Wal-Mart just announced the very talented Norma Kamali is going to be designing for the mass retailer. Under the long term licensing deal brokered by Cherokee Inc., Kamali will establish a lifestyle brand that will encompass women’s wear, children’s clothing, accessories, footwear and home products reports Women’s Wear Daily. Price points will be suitable for the “Wal-Mart customer” meaning, cheap.
OK, the reason WHY Wal-Mart has consistently reported high sales numbers has to do with the fact that they know their customer!! These people aren’t going to Wal-Mart to buy designer duds, they are going to Wal-Mart to buy pasta, pasta sauce and gas!! This is going to be a disaster…
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski
I beg to differ with you. A professionally designed yet affordable apparel and accessories collection available at W*M will dramatically improve the offering at the mass retailer known for EDLP. Past efforts failed because W*M simply copied trendy fashion and slapped its own label on it. The NK deal will insure that a designer (more or less relevant) will influence the product design while leveraging W*M capillary distribution and access to 100M pairs of feet a week. It’s abundantly clear that NK isn’t a top notch brand and has chosen to ‘cash out’ favoring QUANTITY over QUALITY of distribution but it is nonetheless a big WIN for the middle income families who need to stretch every dollar, for those who aspire to wear branded products but cannot always afford to, and for those who, like me, hunt for value irrespective of venue. The NK/W*M experiment may well turn out to be a bad idea and a financial disaster but no matter how poorly it goes it will not kill W*M and it will bring new and diversified product offering to the masses. A win for the consumer (and Norma Kamali’s bank account, naturally).