Globaltrade.net - "Polish fashion sector still brand crazy.."

The Polish fashion wear industry, like most other retail sectors, has significantly transformed over the past two decades, partially down to the country's better economic performances, and expectations from shoppers.

The boom of the 1990s, when local and international brands charted the Eastern European markets, ended up in market consolidation. Currently, global companies and regional leaders dominate the Polish scene. Competition has since stiffened, consumers have become choosy and the Eurozone crisis has destabilised major international players. Also, investment in the fashion business has become more risky, costly and requiring long-term calculation. Branding is more important than ever.

Companies are either putting their money into brand building or are acquiring brands that are already recognised. The Polish fashion market has opened up to high-end international brands, which has caused major realignments.

Brand building

Polish brothers Arkadiusz and Krzysztof Bajolek, Jan Pilch and Adam Skrzypek have been particularly successful as brand builders. The Bajoleks and Jan Pilch successfully launched chain stores for fashion-conscious teenagers under the Mohito and House brands. They sold their company for around Euros100 million to LPP in 2008, when the chains jointly comprised 260 stores in Poland and 100 abroad. Later, instead of launching a new chain they decided to invest in existent ones because chains run under brands were losing popularity among Polish consumers. So, they created Bytom, Gino Rossi and Simple Creative Products (SCP).
The programme to develop brands as the European economic crisis hit was difficult, but turned out successfully in all but one case.
Bytom gained recognition as a conservative, high-end, men's wear brand. The fashion wear brand, SCP, too, won youth appreciation and soon became the pillar of the Gino Rossi group. Investor Pilch seems to recognise the limitations of the Gino Rossi brand and his strategy is to move it eastwards to Ukraine and Belarus where global luxury brands are less available.


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e-shop closed ?

Is it possible? It turns out that yes!   

 In order to verify 24/7 e-shop availability Megapanel and PBI decided to monitor 100 biggest e-stores. Events pages were considered a failure after they have been recorded for at least 3 of the 4 monitoring stations. The results were quite surprising. During the execution of a test of four weeks in late August and September 2012 it was detected a total of over 25 thousand error availability. Worst advised shop did not work for 10 % of the analyzed time (67 hours! ) , And only 14 % of stores not reported during the period of any failure.

to read more suprising news read free raport (in Polish)

The clothing and footwear retail market in the CE region is likely to be worth more than €14bn in 2014

 "The clothing and footwear retail market in the CE region is likely to be worth more than €14bn in 2014"

We estimate that in 2011 the fashion market in the six Central European (CE) countries was worth almost €13bn, only 1% more than the previous year when expressed in local currencies, but slightly less in euro. Half of this was generated in Poland. The ten largest companies accounted for 28% of the market in the CE region, according to our calculations. The latest PMR report “Clothing and footwear retail market in Central Europe 2012. Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Market analysis and development forecasts for 2012-2014” identified Inditex as a leader on the clothing and footwear market in the region.

The clothing and footwear market in Central Europe developed, albeit at a sluggish pace, between 2010 and 2012. All of the fashion markets in the CE region, with the exception of Poland, have observed figures lower than those achieved in the record year of 2008. Positive growth did not return to all of these markets last year, and some are expected to decline in terms of value this year. However, the medium-term outlook seems less bleak. Our forecasts suggest that there should be a modest improvement on the market in Central Europe over the next two years."

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SOLAR - successful polish fashion brand which avoid flashlights

About successful Polish fashion brand - Solar

by Iwona Kokoszka, Forbes

"Fashion is mostly a marketing phenomenon, the bigger surprise may be the fact that the most profitable in this business in Poland is a company whose brand avoids runaways, red carpets and media buzz. It is called Solar, is from Poznan and is on the stock exchange

More than one third of global brands is already in Poland
- We are working on the improvement of our products, do not focus on the rivalry with foregin competitors - explains one of Solar brand owners."

Read whole article (in Polish)