From The Front Lines: How 7 Fashion Businesses Are Coping During Coronavirus

Fashion has come to a near standstill amidst the coronavirus pandemic leaving many brands to wonder if they will be able to weather the economic storm left in its wake. Heritage brands and retailers are announcing layoffs or furlough, as Nordstrom did yesterday, or are floating the word bankruptcy in the media, as Neiman Marcus has done. The already-struggling fashion bible W has hit pause, furloughing 17 of their 58 employees.

What does all this mean for people who are still fighting for their businesses amid the pandemic?

In speaking to 7 leaders in the industry for this article, the goal was to understand what they are doing to mitigate the situation for their businesses. Spanning the spectrum from a CEO at a global e-com site to independent entities to startups, these people represent the different facets of the industry and paint a picture of their experiences as this crisis continues.

First and foremost this is a human situation and the health of our staff and customers is the first priority. We are a very global company so when this hit in China and then in Japan at the end of January and February we ensured our team was able to work from home and we made other necessary operational changes there. That was our first experience with the situation.

Our current priority is to support our community of boutique owners and brands who sell on Farfetch. When you shop on Farfetch, your items arrive from one of 700 boutiques in 50 countries around the world, or from one of our many brand partners.

Most of these are small family businesses and have had to close their physical store locations. For many, Farfetch is now their only channel so we feel supporting them is a huge responsibility as a platform.

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We are working with these boutique owners to help them in any way we can. We are making sure they can keep selling to customers on Farfetch, even if they can’t welcome their customers into their retail stores at the moment. We are assessing all ways we can drive sales volume and traffic to support these boutiques, including putting them front and center on Farfetch website, changing visual merchandising to surface as much boutique stock as possible.

We are also offering logistics and warehousing support. This includes moving stock from boutiques to our warehouses when boutiques cannot ship themselves due to regional lockdowns or staff shortages. We are doing this as a service to them, without charge.

A dedicated #supportboutiques project is launching this coming week, to get the whole Farfetch community involved.

Crucially, we also want to help the shops when they reopen. We are planning to invest in a full-blown marketing campaign, including paid marketing at our expense, to encourage footfall in due course when we are all out of these times of needing to socially distance.