• GlamCorner founders - Audrey Khaing Jones and Dean Jones.
    GlamCorner founders - Audrey Khaing Jones and Dean Jones.
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GlamCorner co-founder and CEO Dean Jones details two changes the fashion rental business has seen in customer and retailer behaviour due to the pandemic. 

Something that we've seen is a permanent change is in two lenses: one is the consumer and one is the retailer. 

On the consumer side, what we're seeing is an accelerated adoption of more sustainable and circular solutions for our customers' wardrobe.

It's about that reset: we're really having the opportunity to sit and think about the customer's consumption habits and I don't think it's just in her wardrobe by the way. 

I think it was in a lot of other parts of her life. She has probably now built some new habits and some new trajectories that will be cultivated from there.  

There is an accelerated adoption of more sustainable solutions and an accelerated appetite to look for more sustainable fashion options. 

I think that's an opportunity for a lot of brands to contribute to and also make their customers lives better at the same time. 

On the retailer side; we have seen an accelerated urgency from a lot of brands on how to futureproof their business. 

It's not just in the obvious ones like 'we need to be more online' I think the answer is actually to futureproof your business you need to be in many channels.

Anyone who was purely online was just fortunate this time that the way things played out it was beneficial but if you were too long in any channel, if you were just on the wrong side of the seesaw, that could play out the other way around. 

It reminded us that we should be taking more seriously the omnichannel approach and taking physical retail more seriously.

Because while the online side of our business had a huge bump, 2020 is a reminder that it could go either way and any executive should be keeping that in mind. 

We're finding a lot of retailers, even the big guys like David Jones, wanting to build a more circular sustainable solution. 

If you look offshore, you've got people like Selfridges building entire parts of their department stores in circular fashion. 

There’s countless other brands around the world that are adopting a more sustainable, circular approach because of what they're seeing on the customer side and also because from a business side of things it is a higher margin and a more futureproof channel. 

It's a higher margin because you get to sell an item and monetise it for a longer part of its life, while making a fraction of the amount of product that you would need to make to satisfy the same amount of demand of a traditional buy and sell model. 

For us, it's part of our mission to accelerate the transformation to a more sustainable and circular economy. 

That's an opportunity for us and we're seeing a permanent level of appetite from retailers there as well. 

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