Online retailing in Canada has been a slow process. Back in 2007 when I first started this blog, online shops were virtually non-existant and only the typical storefront “About Us” websites were up. While our neighbors in the south were enjoying an explosive growth in online retailing such as Zappos.com, The Gap and its sister brands, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks, and the list goes on.

In Canada, our largest high fashion retailer, Holt Renfrew, is still lagging behind in setting up an online shop. I’ve sent an inquiry asking them when (if ever) will they make an online shop available. I received a courteous response that they’re “working on it”, but it’s been a couple of years and still nothing. Holt Renfrew holds a lot of media friendly events, even as far as celebrating bloggers last year and featuring them in their store front. So you would think they could benefit some extra profit by setting up an inexpensive way of shipping their goods directly to consumers who may not have the luxury to step into a physical store. Without this added service, consumers will simply look elsewhere to shop, such as the well curated Net-a-porter and its sister site of outstanding deals on TheOutnet.com.

At least one major Quebec retailer made the jump recently, La Maison Simons offers select pieces from their four main brands of Twik, Icone, Contemporaine and Miiyu. Granted, it’s quite a small selection considering they carry literally hundreds of styles for each brand, but then again, Forever21.com has succeeded in introducing new styles with ease, and Shopbop.com always has something new to show even with models in the picture.

So what exactly is holding Canadian retailers back from setting up an online store? It’s certainly an added expense, especially when the retail landscape is so tough between local designers and their foreign competition. But the benefits outdo far more than the initial risks, especially if their online store is done correctly.

One Montreal-based online shopping site has made surprisingly significant improvements over the last year. Ssense.com was once a website that was trying too hard to be hip, offering a lot of bridge collections and aiming for the clubby 20-something demographic. However in the last year, the site has undergone a complete site makeover, curating a much more refined look and introducing great fashion editorials. Models that once were lively, are now posing straight, nearly expressionless, but nonetheless defined a certain look. The clothes went dark, muted and unusual. I’d say they’re almost the complementary counterpart to Reborn and Trusstclub.

The formula for Ssense.com certainly works and should serve as an example for other Canadian retailers that online shopping can be done and quite fabulously. Holt Renfrew and Ogilvy should perhaps take note, they’re losing precious revenue to other businesses that do ship to Canada.

Following hot on the heels of Denis Gagnon’s collaboration with Bedo, Philippe Dubuc had a collaboration of another kind with Montreal-based department store Simons. While most designer/fast fashion collaborations are of the one-off nature, Philippe Dubuc will have a long-term collaboration with Simons’ Icône line. While the designer has discontinued creating womenswear with his namesake collection, it hasn’t stopped him from venturing into the old sandbox in an effort to reach to a larger audience. Simons, after all, is one of the few department stores left in Canada who is actually succeeding in attracting a good number of shoppers thanks to their exclusive fashionable lines of Twik, Icône and Contemporaine, along with a mixture of high-end brands like Michael Kors, D&G, and more recently, to my surprise, Pringle of Scotland, Balmain and Chloé.

For the Dubuc/Icône collection, I decided to give it a whirl to see what he had to offer to the modern woman who could afford his $75-$275 price range.

The collection consisted of 16 pieces nearly all in black except for a couple in gunmetal gray, made up of blazers, pants, skirts, dresses and a couple of sweaters. The ads made the clothes look good enough, but often, looks can be deceiving.

I didn’t particularly like the style that had what looked like untucked hems (pictured above), giving that unfinished look. You could see two fabrics were sewn together (outside black, inside gray). It also meant that you could see crooked cuts, and other flaws. Like a Monet, it looks great from afar, not so hot upclose. Nor did I find the parachute like dress or top to be flattering to the body, especially with such a cheap fabric choice that made me feel like it could rip at any moment.

I liked the cotton wash on the skirt suit set, it shone like it was made of leather, great trick on the eyes and soft to the touch. The cupro gray dress with the soft ruffles or lapels felt a little cheap and didn’t hug my figure as much as I would’ve liked. The sweaters were probably the best pieces of the whole collection, they felt solid and had a neat front satin panel detail or had a zipper along the collarbone, but aside from the satin panels, the knits were void of any interesting stitches or details.

I checked the labels for the majority of them and to my surprise, most of the collection was Made in France. While that would’ve been a surefire plus, I couldn’t help but feel let down by what I saw. Just because it’s Made in France doesn’t mean the products presented were of superior quality. It’s like a cook who is given the best ingredients in the world, but cannot cook a decent meal. The Made in France label was not enough to save this collection, and it was apparent from the unsold merchandise on the racks. I saw a lot of women, from all ages, poking around but walked away empty handed.

Unfinished hemlines, skirt and blazer without lining. Felt like a prototype more than a finished piece.

Certainly, for Dubuc female fans, this Simons collaboration seems subpar than what he’s offering for the male counterparts in his store on St-Denis. As a first contact with the designer’s work, I was expecting designs that were more outside of the box, but they seem to blend in all too well with Icône’s other office looks. For the same price I could go to my favorite mid-end brand, Tristan, and get far cuter skirts and jackets, with better shapes and fabrics (made both Canada and China for some perspective). It’s unclear when Dubuc will churn up another collection for Simons, but for the moment, let’s hope his next effort will be better.

Are store websites a little too boring to browse to your liking? Do you miss that editorial fashion fantasy that magazines thrive upon and yet website miss upon? Fear no more, there seems to be a new trend emerging on fashion websites.

I’ve been store surfing online looking at the latest holiday collections and came upon Barneys‘ site. Although I seldomly have browsed there, I did noticed that they’ve added a new shoppable editorial magazine. Most websites will have commercial photo shoots of a model wearing the item on sale, however the relationship between viewer and photo is sort of cold and generic in my opinion. Fashion editorials, on the other hand, are highly stylized with different accessories and contain more elaborate backgrounds. They weave a fantasy of eye candy that makes potential shoppers go “oooh…now that’s pretty, and I want it.”

This format of catalogue shopping through editorials is relatively new from what I’ve seen of store websites. Barneys has picked up on the idea and launched their version of it called “Designer Mailer“. This holiday season, Canadian model Coco Rocha is splashed across the catalogue on every page. Whether in Flash or HTML  version, users can mouseover certain items that can be directly purchased online. The slightly disadvantaging point is that most of the items sold are accessories like shoes, bracelets, necklaces and bags. Some of the big ticket items like an L’Wren Scott dress are not available online, and can only be found in certain stores. A shame because for me in an editorial, I’d want to have the chance to purchase everything that I see. Call it online boutique hotel-style shopping.

I’m not sure if many shoppers are like me, but my desire to purchase depends greatly on how great the mannequins or models are dressed. I like being in a store where there are styled mannequins. It’s enough to send me finding the exact thing I see. Montreal, alongside Tokyo, in general has very attractive mannequin displays, especially at Simons. I can be sold on a look in seconds, it really doesn’t take much.

Online beauty stores can also apply this method of shopping by allowing users to mouse over a model’s face and imagine buying the very products that they’re looking at. They usually give credits in magazines as to what exactly a model is wearing, but you’d have to dig through the end of the magazine for that. An online beauty store could ideally benefit from this ease of purchase.

Certainly this is an interesting approach from Barneys, but they would need to work on refining the editorial shop just to make it a little more user-friendly. One advantage over Net-a-porter is having real physical stores in several locations (unfortunately only across America). I think The Gap & co. could use this kind of online business model as they have several brands and they could need the boost. I expect to see similar editorial shops to pop up in the near future.

Image credit: Barneys’ website

On one side you had a couple of the artists painting a replica of their printed t-shirt version, on the other there were outlined illustrations in black and white. The curious (including myself) were invited to actually color in the illustrations with paint markers of flashy purple, pink and blue colors. I participated in coloring one of the flowers on the panda filled canvas (subliminal message that Dahlia is a flower). It was fun, silly and interactive.

I bought the DJab CD because I digged the sound and took a few photos. It wasn’t particularly a party per se, but it did attract curious onlookers to check it out. They were also selling all sorts of DJ-related goods like headphones and more listening stations on the inside of the store.

Not sure if the guys digged the t-shirts since it was too early to say if the event was a success, however it did make for an interesting shopping day.

If you’ve passed by Simons, there’s actually a listening station outside the store where you can preview the compilation album called “I See The Light” that will be sold for the event. From my impression, it’s one of those electro 80s inspired albums, which isn’t too shabby to listen to on a Sunday morning to pump you up in the morning.

While H&M may have had Lindsay Lohan’s girlfriend spin at the opening of the downtown store, it’s an interesting coincidence that Simons will collaborate with musical and street artists with much fanfare for a new collection they’ve just acquired. It’s especially notable that this is all for the men’s collection, which often gets overlooked and rarely receives any attention from the media. For a department store, Simons has done everything to keep its inventory fresh, exclusive and young, pushing past the traditional boundaries of department stores and really turning it into a fun shopping experience.

We can see that music is increasingly sharing the spotlight with fashion, which really has always been the case since the inception of popular music. We can associate music and looks with the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Music has really caught the eye of fashion.

Expect the party to go down at Simons from 12pm to 4pm on Saturday, I’ll be there to take in the scene and take pictures.

Which brings me to these very interesting articles that popped up in the last couple of days.

Made in Canada – An in depth look at the advantages and some tips on how to keep a Canadian business going with some examples of some companies who have learned harsh lessons throughout the year. This also highlights that despite China and India’s cheap price, in the long run, it could become more costly to make things overseas as wages will increase over time.

Procter & Gamble links laundry to fashion - Tide, owned by P&G, has come up with a new type of laundry detergent that could be called as the “anti-aging solution” for clothing. Sure it’d be great to have a detergent that didn’t destroy your clothes…but how about buying clothes made of reliable, high quality material instead of the cheap kind if you want them to last?

Sick of Slow Service, Customers Walk -This is an ever growing problem in the retail business as Canadian consumers are fed up with the slow service being offered to them. And here’s another contributing factor of the ailing department store industry:

Department stores lose the greatest amount of business because of frustrated customers leaving empty-handed, with 78 per cent of survey respondents indicating that they have left a department store because of long waiting times.

It looks to me that HBC will really have to put customer service as a priority if they want to lure customers back. It will also need to significantly exceed the kind of service you get at Holt Renfrew (which is to say discriminatory and snooty).

The Gazette (shocking, I know)

Catalogue Yanked -La Maison Simons has decided to pull it’s Fall catalogue from the shelves after receiving numerous complaints of using too thin models on its pages. Although it’s been argued that images of very thin models do not cause anorexia, it has been proven to be one of the triggers that can lead to eating disorders. Montreal has especially been aware of the image it projects to its consumers in the fashion industry and Montreal Fashion Week fully supports the use of not-so thin models. However, from my observations when I’ve been to MFW, some of those girls seemed too thin in my opinion. But kudos to Simons for taking action.

If you’re not familiar with Lane Crawford, they are one of the most well-established department store chains in Hong Kong on par with our Canadian counterpart Holt Renfrew or Ogilvy. Under Brooks’ management, “the Lane Crawford group has tripled its business in the last five years and expanded its scope beyond Hong Kong and Macau into China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia,” according to WWD.com.

Baker says that there’s a gap between The Bay and Holt Renfrew, and he wants to fill that gap, but many Globe and Mail commentators were skeptical. Raising the usually affordable Bay prices might drive consumers away even if they were offering a better selection of brands. This is especially true with the failed project of Complexe Les Ailes in downtown Montreal where they were offering high end brands with considerably high price points for shoppers. Toronto-based Fairweather Group bought Complexes Les Ailes in 2005 and the upper levels have since been turned into office space.

Bringing in a luxury player and turning The Bay into a brand that sits between The Bay (the old one) and Holt Renfrew will prove to be tricky. Here’s a pricing breakdown between the two.

Holt Renfrew: Carries ready-to-wear and some bridge collections. $200-$5000 on average.
The Bay: Carries fast fashion, local, and some bridge collections. $20-$300 on average.

A premium price point would probably be somewhere between $75-$1000, if they indeed intend to offer better brands. However, I don’t know why this hasn’t been mentioned but what about Simons? They clearly have that premium price point – offering unique different brands, established an attractive shopping experience, while also offering a chance to pick higher quality brands. The demographic is however geared towards 18-25 year olds, while The Bay is probably targeting 25-35 yr olds. If anything, the new Bay (or Lord & Taylor) should perhaps take a cue from Simon’s and just make the experience a little more fun and luxurious without alienating their intended consumers.

Some might scoff at the idea of paying more for clothes, but these are people who don’t care for quality or don’t know what quality clothing is. What with the way stores are churning out new stock every month, it’s no wonder the general public demand cheap clothing. But I really think all this fast fashion lifestyle will turn around bite them in the butt. Soon people will tire of keeping up with trends (especially as we get older) and we would eventually want something durable and trendless. Fashion designers are already working towards seasonless collections, so “trends” per se are becoming obsolete. Therefore, stores will now have to make up for their seasonless collections and improve elsewhere such as price point, quality, branding, service and consumer experience.

So the appointment of Ms. Bonnie Brooks does inspire hope for The Bay brand, or really just the department store experience as a whole. We’re in serious need of quality stores in Montreal, and despite my initial reactions of The Bay possibly losing its brand name and appeal, at least they’re making an effort in changing it for the better.