Elegance Meets Streetstyle: Crismot, The Luxury Loungewear Brand
Introducing a harmonious blend of sophistication and urban flair, our luxury streetwear brand proudly hails from the fashion capital of the world, Italy. Crafted with passion, we present a collection that redefines modern luxury.
Drawing inspiration from Italy’s rich cultural heritage, we infuse timeless motifs with cutting-edge design to the vibrant energy of Milan’s streets, our creations reflect a seamless fusion of history and innovation. Experience the allure of the past intertwined with the audacious spirit of tomorrow.
Credits: Crismot Elevated Aesthetics, Effortless Elegance
In our atelier, we sculpt garments that epitomize effortless elegance. Our designs speak volumes without uttering a word. Luxurious fabrics embrace your skin, and sophisticated silhouettes flatter your form. Whether you’re strolling through the city streets or attending a high-profile event, our luxury streetwear effortlessly complements your lifestyle.
We believe that luxury should never come at the expense of comfort. Experience the exquisite softness of premium fabrics against your skin.Embrace Luxury Streetwear, Redefine Your Identity
Immerse yourself in a world where luxury meets urban culture, and elegance intertwines with audacity. Let our luxury streetwear speak to your soul, empowering you to embrace your truest self.
Indulge in Italian excellence today. Embrace the essence of luxury streetwear, meticulously crafted in Italy, exclusively for you. Welcome to a world where fashion becomes an art, and you become its living canvas.”
Credits: Crismot About Crismot
Embodying the epitome of essential elegance, Crismot is a celebration of simplicity and refined minimalism. This young, vibrant brand balances trendsetting versatility with a unique blend of Italian DNA, creating casual-chic streetwear with a luxurious feel. Stripping away excesses and focusing on quality, the design philosophy yields garments that are as comfortable as they are stylish. Every piece from Crismot serves to enhance individual personality, reflecting an experience of well-being and ease. Rooted in trend, versatility, and experience, Crismot blurs the lines between classic and casual, delivering must-have outfits season after season. Embrace the Crismot lifestyle: feel at ease, feel exceptional.
Why Luxury Brands Should Embrace Mobile
By Jason Goldberg
The rapid adoption of the smartphone and the mobile medium is one of the most important trends that shopper marketers are tracking this year and next.
Consumers are not only using their mobile phones to make purchases, but also increasing using them to perform shopping research on their way to a store and while they are in the store.
This trend will only increase with Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone activating 450,000 phones a day and as a generation of teenagers, who currently average 3,339 text messages a month, come of age.
Luxury shoppers are early adopters of powerful smartphones, but paradoxically, luxury brands are lagging behind when it comes to leveraging mobile marketing.
This is not unusual in and of itself.
Mind the gapLuxury brands traditionally trail other retail brands when it comes to technology adoption and in providing cross-channel user experiences.
Unlike wide-appeal brands such as Gap or J.C. Penney, luxury brands’ core customers often have higher service expectations due to the higher price points of luxury goods, which luxury brand managers mistakenly assume exclusively means personal service from sales associates.
In reality luxury shoppers’ expectations for high-quality service extend to great self-service tools and rich multichannel shopping experiences.
In a recent New York Times interview, Christopher Bailey, chief designer at Burberry, explained that part of the continued success of the venerable luxury fashion brand is due to its new cross-channel initiatives, especially in the mobile medium.
In fact, during the fashion house’s runway shows, spectators are furnished with mobile devices that allow them to reserve items in real-time while they are viewing them on the runway.
However, Burberry – which ensures that its customers can interact and experience brand consistency across every possible channel – is the exception to the rule.
(See Burberry takes third place: Luxury Marketer of the Year)
Many luxury retailers continue to invest their resources in the same old tools.
For instance, luxury brands spend millions on store facades and interior fixtures, yet ignore the parking lots that surround the stores – leaving them aesthetically displeasing and visually at-odds with the brand experience inside the store.
There is a similar incongruity related to mobile.
While their in-store experience may be unparalleled, luxury brands often receive failing grades when it comes to pre-tailing, an increasingly important step in a consumer’s purchase decision.
Luxury brands need to move quickly to offer mobile and online pre-shopping tools that seamlessly integrate with their existing ecommerce and retail experiences.
These marketers must ask themselves: Do all channels have visibility into a customer’s past purchases, gifts and wish lists?
In many ways, mobile represents the latest incarnation of the venerable clientelling practices that luxury brands have leveraged for years.
Associate sales, not sales associateWhy is mobile so important for luxury brands? Brand perception, loyalty and retention, for starters.
Luxury brand customers feel they have a relationship – even a bond – with the brands themselves, which does not extend, interestingly enough, to the sales associates or other human faces of the brands.
Mobile, in particular, allows customers to limit their interaction directly to the brand via the use of technology and to keep their interaction and brand experience consistent with their own perception of the brand.
For example, users of Gucci’s iPhone application are treated to exclusive music mixes by celebrity DJ, Mark Ronson, as well as sneak peeks of forthcoming merchandise, such as the Gucci Kids line.
The brand is rewarding its customers for using the mobile medium, offering a more intimate interaction than might be had in a bricks-and-mortar store, while also removing the chance that a single sales associate’s bad day could translate into lasting damage to the brand via customer dissatisfaction.
Of course, one of the primary justifications for the mobile medium is the same for Walmart as for Neiman Marcus: simple convenience.
Consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices for everything from calendaring to weather forecasts to GPS, and this ubiquity extends to shopping.
In fact, according to a recent survey by Brand Anywhere and Luth Research Inc., Web retailers could increase consumer engagement by 85 percent simply by offering a mobile version of their Web site (see story).
So, the time is now for luxury brands to add mobile to their channel mix.
While the benefits are numerous for all retailers, luxury brands, in particular, stand to gain higher engagement, sales and retention rates by offering a strong user experience to customers who clearly want – and expect – a direct, intimate and convenient way of interacting with the brands.
Jason Goldberg is vice president of strategy and customer experience at CrossView. Portland, OR. Reach him at [email protected].
The Return Of The Luxury Handbag
Made on Earth: Road to Recovery
By Isabelle Gerretsen
The pandemic has been a blow to Italy’s artisan handbag industry, but the lockdown demand for escapism has led to a surge in luxury appeal.
As many European countries announced new coronavirus restrictions in late September 2020, 100 handbag brands flocked to Milan to showcase their new collections at Italy’s international leather goods fair, Mipel. The gathering sent a clear message from Italy’s luxury fashion industry: “We are open for business.”
When Italy became the epicentre of the pandemic in February, the luxury apparel industry was dealt a harsh blow. Factories and workshops were forced to close and brands were left with shortages of material, orders and staff.
Italy’s fashion sector is a €90bn (£82bn) industry, which accounts for 40% of global luxury manufacturing and employs almost half a million people. Worldwide, the pandemic could cost the luxury market up to $100bn (£78bn), according to the Boston Consulting Group.
But after months of turmoil and economic losses, Italian luxury brands are finally starting to revive their businesses. Despite very difficult conditions, 100 brands still turned up to Mipel this year, making up about a third of the usual contingent, says Franco Gabbrielli, chief executive of Mipel.
“It was very important to do this edition of Mipel because we would like to show the world that we are here,” says Gabbrielli.Some Italian leather goods producers repurposed their workshops to make protective equipment such as face masks during the pandemic (Credit: Miguel Medina/Getty Images)
Although brands, big and small, successfully adapted their business models to survive during the pandemic, many artisans are fearful of further lockdowns.
“Next year will be very difficult,” says Gabbrielli. During the first lockdown, “many companies already had orders in hand. Now they don’t have new ones for the winter.”
Italy is by far the biggest exporter of leather handbags in Europe, selling €6.3bn (£5.7bn) of them last year, according to Mipel.
Italy’s first, two-month lockdown caused the leather goods industry’s turnover to drop by around 43% and the total value of exported goods to fall by 31% in the first half of 2020, according to research carried out by Assopellettieri, Italy’s national leather goods association.
Small family-run businesses are the beating heart of the industry. Many global brands, including Prada and Gucci, rely on artisans in Florence to produce their collections. If these small businesses do not survive the pandemic, “the craftsmanship that is the result of excellence and skill passed down through generations, and the source of the ‘Made in Italy’ aura – could be lost forever”, a report by the management consultancy McKinsey warned in April.
Italian handbags are world-famous for their craftsmanship and authentic, bespoke design. “The Italian product has always been the best [among] the leather goods. It is artisan, [rather than] industrial. All the bags have something different,” says Gabbrielli.This workshop in Chianti, Tuscany, opened to produce handbags for luxury brand Celine just a few months before Covid-19 struck (Credit: Miguel Medina/Getty Images)
Many brands relied on the global appeal of “Made in Italy” luxury goods to weather the coronavirus storm. “Clients have turned to brands that represent value and are a safe investment,” says Mireia Lopez Montoya, managing director of leather goods and accessories at the luxury brand Bulgari. “This has definitely helped.”
Bulgari launched its Arkadia leather goods and accessories collection on schedule, despite difficulties sourcing materials during Italy’s lockdown. Montoya says the lockdown was not disastrous for Bulgari as handbag collections are normally produced eight months in advance and are less trend-driven than fashion, which gave the company time to adapt. “We don’t have the same seasonality as fashion. Our models are timeless, they don’t age,” she says.
Bulgari’s European market has suffered the most as a large portion of sales comes from tourism, Montoya says. When Europe locked down, Bulgari closed many of its airport stores, which are important sources of revenue for the company.The Chinese have this appetite for luxury goods. They are buying more as a result of not travelling right now and having more money – Mireia Lopez Montoya
While sales fell sharply in Europe, the firm’s Italian handbags were snapped up in China. “There the bags are really flying,” says Montoya. “The Chinese have this appetite for luxury goods. They are buying more as a result of not travelling right now and having more money.”
Luca Solca, a luxury goods analyst at the asset management and research firm Bernstein, says it is not surprising that the Chinese market was the first to rebound, as regional lockdowns were lifted there months before those in Europe. “During the summer, luxury demand has been resurging even if people haven’t come back to travelling,” says Solca, who has also noted that lockdown lifestyle meant people had more savings, which then gave a boost to the market. Chinese consumers had more “discretionary spending capacity that they can dedicate to personal luxury goods,” he says.
A case in point is the Sicilian handbag brand Studio Sarta. The brand’s founders, siblings Fabio and Giorgia Gaeta, were surprised when their sales increased by 50% over the summer. Established in 2017, Studio Sarta in Palermo creates chic, contemporary handbags made from rattan and Italian leather.Demand from China as it has adapted to life with Covid-19 has meant many luxury handbags brands have enjoyed strong export sales (Credit: Getty Images)
“It is a strange story. We expected our sales to decrease during lockdown, but people did not stop buying [online] and our sales remained stable,” says Fabio, who manages the business while Giorgia designs the products. “Over the summer people bought our entire stock in three weeks.”
Fabio believes that sales were driven by the many hours people spent online during lockdown and a desire for escapism. “In order to escape the fear of coronavirus, people started buying products online,” he says.
Studio Sarta was in a strong position when the pandemic struck due to its established online presence. The company has always sold its products online, directly to customers around the world. By bypassing the reseller, the company is able to significantly cut costs and lower prices. “Ninety percent of our sales are through the internet which lets us keep the prices low. Our bags are at the cheaper end of the market. For €150 everyone can have a little luxury,” says Giorgia.
Instagram lies at the heart of Studio Sarta’s marketing strategy. The company’s Instagram page features models carrying the bags as they wander through Italy’s sun-kissed countryside. “In May we had some publicity from an influencer and it was incredible: one influencer photo can sell 100 bags in three days,” says Fabio.As the pandemic continues, many brands fear that further lockdown restrictions are likely to interfere with production (Credit: Mipel)
Luxury brands have been slow to embrace e-commerce in the past due to reluctance among consumers to buy expensive, high-end products online. But the pandemic has accelerated the industry’s shift to online channels. Bulgari has expanded its e-commerce division to seven new markets over the summer in an attempt to boost sales.
But many small artisans will struggle to switch to an e-commerce model. “The investment to start e-commerce is expensive. In many small companies the owners are quite old and not used to working with technology,” says Mipel’s Gabbrielli.
According to Studio Sarta, it is worth the investment. “With the internet you can produce high-quality products locally and sell worldwide. It was quite easy [for us] to survive this period,” says Fabio.
“It’s incredible how a small, crafted, locally-sourced company can be resilient, can survive and be very flexible in a global world.”
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The world’s trading routes have seen a year like no other in 2020. Many industries, makers and markets have responded to the coronavirus pandemic with ingenuity. Made on Earth: Road to Recovery explores how the trades in eight everyday products are adapting – from bicycles to whisky, spices to semiconductors – and how resilience and innovation are redefining the way the world trades.eight products that defined global trade Semiconductors How the chip changed everything
All our complex and connected modern electronics would be nothing without pure, white sand.Bicycles An ordinary bicycle’s epic journey
Bicycle-making has become one of the most complex and integrated international industries there is.Whisky The secret to whisky’s global success
The enduring mystique of Scotch whisky has been paramount to its global success.Handbags Leather handbags: Why ‘Made in Italy’ has such appeal
The Italian leather handbag has been a style icon for decades, and shows no signs of going away.Spice The flavours that changed the world
The insatiable hunger for spices across the world was the spark needed for globalisation to begin.Flowers The new roots of the flower trade
A shift towards the equator has reinvigorated the global flower trade and local economies alike.Paper How paper is making a comeback
As the world goes digital, paper might seem increasingly obsolete – but it is anything but.Coffee How the world came to run on coffee
In just a few centuries, the world has developed a two-billion-cups-a-day habit.The Best Of Future The scents being saved from extinction The natural replacements for plastic Why ‘Made in Italy’ has such appeal
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