Source: Loewe official blog
In recent years, luxury brands seem to be more and more skilled in the "operation" of co-branding, and they all want to use this "east wind" to enrich the brand image and contact more potential consumer groups.
Source: Prada Official Blog
On January 7, the "Yeezy Gap Engineered" project, co-ordinated by Kanye West and Gap, announced a collaboration with Balenciaga to launch a joint collaboration series, which received more than 820,000 likes and more than 11,000 comments after Ins was announced; on the same day, Loewe also officially announced the new "Loewe Thousand and Away Series" Prada also took advantage of the trend of luxury goods and sports brands to cooperate with adidas again to launch the third wave of co-branding.
Image source: Ins@yeezysupplyofficial screenshot
In addition, Gucci has also had a special love for brand co-branding in the past year. In the second half of 2021, Gucci entered the NFT field while it was hot, and announced cooperation with Xbox and China's emerging trend IP Marsper, respectively, and announced the release date of the second co-branded series with The North Face. It is also very impressive that the brand has cooperated with Disney and Doraemon to launch a limited series during the Spring Festival in the past few years.
Image source: Ins@gucci
With the advantages of the "1+1>2" marketing model of co-branding, it has become a common way for major luxury brands to release co-branded series with artists, anime and fashion brands. Recently, cbnData released the "2021 Global Fashion IP White Paper" released by CBNData, the first financial business data center, pointed out that from 2019 to 2021, the past three years have been the most rapid years for brand co-branding and cross-border cooperation, since the joint name of Supreme and Louis Vuitton in 2017, the trend of brand co-branding and cross-border cooperation has swept the world.
Why do luxury brands choose to promote in this way?
First of all, the joint name of luxury brands and different IP will attract different customer groups, and with the influence of both sides, they can carry out "goodwill grafting" to expand the customer base. This can be seen from the launch of Gucci and Doraemon, as well as Luo Yiwei's choice and the launch of the joint series of "Spirited Away", many netizens have left messages under the official blog saying "Spirited Away yyds", "Where can I buy", "Cute" and so on.
This classic "Spirited Away" is not only the childhood memory of a generation, but also the classic anime IP that many adults are constantly reviewing. The joint products of the two sides not only inject new vitality and wider exposure into the top brands in the fashion industry, but also meet the needs of two-dimensional enthusiasts, and "push" the fashion brand of Loewe to the Z generation and millennial consumers, and the brand tends to be younger.
Secondly, the joint name with different artists and different types of brands not only "makes up" for its own shortcomings, but also enriches the brand's own image. Following the joint name with the tide brand, more and more luxury brands have turned their attention to the sports and outdoor fields, and the application scenarios of the brand are more diversified and life-oriented. The "Gucci × North" and the "Prada × Adidas" have shown the "determination" of luxury goods to lay out the sports field.
The joint cooperation of "Gucci × North" is the first time that Gucci has cooperated with other brands to develop a complete range of products, and it is also the first time that "North" has cooperated with luxury brands. Netizens also expressed their recognition and love for the joint name of the two sides.
Prada and Adidas hope that through this joint cooperation, they can better implement the sustainability goals of the two brands, and all of them are based on Prada's recyclable recyclable nylon produced in Italy. Netizens have left messages saying that this will probably be robbed of crazy.
As reported by the Tianjin Garment Association, the joint name is in line with the consumer psychology of the current customer base. A new generation of consumers is more interested in the impact of fashion on society and the environment, and the ethics, sustainability and transparency of brands are very important to them. The rise of young consumers is rapidly changing the landscape of the entire fashion industry, and sustainability is gradually developing into an important selling point for brands.
Proofreader: Ling Zaiqing