“There are this kind of nuggets in the archives (…). Hurry up girls! », Launches, in mid-June, an Instagrammer with 500,000 subscribers. She does not suggest reopening a dusty file forgotten in an old cupboard. No, it’s about browsing through the old collections of a ready-to-wear brand and finding THE nugget at a bargain price. In her story, the influencer shares a photo of a dress from the Plume brand, embellished with an affiliate link to the commercial site in question. “Today in marketing, when we talk about archives, we’re talking about seasonal iconic pieces that set a trend and went back to stock,” says Dinah Sultan, trend stylist at peclersa creative strategy consulting agency.
From luxury to ready-to-wear, more and more brands are now offering their “archives” for sale to their customers, for a limited time. After private sales, ephemeral shops or capsules, this trend is added to the fads of fashion addicts. But how are these archives different from classic sales?
Exceptional clothes from old collections
These sales are “very popular with luxury designer brands”, explains Dinah Sultan, giving the example of the one organized by Jacquemus in 2019 in Paris. “In these sales, there are few products, the offer is rather tight, like a curation [une sélection rigoureuse] sort of, she says. In addition, they take place outside the usual promo and sales calendars to make it an event in itself. You can thus find exceptional clothing there, such as outfits presented as “almost importable and almost museum-like”.
These sales also come from the high-end ready-to-wear sector. From time to time, customers can thus find clothes from previous seasons of certain brands at much more attractive prices. This is the case of Sézane which last Sunday opened its “summer archives” on its website, offering ” [ses] previous collections at low prices”. On the price side, the reductions vary between 30 and 40%.
Emoi émoi has engulfed itself in this furrow this year. Since 2017, the online brand has organized two to four annual sales, but no more than a week each time. “We decided to leave these unsold items active longer on the site in an “archives” tab so that customers who missed the clearance sale could have access to these old collections for a few additional months”, explains Nathalie Fargeon, the co-founder of the brand. .
“We give an exclusive value to stock parts”
Archive sales also allow brands to better manage their stocks and any surpluses, but also to avoid the destruction of unsold items. It is also a way of freeing oneself from a more traditional and increasingly anachronistic or less and less relevant sales calendar. “Making sales at the end of June doesn’t make sense for us because we launch our products gradually, between February and May for the spring collection, for example. This allows us to have the time to properly explain each product to our community. If, from one day to the next, our customers see a product offered at -50% that they bought at full price a fortnight earlier, we lose price consistency and they feel like they’ve been cheated. It is therefore also a question of ethics and transparency towards our customers,” says Nathalie Fargeon.
It is also a question of marketing. We no longer speak of “markdowns” but of “soft prices”. The “unsold” – term connoted pejoratively – are renamed “iconic pieces”, which has more cachet. And rather than announcing potential “good deals” – the formula is a bit banal – the brands prefer to evoke with their customers the promise of a “treasure hunt”. “We choose the terms that we use carefully to express what we want to say to our customers,” explains Emoi émoi. We are looking for the right word to promote our creative work and our way of doing things. This creates a community and an attachment to the brand which is very important. »
A matter of “connoisseurs”
Be careful, however, not to imagine that the archives are only in fact repackaged sales in a more flashy packaging. “The sales evoke the break in prices, the clearance sale, the profusion…. The notion of archives evokes rarity, the collectable, and also the unique piece. We give an exclusive value to stock pieces, by reducing the price a little (but not too much) and by giving access to these references by invitation, during a limited period when the consumer will have to make himself available”, continues Dinah Sultan. . While the duration of the sales is strictly regulated and scheduled at fixed periods, the launch dates for archive operations are delivered at the very last moment, sometimes by surprise, via the brands’ newsletters or social networks, thus encouraging customer loyalty. . “We could link the archives to the idea of private sales/press sales which are normally accessible to the happy few, to the best customers”, suggests the trendy stylist.
Thus, the balances are “rather expected by mass consumers”, the archives, they are a matter of connoisseursthat is to say, “consumers who follow the brand, who know it but are not necessarily customers and patiently wait for these moments of bargain sales to afford one of the pieces”, explains Dinah Sultan.