Menswear Shoppers Savvier as Alexander Wang x H&M Collection Sells out in Minutes Globally.
If you thought the shuffles and scrambling that existed during sample sales were the provenance of women’s shopping alone you’re in the wrong. Men showed how eager they were when it came to shoving through people, stuffing shopping bags with 2 swift moves all in less than 2 seconds. This in turn led to more than a 70% sell through for the high street retailer in the first few minutes making the Alexander Wang X H&M collection the fastest selling its collaboration history.
The Early birds started queuing as early as 9pm, a day before the launch and the first 50 were rewarded with backpacks not included in the collection. The queuing system in place for women where shoppers were divided into time slots identified with different coloured wristbands was non-existent for menswear, which in hindsight the company should have implemented. The menswear sections in most of the stores saw more footfalls and frenzied pace as opposed to the women.
Staff and security at the H&M London Flagship store on Regent Street all confirm that most of the pieces in menswear sold out in less than 20 minutes. The key items that you were most likely to take a blow for were the hooded jacket in scuba fabric £39.99, Scuba sweatshirt £34.99 and the Down Jacket made with reflective fabric £249. These items flew off faster than staff could restock and 20 minutes after items started selling word spread to the people still on the queue outside that almost everything was sold out.
Upon questioning a shopper carrying about 5 shopping bags, he mentioned that you were allowed to buy 2 items of clothing of each design so long as you got 2 different sizes of them. This probably explains why everything was cleared off the store with a high trickle onto eBay where resellers tripled the prices on some of the items.
This by far – at least for the menswear bit of H&M’s 10 year collaboration history – the most successful in terms of marketing. Three and a half hours later when the shops were opened to all customers, there was little or no sign that the pieces from the collaboration was sold on the menswear floors of the H&M Flagship store and the Oxford street store as shelves with other merchandise had replaced what was the floor space for the collaboration albeit for a few hours. Most stores still had bits of women’s left, again proving how savvy men have become when it comes to shopping and how important the male customer is to fashion.
Words: Terence Sambo
