Anon12/01/25, 05:07No.18603403
luxury department stores (and department stores in general) are dying, covid caused a ton of luxury houses to tighten their control and make wholesale/leased dept exits after chanel decided to and it worked out for them but
this strat actually fucked most houses (see: gucci, dior) so lolthis isnt unique just to luxury though, nike did the same shit by pulling back from footlockers to try and get more direct purchases and it just led to their overall sales dropping enough that the higher margins didnt cover for it, and now theyre back to kissing footlocker's ass (nike is shitting the bed lately for other reasons too but)nevertheless it led to a lot of rarer pieces no longer passing through places like bergdorf/neimans/saks so then it killed a lot of the reason to be loyal to them, you gotta build repertoire with associates at each respective boutique now rather than being able to do it all under one roofif you're normie or with someone that doesnt have certain brand affinities then theyre still cool to just see a lot of stuff all together but anyone with some semblance of preference/taste should go to proprietary brick-and-mortar locations for better selectionif youre a girl the skincare/makeup floors are still worthwhile as a consumer though since theyre predominantly licensed out and thus dont have the gatekeepy tendencies of other product lines