Key takeaways:
Showrooms’ relevancy is at risk of slipping as Instagram and e-commerce increasingly cut the middlemen out of fashion’s equation.
In response, the spaces are adding new lines of business including event hosting, content producing and designer discovery.
Like brands, the showrooms have also started selling directly to consumers, further removing retailers.
At the Tomorrow Le Palais wholesale apparel showroom on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine, modern dancers dressed in padded pink pantyhose crept, lunged and threaded their way through a nattily dressed crowd. Garment racks surrounded the scene, loaded with the Autumn/Winter collection of Enfold, a Japanese label known for its quirky, minimalist take on normcore.
It was an unexpected experience to stumble upon in a wholesale apparel showroom during Paris Fashion Week.
But when Enfold representatives requested permission to stage a performance there, the showroom’s executives eagerly agreed. “We said yes, absolutely,” says Tim Ryan, chief marketing officer of Tomorrow London Ltd, the operating group that owns the showroom. Tomorrow has found that performances, art and other entertaining activities cause retail store buyers to stick around longer and to look more deeply at collections.
The traditional showroom has been rocked by the myriad shifts that have roiled apparel retailing in the past decade. “It’s dead,” Stefano Martinetto, Tomorrow’s chief executive told me last September. “The showroom as we knew it doesn’t work anymore.”
There was a time, not long ago, when the fashion showrooms that populated Paris, New York, London and garment districts like those in Los Angeles were largely a matter of four walls, some tables for writing orders, and racks of clothes. But as Instagram and the internet have removed middlemen that once separated consumers from fashion brands, wholesale showrooms which employ about 8 per cent of the industry’s labour force in the US according to Fashion United — are evolving by becoming more like the brands they represent.
It’s the forced result of a sink-or-swim survival mode that showrooms have entered as more brands sell directly to consumers and as retailers’ — and therefore wholesalers’ — struggles increase. Barneys New York, Opening Ceremony and roughly 9,300 other retailers closed stores in the US in 2019 up from about 5,800 in 2018, according to Coresight Research. Those closures are only expected to climb this year.
Hybrid models
At the More Dash showroom in Paris, founder Daria Shapovalova says the showroom has become a “platform” for elevating brands directly to consumers as well as to stores. She started the showroom when she lived in her native Ukraine to highlight Ukranian fashions. Designers crowded in seasonally, hung their clothes on metal racks and waited for buyers to come by.
Today, More Dash bills itself as a “fashion experience retail company”. The showroom allows consumers as well as retailers to place pre-orders online for clothing. At its Paris headquarters on the rue du Mail during fashion weeks, photographers and filmmakers record the myriad activities — cocktail parties, sales meetings, visits from influencers — to create content for the labels’ and showroom’s use in later social and marketing campaigns.
It also holds pop-up displays that it calls “content creation studios” in between fashion marketing seasons, building out sets and inviting influencers and their friends to photograph themselves in designers’ samples in return for posting to social media accounts and tagging More Dash as well as the label. If the influencers want to keep the item, they may buy it. The overall effect is a hybrid wholesale showroom, e-tailer and content marketing and production firm.
Foreseeing a continued dramatic downturn in retail, London-based Tomorrow has shifted into entire new businesses, investing directly in promising fashion brands such as A-Cold-Wall, a menswear brand launched by Virgil Abloh mentee Samuel Ross. The group offers consulting, design, licensing and production services to brands. Last autumn it brought in as chief development officer Julie Gilhart, a former fashion director of Barneys known for ferreting out promising young designers.
“We’ve evolved into a real multi-brand platform. It’s like an independent record company for fashion,” said Martinetto.
New brand partnerships
That involves inviting influential brands to use Tomorrow’s Paris showroom — actually an 18th-century mansion surrounded by high wrought iron gates — even if they aren’t part of the firm’s stable of labels. Last week, US wunderkind Christopher John Rogers had parked his collection at Tomorrow for Paris Fashion Week sales.
“It’s discovery — they reached out to us,” Rogers said, glancing around the large room where people mingled and looked over the collection he’d shown in New York in February. “Normally we’re in a little hotel room in New York with two racks.” He grinned. “They have services, models, dressers… chairs!”
Last September, Tomorrow installed Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond on an upper floor. The label — fashion’s equivalent of a rock star these days — drew a stream of visitors past other showrooms on their way to pay homage. Raymond called his arrangement with Tomorrow a “strategic partnership” that involved revenue-sharing, but noted that he benefited additionally from traffic the showroom generated for him, and the competent sales help.
In the current Covid-19 crisis, Tomorrow is seeing decreases in orders versus their projections for the Autumn/Winter 2020 season (projections based on Autumn/Winter 2019). Like-for-like orders are down about 15 per cent, Ryan said in an email this week. He noted that Tomorrow is advising brands in which the group has invested that they should produce “more edited” collections for third and fourth quarter 2020 deliveries, given the coronavirus outbreak is impacting global production, distribution and possibly consumer demand.
But new business and organic growth is up nearly 30 per cent, Ryan said. That suggests that diversifying may be having an unintended benefit in a time of economic downturn by building business that didn’t exist under the old model.
Elena Troulakis, Tomorrow’s commercial director, said in an email that she sees the Le Palais showroom in Paris as an “environment of impact, energy and experience”. That sounds theatrical, but she sees the showroom as serving a human need that is ultimately vital to sales. “Le Palais lets us [connect] with our brand partners to generate cultural experience, as well as providing many other good reasons for us and our network of international retail partners to come together — which we will continue to do, when we are all able to again.”
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