Dark Fashion for the Apparel Industry | The Press

On the raw screen of the videoconference, Sandrine Devillard drops her predictions without a crash, but without tweezers either.

In general, in North America and Europe, the clothing sector has not been doing well for a while, explains the senior associate director at McKinsey in Montreal. He was just getting his strength back before the virus hit.

Of course, some companies have been a hit in 2020, despite everything, and are generating profits. Especially the strongest in online commerce. But together, they represent only 20% of the sector.

The rest ?

The other 80%?

It pulls all profit stats down.

McKinsey calls these companies “value destroyers”.

According to a report titled The State of Fashion 2021, published by the consulting firm and The Business of Fashion magazine, profits for the entire industry will decline by 93% in 2020 because of these struggling players, so that they had increased by 4% in 2019.

So, from a general point of view, the year 2020 was catastrophic in clothing. And the bankruptcies, closings and other recourses to the law protecting against creditors that have been observed as the pandemic refused to lose its breath are only the beginning of a tumble that will continue.

This wave of bankruptcies or protections against creditors, etc., is going to increase.

Sandrine Devillard, Senior Associate Director at Mckinsey

In addition, according to McKinsey consumer research, Canadians are not in spending mode when it comes to clothing. No outings, no restaurants, no parties with friends or family, telecommuting… The ball gown and suit and tie are on hiatus.

The word gloom is just beginning to describe the state of affairs.

But the portrait drawn by the analyst is not entirely gloomy.

Clothing, unlike electronics in particular, is not controlled by the web giants or even by the giants as such. Between them, Amazon, Target and Walmart barely occupy 20% of the market, even if there was a growth of 6% during the confinement of the beginning of 2020.

So there is room for other companies. Smaller, more agile, those who will be able to use digital technology to compete with the big guys and will be ready to rush into the future, head first, in order to meet the many challenges that mark this sector in transition.

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“It's not an easy time. But there are positive things,” notes Debbie Zakaib, director of mmode, the organization that brings together the many voices of the various players in the clothing industry in Quebec.

The pandemic has created a surge of solidarity within the industry, she says, to ask together for help, support. It has also accelerated the digitization of sales, the organization of delivery structures. Companies have been forced to accelerate the development of their online business. A lot of things have been shaken up. And it wasn't necessarily bad.

But if the crisis has awakened a certain economic nationalism and especially the realization within the population that a certain self-sufficiency was important both in food and in the production of clothing – for the health sector in particular –, the battle for local purchase and for the health of this sector is not won in advance. However, 83,000 people are employed there, more than in aeronautics.

According to McKinsey's predictions, the garment will have to wait until the first quarter of 2025 to return to normal in Quebec.

The road will be long and arduous.

Charles de Brabant, director of the Bensadoun School of Retail Management at McGill University, is among the optimists. “I'm so much more confident now than 30 years ago,” he says.

The professor is convinced that there are the human and technical resources in Quebec to find solutions.

Currently, and even before the pandemic, he observed a split in the sector between companies specializing in "experiential", on the one hand, therefore strong brands that bring intangible added value to products, a reality often associated with online shopping shop, and on the other hand, companies that could be described as efficient, often online. Those whose strength is to provide practical, concrete solutions, quickly. A gray t-shirt delivered during the day. Snow boots too. These companies have often done well during the pandemic given their naturally distanced specialization.

Some brands have also performed well because of the very nature of their products. “Lululemon did well,” notes the professor about the Canadian company specializing in very comfortable clothing. And we can easily imagine that slippers will have had a better year than pumps.

For companies whose business model relies heavily on the narrative force of the brand, the challenge, currently, is to keep alive the experience of this identity, of the emotions created in a context of pandemic, confinement and distancing. .

Some try the experiment. The Danish brand GANNI makes its deliveries overseas in the same bags – sealed – as if you were going to the store, while offering very precise software for evaluating sizes on its online shopping site. We are trying to approach the boutique experience.

"The future is the fusion of the efficiency of online shopping with the brand experience," believes Jacques Nantel, a former HEC professor specializing in retail and member of numerous boards of directors.

And that's where medium-sized Quebec businesses need to look.

Because between the small niche local brands, which have been spoiled by the wave of nationalist consumption accelerated during the pandemic, and the big ones on the web who have also benefited from the new passion for online shopping, there are the average players who suffer and need to rethink themselves.

Those who have too much square footage to pay for in shopping malls, in particular, and who are now being forced to restructure even though their online sales have increased and they are working hard to develop this niche. We think of Garage-Dynamite, Aldo, Reitmans and company.

The other crucial angle to prepare for the future – apart from trying to conquer the Asian market, a big chunk! – is everything that affects the values ​​of millennials: sustainable, eco-friendly, recycled, humanitarian...

It is clear that companies that want to meet the challenges of 2021 must think about it, believes Sandrine Devillard, of McKinsey.

Take inspiration from food

Marie-Eve Faust, director of the École supérieure de mode at UQAM, thinks that Quebec should definitely do the same exercise with clothing that it did with its food: try to understand where our clothes come from, who makes them, their environmental and human impacts, and how encouraging local businesses can help Quebec's social, ecological and economic development.

In food, the trend had already been strong for several years, but it accelerated during the pandemic: consumers are asking for Quebec products. Grocers and producers have seen it. The sometimes higher prices of local products no longer put off customers as much as they used to, and they want to know who grew, who raised, who cooked, who fished their food.

We dress up every day, but we are detached from these questions.

Marie-Eve Faust, director of the UQAM School of Fashion

However, there is know-how for design and production in Quebec and there is a way to find the fibers right here. Whether it's hemp, a material of the future, milkweed or Quebec wool.

“I want to put together a team of people to think about this,” she says.

And see if it will be possible, perhaps in 2021, to make a truly 100% Quebec garment.

And start in this way, but also by other paths, to really seek new local paradigms, ecological, economically, culturally and socially sustainable, and therefore profitable. To reinvent the sector. To give new meaning to all this upheaval.