A Better Fit for Online Fashions
Web sites that sell clothing are all dressed up this holiday season, and they have someplace to go: the bank.
Once relegated to hand-me-down status while books and electronics thrived, the apparel category is now second only to computer hardware in online sales.
“Last year it was starting to do well, but this season apparel is really hot,” said Michele David Adams of market research firm ComScore Networks Inc.
Though analysts cite numerous reasons why clothing is finally coming into its own online, Kate Delhagen of Forrester Research says it comes down to one main factor.
“This is the first year in which the number of women purchasing online exceeds the number of men, and women are the primary apparel buyers,” she said.
According to a study this year funded by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 58% of online shoppers are women.
“For years, men dominated the online shopping universe,” the study said. “That made sense because men were more likely to be early adopters of the Internet.”
But women have helped sites from L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer and other apparel retailers shoot past those for books, toys and even consumer electronics, racking up $1.29 billion in online sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 13, according to a ComScore survey. That’s not far behind computer sales, the top online consumer goods category, with $1.32 billion in business for the same period.
The biggest online retailer of all, Amazon.com Inc., entered the fray last month with its hugely ambitious apparel store featuring clothing from Gap, Lands’ End, Liz Claiborne and other well-known brands.
“In terms of the number of items sold in the first 30 days, it’s off to the fastest start ever for an Amazon store,” spokesman Bill Curry said. He declined to disclose any sales figures, however, and said the Seattle company is not planning to break out apparel when announcing quarterly results next month.
Delhagen suggested that Amazon might be persuaded otherwise. “They say they are doing well with apparel, but analysts are going to want to have figures to substantiate that,” she said.
Clothing sites didn’t catch on simply because women took to the Internet. Unlike with books, which are relatively easy to present online, there were painful lessons to be learned before apparel sales could take off.
“We launched our site on July 17, 1995,” said Anna Schryver, e-marketing manager at Dodgeville, Wis.-based Lands’ End Inc., the leader in online apparel sales. “In the first month we had $160 in sales, and we were thrilled.”
By last year, online sales for the company had grown to $327 million, and they were up another 45% in the first half of 2002 compared with the same period in 2001. Online sales account for about a quarter of the business of Lands’ End, which was founded in 1963 as a mail-order company. It was purchased recently by Sears, Roebuck & Co.
The first edition of the Lands’ End Web site included only 100 clothing items. The rest of the site featured lengthy essays about the company and its products. There was even a “Dateline Dodgeville” section with local news about the town, including the tractor auction firm next to Lands’ End headquarters.
“It took us a little while to figure out that people were not much interested,” Schryver said. Over time the company dumped much of the text, added detail shots of the clothes and added Web-savvy tools such as a virtual model that customers can manipulate to approximate their body shape and use to try on clothes. The site now features about 1,000 items.
Dodgeville recently got its second traffic light, but you won’t read about it on the Web. “We learned our lesson,” Schryver said.
“I love to curl up in bed and read a catalog. No one wants to do that with a computer.”
