Reporter | Chen Qirui
Edit | Lou Shuqin
Tmall's fashion landscape is further expanding.
On January 18, three brands of Italian fashion group New Guards Group, Ambush, Palm Angels and Off-White, officially landed on Tmall to open flagship stores. Prior to that, Palm Angels and Off-White had already sold online through WeChat mini-programs, but this was the first time Ambush had launched an official online channel in China.
Interface Fashion has previously written that After New Guards Group acquired a majority stake in Ambush in 2020, it said it would use existing resources to help the brand expand globally.
Although Ambush has become a representative brand in the street fashion trend of the past few years, because its production and distribution system is concentrated in Japan, and the category is still dominated by accessories, the overall revenue performance and popularity do not match. Yoon Ahn, one of Ambush's founders, pointed out that there were not many Internet platforms and offline channels to help brands expand, and language was also one of the limiting factors.
For Palm Angels, which is less well-known than Ambush, this platform and cultural limitations are even more pronounced. But Palm Angels is also expanding rapidly, opening stores in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, and recently expanding offline channels to non-first-tier cities such as Wuhan and Chengdu.
At a time when China's online luxury consumer market is growing rapidly in the post-epidemic era, all overseas brands need to increase their online channels to achieve further development. Unlike brands that want to explore digital solutions from scratch, New Guards Group was wholly owned in 2019 by British luxury e-commerce company Farfetch, which started out as an online sales platform for offline buyers and department stores.
Previously, Farfetch's e-commerce partner in China was JD.com, and it had received investment from Tencent. But in 2020, Farfetch announced a joint venture with Alibaba and Richemont to increase the size of Luxury E-commerce in China. Starting in early 2021, Farfetch officially opened its official flagship store on Tmall International after closing its entrance to JD.com.
Therefore, the opening of Ambush, Palm Angels and Off-White on Tmall this time may be seen as part of Farfetch's promotion of cooperation with Alibaba. In fact, with Farfetch, Tmall can more widely reach overseas trend brands and niche designer brands in addition to attracting head luxury brands such as Gucci and Prada.
And this is obviously Tmall's move to expand its international influence. Relying on a huge user base and traffic base, Tmall has become the first choice for a large number of international fashion and beauty brands to enter the Chinese market. Tmall International previously announced business upgrades in 2020 and increased investment in overseas direct shipping business, with the aim of allowing more overseas brands to enter the Chinese market with less effort.
On the other hand, JD.com, as a competitor, has not handed over the market to others in vain. Many brands that have opened flagship stores on Tmall in the past have entered JD.com. In the luxury sector, LVMH's Levert-Vuitton, Bulgari and Givenchy began working with JD.com.
Like Tmall, JD.com also began to lay out cross-border e-commerce very early, and the previous cooperation with Farfetch was one of the results. The latest move is that JD.com announced that it has established a partnership with Shopify, a Canadian online e-commerce service provider, and in the future, JD.com will connect the import and export supply chain business to the Shopify system.
Founded in 2004, Shopify started by providing e-commerce solutions for small and medium-sized merchants and is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in North America. Shopify's current service is no longer limited to small businesses, including celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and Kylie Jenner who sell personal branded products through Shopify.
Although Shopify cannot provide JD.com with a large number of mid-to-high-end fashion brands and beauty brand resources, its rich merchant resources can bring many new DTC consumer brands to consumers. For those Chinese brands who are interested in going overseas, with the help of JD.com's partnership, it is more convenient to establish sales channels on Shopify, shortening the time and cost required for the previous process of going to sea.