and products.

Currently, Casual Male Retail Group operates 454 Casual Male XL retail and outlet stores, as well as 19 Rochester Clothing stores.

What is M.A.C?” The question, posed by Govind Shrikhande of Shoppers Stop, must have taken the top brass at Estee Lauder Companies by surprise. 

To the top managers of the New York cosmetics group, the question may even have come across as a case of rare ignorance about Make-up Art Cosmetics or M.A.C, especially surprising from the boss of India’s largest department store chain who had been pitching for a partnership with Estee Lauder in India.
But just four years later, two of the 20-odd stores that Estee Lauder runs in partnership with Shoppers Stop in India rank among their top 10 worldwide in terms of revenues.

And Estee Lauder is not alone.
Scores of leading international brands – Swarovski, Accessorize, US Polo, Aldo and Promod, to name a few – are realising that some of their stores in still third world India are among their most successful across the world, helped by a constantly expanding army of consumers with increasing disposable incomes and high brand awareness.

Such is the level of awareness that it has even taken retail industry veterans by surprise. Shrikhande drew a blank then about M. A.C, but consumers in India knew about the Canadian brand that Estee Lauder had acquired in 1994. “Many consumers knew about the brand and were using the products even before it entered the country officially,” he says.

And now M.A.C stores at Select City Walk shopping mall in south Delhi and at Dynamix Mall in Mumbai’s Juhu are generating revenues in excess of $1,000 per square feet per year, executives who did not wish to be named said.
High-end crystal products maker Swarovski’s stores at Bandra in Mumbai and at the T3 terminal at Delhi airport rank among its top stores by sales, says Sukanya Dutta Roy, director of the company’s consumer goods business.

Similarly, British fashion accessories retailer Accessorize’s store at Ambience Mall in Gurgaon is the company’s second biggest revenue earner, clocking sales of about $600 per square ft per year.

Two of apparel brand US Polo stores also rank among the top ten globally. The 1,000 sq ft stores in Delhi and Bangalore generate sales of around $700 per sq ft a year, says J Suresh, managing director of Arvind Lifestyle Brands, which launched US Polo in India barely two years ago. Sales at the company’s other stores across the world usually vary between $200 and $500 sq ft a year.
Women’s fashion brand Promod’s store in Delhi reports the highest sales per sq ft in Asia, while Canadian shoe and accessories brand Aldo has two of its top 50 stores in India.

While some analysts believe that the performance at Indian stores may reflect the declining offtake in the more developed markets, others argue that several brands generate above average sales for short periods because they have a few stores servicing a large catchment.

“The reason could be initial attraction of the brand and fewer points of sale compared to the size of the overall consuming population,” says Ramesh Tainwala, CEO, Planet Retail.

At German sportswear brand Puma, executives do not look at sales figures alone but also factor in the exchange rate fluctuations. “We compare performance of Puma stores on a percentage profitability basis as opposed to sales per square feet,” says Rajeev Mehta, managing director of the company which counts three of its stores among the top ten globally.

Even as some analysts view the strong sales at Indian stores of global brands with caution, Raghav Gupta, principal at management consulting firm Booz & Co, points to the emerging big picture. “It links back to the overall position that India is starting to take in the global economy,” says Gupta.

Global India Stores

M.A.C
Juhu in Mumbai and Select Citywalk in Delhi

Swarovski
Bandra and Delhi Airport Terminal 3

Accessorize
Ambience Mall, Gurgaon

Puma
Bangalore’s Garuda Mall, West Gate Mall in Delhi, and Church Road in Pune

US POLO
Select Citywalk Mall at Saket in Delhi, and The Forum, Bangalore

Promod
Select Citywalk Mall in Delhi

Aldo
Select Citywalk Mall and Palladium

The Future of Shopping: An Avatar Lets You Find the Perfect Fit

A Me-Ality body scanner at the North Point Mall in GeorgiaPhotograph courtesy Unique Solutions.

For anyone who loathes trying on clothes, there are no good options. The fitting room can seem like a torture chamber—harsh lighting, the walk past other customers to the three-way mirror. Online, you can avoid the horror of asking the sales person to bring you a bigger size, but you may end up returning four out of five items because nothing fits properly.

Farhad Manjoo recently wrote in Slate that Amazon’s move to same-day shipping may doom physical retailers. But another technology could hasten the demise of clothing stores in particular: body scanners, like the one I saw recently in Seoul’s T.um Museum, which is dedicated to futuristic technology. Pairing customized avatars with technology similar to that in some airport security scanners, the machine could make the process of trying on clothes obsolete.

The Me-Ality machine, made by a North American company called Unique Solutions and modified in Korea, runs radio waves over a fully clothed person who is scanned standing up. The radio waves send and receive power signals that reflect off the water molecules in the skin, picking up more than 200,000 points of measurement. From these, the machine creates a 3-D image, then extracts more than 100 measurements, according to Bob Kutnick, the company’s chief technology officer—not just the circumference of your waist but the gradation from your knee to your ankle, for example.

Currently found in common areas of about 70 malls in the United States, the Me-Ality is free for shoppers to use. After a 10-second scan, software compares the individual’s measurements to those provided by partner manufacturers and then recommends items that are guaranteed to fit: Old Navy’s Sweetheart style jeans in a size 10, say. The clothes it recommends are all (of course) available in shops at the mall, so customers can stroll in and pick them up, or head home and order online.

While knowing which mass-produced clothes fit you right now is a convenient time-saver, the scanner’s true potential lies in perfectly tailored clothes for everyone, and the extinction of size eights and size 12s. Ordering well-tailored clothes online is certainly possible, as Manjoo has written, but it still involves taking your own measurements, a visit from a consultant, or mailing the company a piece of clothing you already own. These are time-consuming, and even a thorough shopper won’t be able to take as many measurements as the body scanner does.

Visualization is, of course, an integral part of the process—consumers want to see how their clothes will look on them before they buy. In the technology museum, a program created an avatar that bore a remarkable resemblance to the man scanned. His digital doppelganger tried on different items of clothing and told him how they fit (“a little tight in the thighs”). He could even make the avatar walk up and down a virtual runway to see how the clothes looked in motion.

Body scanning also has tremendous potential to lower prices—for consumers and manufacturers. In the short term, returns will drop sharply, and data from the body scanners will allow shops to stock more of the sizes found in their locality. In the long run, consumers will finally stop visiting clothing stores in person—a huge savings in overhead for manufacturers. And when you take returns out of the equation, costs go down even more.

Gimmicks meant to make shopping easier, from doorstop-sized catalogs to X-ray machinesthat showed how well your shoes fit, have come and gone. There are lots of variations on the avatar idea popping up these days, from using the sensors on a Microsoft Kinect to submitting photos to websites. But while these might seem attractive, they’re just stopgap measures on the way to the ultimate goal—infallible fit with minimal effort. The possibilities for body scanning are nearly limitless, whether it’s used to make online clothes shopping work efficiently or to create one-of-a-kind apparel. Kutnick told me that the technology even exists to infuse man-made fabrics with dye in real time using radio waves. One day, quite soon, we’ll be able to pick the exact colors we want—matching our shirts to our eyes, for example—and machines will produce them on request, making clothing that’s truly customized. For now, though, most consumers would probably settle for clothes that fit—minus the fitting room.

By Nell McShane Wulfhart

source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/19/me_ality_body_scanner_creates_an_avatar_to_make_clothes_shopping_a_breeze_.html#article_comment_box