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Zara and other fast fashion brands are clustered at Astana's landmark Khan Shatyr mall.
there are geographical differences if you look at consumer culture, but one thing that changes the landscape a lot is online shopping,” says Gurova.
Thanks to the multichannel approach taken by H&M and Zara, for example, as well as online-only retailers like British Asos or Chinese AliExpress, “small cities and remote areas now have access to consumer goods if not from fast fashion retailers directly, from knockoffs or cop- ies to some items that look like products of the fashion brands but are from some- where else ... online retail is growing immensely right now,” she continues.
It’s similar in Romania where, Urbn Style’s Maria says “online revolutionised shopping ... many young girls buy clothes from Asos, H&M, Zara or Romanian Fash- ion Days and such online stores.”
"New players such as Boohoo.com, ASOS and Missguided are bringing products from design to sale in as little as a week or two–faster than traditional fast-fash- ion retailers, and even faster than Zara. Fast fashion is turning into ultrafast fashion,” said a 2017 report from Fung Global Retail Research. “Pure-play online fast-fashion retailers are able to continuously refresh and rotate a large part of their assortments to drive cus- tomer shopping frequency.”
Online is ideally suited to fast fashion retail because it speeds up the process by cutting out parts of the supply chain (i.e., displaying and selling clothes in shops) and makes it even quicker to respond to demand changes. While the expansion
of fast fashion stores is continuing in Eastern Europe, in these countries too retailers are combining bricks and mortar with online shops as they feel the squeeze from their online rivals.
Fast fashion has been turning the clothing retail markets of the CEE and Eurasian countries on their heads in recent years, but this is just one stage in the consumer revolution that has been ongoing for the last few decades. As consumers turn in growing numbers to online retail – lag- ging Western consumers by a few years
– the rapid pace of change within the sector is set to continue.
says, fast fashion retailers arrived when new forms of retail space appeared, after which they started to proliferate in the country. “The problem is that fast fashion retailers come to particular retail spaces, and in smaller cities there are not many of them that work in terms of standards for fast fashion retailers,” she adds.
This means that shopping centres that meet the standards of international retail- ers all tend to be populated by the same group of brands: the Inditex group stores and H&M, alongside their Turkish com- petitors like Koton and LC Waikiki, plus local competitors such as Russia’s Concept Club, Gloria Jeans and Sela. As a result, it’s often not obvious to consumers where the clothes they are perusing are coming from, especially as some chains don’t advertise their locality, and the labels in the clothes indicate where they are made rather than designed, points out Gurova.
From East to West
As the fast fashion business model expands in emerging markets, local companies are also jumping on the fast fashion bandwagon.
Probably the first high-profile fast fash- ion brand to venture from East to West was Kira Plastinia, the eponymous brand of the then 15-year-old daughter of one of Russia’s richest dairy producers. Kira Plastinia launched in the US back in 2008, but the venture flopped and was shut down within a year.
A more convincing debut was made
by Polish fast fashion chain Reserved, which opened last year at a 30,000-square foot space in London’s Oxford Street
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that was once British Home Stores' main department store. Reserved’s first UK store was opened by English supermodel Kate Moss in September 2018.
Reserved is part of the LPP group that also includes the Cropp, House, MOHITO and SiNSAY brands, and has already expanded from Poland to 20 other countries including fellow East Euro- pean markets, Germany and China. Built up from scratch over the past 25 years, the Gdansk-based group’s success has resulted in it being dubbed the ‘Polish Inditex’; in 2017 it sold more than 140mn garments and accessories, achieving rev- enues of almost €1.4bn. The expansion continues; its launch in Israel ended in a stampede as the first 200 shoppers who spent over €48 were offered free tickets to Europe. While Reserved made a loss in its first year in the UK, LPP CEO Marek Piechocki told The Telegraph it still plans to open many more stores in the country in the near future.
Data from Euromonitor shows Reserved was the fifth largest apparel brand
by sales value in Eastern Europe in 2017. Russian players Gloria Jeans, O’Stin and Kari, plus Polish accessories retailer CCC, also make the top 10.
Probably the biggest competitors to the bricks-and-mortar clothing retailers, however, are their online rivals. In coun- tries like Russia, where a large segment of the population live in far flung towns or rural areas, online is the only way to reach large numbers of potential cus- tomers, and even in the big cities malls are underperforming, mostly due to the switch to online purchasing. “Of course