I was in an urbanwear store the other day that was going out of business. I saw all of these signs about 75% off of the lowest price, and so I figured I would go in to see whats up. The store was picked clean, so I had to go all the way to the back. The stuff on the walls was good, but the prices were entirely too high; they did have some really good Polo Ralph Lauren dress shirts I would have bought if they were 75% off of the lowest price. Some of the shirts I was interested in, had sleeves that were entirely too short; I need a 17 1/2 34 – 35, as tempting as 32 – 33 sounds, it never works out, and I end up looking like a clown.
What I found for 75%, offended me. It was not the shirts themselves, stuff from The Gap, Van Heusen, even vintage Manhattan Shirt Company shirts from the eighties that really look like they deserved to be in a thrift store, but were probably brand new. It was the fact that the store was trying to deceive customers by telling them these shirts had originally sold for $98, had been discounted to $22, and can now be yours for $7 after the discount.
No one in their right mind would pay more than $7 for this stuff in a regular store. Considering that the Polo Ralph Lauren shirts were selling for $56, if you are really short and get by with a 32 – 33 length, you might want to pick up that merchandise because you could easily find two shirts for $28; as they were running a buy one get one free to dump their merchandise.
As many stores are in this mall, just as many have opened their doors, and closed their doors. Some of the stores sold junk, some of them had gems amongst junk, and some of them sold overpriced urbanwear couture, like $80 t-shirts and $300 jeans, $800 sweaters, that the average resident in Hampton Roads simply cannot afford.
As much as I love to hate labels like Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein for putting out the same item consistently, year after year I now understand why they do it. Everyone else seems to be offering junk. The only consistent urbanwear labels are Rocawear and Sean Jean. Everyone else experiments, and you never know if you are getting a quality piece of attire or not. Rocawear and Sean Jean are trendy, to a point, but they are actually putting out classic fashion in the same vein as Polo Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger.
The trendy, this is only in style for 3 months approach, attitude to the design of urbanwear is going to be its undoing. Some of your customers might not care if it falls apart this time next year, but a lot of your customers do. A poor customer might look at a Rocawear or Sean Jean piece of attire as an investment, and you never know who will continue to wear that garment five, ten, even twenty years from now. Sean Jean even has a nice line of suits for young men to wear to work, and another line of suits for older men to wear to church.
Urbanwear will never become a high-end sub-genre of fashion. Most artists and individuals that have the money to pay hundreds of dollars for clothing are going to opt for the European designers that have consistently offered high-end luxury for decades, or in some cases, well over a hundred years. The best that urbanwear designers can do is to offer a few pieces here or there, as the aforementioned designers do, but launch other labels that consumers do not have to differentiate from the core label.
Urbanwear stores, on the other hand, need to step their game up. There is a reason that stores like Dr. Jay’s continue to do well and mom and pop stores, like the one I was in yesterday, close every single month. It is a tough business to be in, and you have to decide just how much of the fashion staples you carry, and how many trendy items you carry, and at what price points.