Amazon has spent years building up its Fashion division, providing a marketplace for other companies’ clothes. Now, Amazon is looking to sell their own clothing.
Remarks from VP of clothing at Amazon Fashion Jeff Yurcisin indicate that Amazon wants to fill in the gaps, and offer its own private label items when other brands have declined to sell on the site.
From BuzzFeed:
“For Amazon, we know our customers love brands, many of the brands in this room…and that’s where the lion’s share of our business comes from,” Jeff Yurcisin, vice president of clothing at Amazon Fashion and CEO of Amazon’s Shopbop unit, said at the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit on Tuesday. “When we see gaps, when certain brands have actually decided for their own reasons not to sell with us, our customer still wants a product like that.” Amazon may get into private-label for those kinds of goods, he added.
In a way, this announcement feels inevitable.
Amazon already sells items from big name brands like Calvin Klein, Carter’s, Jessica Simpson, Levi’s, kate spade new york, Nautica, New Balance, PUMA, Roxy, and Steve Madden.
But not every top fashion brand is eager to get in bed with Amazon.
Take this, from a recent New York Times article on Fashion Week:
While fashion companies like these are drawn to Amazon’s huge reach — more than 40 million United States customers have made clothing, shoes or accessories purchases in the last 12 months on Amazon.com, Ms. Beaudoin said — many are concerned about tying their brands to a website that is far more a utility than a boutique…
…The concerns mainly involve the presentation of the pieces on the site and the pricing. Legally, a wholesaler cannot insist that a retailer sell an item for a certain price. But a company like Lacoste does not want to offer its products on a website that may slash its prices (as Amazon does with books and other products) such that its brand comes off as down-market.
So, when Amazon has a fashion gap, it can fill it with its own product.