Backlash For Untimely Brands

With the headlines being heavily satirised by coronavirus, we are hearing every day how the pandemic is affecting the people of the world’s health and wellbeing, and then the second worry is how it’s effecting businesses and the economy.

Due to all physical retail now being closed and put on hold for the foreseeable future, the only way we are able to shop for clothes, is online. Unless you enjoy buying your clothes from George at Asda that is!

Over the years, we have seen the dramatic growth of online shopping and this is due to keep on growing for years to come. It has been predicted that the sales in online shopping; as a whole, not just for clothing, will increase by 7.8% each year from 2017 to 2023, in the US. Thinking about this, issues will definitely continue to incur for the physical retail industry.

If we think about the current issue the world is facing, is it a similar situation. But instead of the physical retail market decreasing gradually, it’s like it has just disappeared one day and never to be seen again. Of course, in this COVID world we are living in, retail will come back, but when, how and the change it will see cannot be answered as yet.

With everything now being online until further instruction, shops like PrettyLittleThing, ASOS and Missguided are flourishing more than ever. Even high street stores that are shoppable online are able to still receive sales.

This got me thinking about different stores and how they’ve been coping with this rapid change. I thought about Primark after seeing a tweet stating that they’d gone from making £650 million in one month to making £0. No money at all.

Most high street stores moved with the demand of the consumer; Primark never did this. We all know that Primark isn’t shoppable online. They made enough profit from being so cheap, being able to open large stores, having high enough footfall and selling enough stock, in stores, to not have to go online. Of course, this is clearly going against what the consumer wants. I’ve seen so many tweets over the years saying, “why can’t Primark just be online” or “Primark never has my size they need to make an online website.” People want the clothes, but they want to be able to shop them in the way they shop at all their other favourite high street stores.

Of course, Primark thought they could rely on their footfall and amazing sales to keep the business going as well as it was, they never predicted having to deal with what would happen if there’s a global pandemic. Because, who did?!

This then got me thinking, due to them not keeping up with the demands of the modern consumer and ‘keeping up with the times’ this has resulted in the company drawing a massive loss which could then result in the company having to change the way they work when things do go back to normal.

Maybe they will consider putting some of their stock online in the future or having some way of making sure their sales wouldn’t plummet if something like this were to happen again.