Introduction: Taking stock of 2024 to move forward
As 2024 draws to a close, brands and retailers are going to be looking forward to 2025. In doing so, they will likely look back at the past year and reflect on some of the main challenges that defined fashion’s year.
The first major challenge was the downturn of the luxury and retail market. The most recent edition of the Bain & Company Luxury Study (released in collaboration with Italian luxury goods association Fondazione Altagamma) suggests that the global personal luxury goods market is likely to dip by 2% by the end of 2024. The study estimates that only a third of luxury brands will leave 2024 with positive growth, down from two-thirds last year.
The next was severe supply chain disruptions due to geopolitical tensions and climate change. One example at this intersection is the crisis in the Red Sea and the low water levels in the Panama Canal, which have caused disruptions on the supply side and particularly affected shipping. The low water levels in the canal are expected to occur more frequently in the coming years due to climate change and reduced rainfall.
And, adding to an already complex picture, there is increasing pressure on the fashion industry as sustainability legislation worldwide tightens – many that will require fashion businesses to rethink their entire approach to product creation, sales, and disposal to ensure compliance.
What brands want to achieve in 2025
In this broader context, brands will also be retrospectively considering their priorities and performance in order to put their best strategies forward for performance improvement. The data from The Interline and MMGNET’s Fashion & Technology in 2025 report reveal that brands have four top priorities as 2024 ends: profitability and margin, forecasting demand, complying with sustainability regulations, and standing out in a competitive fashion market.
Companies are investing heavily in technology to help them achieve these aims. The Interline and MMGNET’s data reveals that 85.71% believe technology will play a role in helping businesses overcome challenges. But they don’t necessarily have the clearest picture of exactly how technology is going to assist them with understanding their place in the market, making the profit they need to, predicting demand, and becoming more sustainable. The same Interline and MMGNET data also tells us that companies want to reduce costs, acquire new customers, and expand into new markets and channels.
Here, there is a clear mix of challenges and opportunities that brands will have to tackle and seize simultaneously. The best way to do this is to use the right kind of technology – preferably the kind that is intelligent and interconnected – which is the foundation of a better fashion future. These are the same two pillars of Industry 4.0, something that Lectra has a long-standing commitment to, particularly in the fashion industry.
Conquering challenges and capturing opportunities
Tackling obstacles and finding new avenues for success at the same time is no easy feat, even for the most powerful brands. But The Interline and MMGNET’s data show that 87.39% of companies believe that technology can empower them to achieve success. Lectra has championed this belief for five decades, partnering with leading fashion companies to create the best possible technology to make sure their partners are able to reach their full potential.
The costs and quality challenge
A foremost challenge that brands and retailers are facing is how to reduce costs while maintaining quality. The past two years have seen interest rates surpassing those before the 2008 financial crisis and steadily rising inflation, which has driven consumer prices higher. This combination has weakened consumer purchasing power, reduced discretionary spending across various categories, and elevated input costs for raw materials, logistics, and other critical needs for brands, retailers, and suppliers.
After analysing the state of the market, Lectra launched its Valia Fashion solution to address these issues directly. This new offering is a digital platform that empowers fashion brands and manufacturers to connect and automate every step of apparel production. The platform was designed by Lectra to manage the entire production workflow – from order to cutting – unifying and unlocking new value from unstructured fashion data.
Thanks to its cloud architecture, artificial intelligence, and an industry-specific data model, with Valia Fashion, the same data is generated, consumed, both upstream and downstream – meaning that brands and their manufacturers can now work in a more agile, more sustainable, and collaborative way. As a plug-and-play system, Valia Fashion provides wide accessibility, supporting both experienced and new users alike.
New customers, markets, and channels
Part of what makes the fashion industry one of the most fascinating industries is that even in times of turbulence, there are still valuable opportunities for businesses to pursue to overcome (or at least mitigate) the difficulties of the moment. These opportunities lie in exploring uncharted territory and paving new ways to connect with current and potential customers.
For brands and retailers, acquiring new customers can help offset stagnant or declining sales in saturated markets, while expanding into new markets and channels can diversify revenue streams, mitigate risks from regional economic fluctuations, and tap into untapped customer bases. Reaching customers via new channels – whether via social media or in the physical world – has the possibility of capturing audiences engaging with fashion in innovative ways. This strategy not only supports growth but also strengthens resilience by broadening a brand’s reach and adapting to changing consumer behaviours.
To support fashion businesses to thrive in adverse market conditions, Lectra developed Neteven: a centralised platform that allows brands and retailers to simultaneously manage multiple fashion marketplaces , anywhere in the world, and is ideally suited for forming successful sales strategies and enabling brands to have a global expansion to reach other countries. By using Neteven, brands and retailers can achieve end-to-end control and maximise visibility of their online channels.
Printemps Group – one of the leaders in retail in the fashion, luxury, beauty, and lifestyle sectors – has found huge value in this particular solution, using it to accelerate the omnichannel strategy for three of its e-commerce brands. Doing so has meant that its customers benefit from the same product offering at the point of sale and online and a unified customer experience, while guaranteeing that the brands distributed via printemps.com retain control of their sales and associated logistics. Primtemps Group has also realised a shorter time-to-market for its products, increased the visibility of those products, and recorded growth in overall sales volume.
Staying ahead of trends, and honing a competitive edge
Staying ahead in fashion in 2025 is going to mean more than simply releasing one collection each season. It requires fine tuning and adjusting strategy in real-time in order to quickly respond to market shifts and lead the way in the market. In 2025, margin pressures and sustainability regulation will place greater emphasis on end-to-end planning excellence.
Knowing this, a broad range of brands – including Jacquemus, Courrèges, Armed Angels, PINKO, IKKS and Be Camaïeu – have chosen to digitalise their market monitoring and competitive analysis by relying on Lectra’s AI-powered market intelligence solution, Retviews. The platform collects and analyses public data from more than 5,000 e-commerce websites worldwide in real time, allowing fashion companies to easily monitor changes in trends and competitor offers, thus empowering them to adapt their retail strategies accordingly.
Alongside spotting gaps and opportunities for price optimisation both locally and internationally, Retviews also facilitates collection assortment optimisation depending on the trends in each global market to help boost sell-through. The platform allows brands to compare market averages and competitor strategies to better understand what’s selling in the market, enabling them to release the right products each season.. In doing so, excess inventory and the opposite challenge, stocks-outs, are avoided.
By using Retviews, Be Camaïeu gained speed and precision in tracking assortments, size ranges and product characteristics and have credited the platform as a valuable tool to increase its overall performance, productivity, and profitability.
For all brands, using these kinds of data-driven insights enables agility and adaptability when it comes to market fluctuations as they arise. It is also an essential tool to facilitate smooth and confident global expansion, and to optimise collection planning to make confident decisions and maintain a market-leading edge.
Improving brand performance
As already noted, the fashion system today is more complex than ever before, and is constantly changing. To succeed, brands must establish a distinct identity, carve out a unique position to enhance visibility, and excel in identifying and retaining their customer base.
To support, Lectra’s Launchmetrics is a cloud-based Brand Performance platform that provides its clients with the software, data, and insights they need to connect strategy with execution. With over a decade of expertise, its Brand Performance Cloud empowers executives to launch campaigns, amplify reach, measure ROI, and benchmark brand performance. This ensures adaptability to shifting consumer demands and long-term competitiveness in a dynamic market. Thanks to their innovative approach to modern measurement, Launchmetrics has unlocked a deeper understanding of the difficult-to-define concept of “brand” by introducing Media Impact Value (MIV). Recognized as the most comprehensive and modern measurement standard in the industry, MIV enables comparisons and insights into which strategies generate the most media impact across print, online, and social channels by reflecting the audience’s perspective.
For Jacquemus, Launchmetrics proved to be the perfect partner in overcoming critical challenges. The brand had experienced several issues related to sample and event management, along with campaign tracking, and sought an optimized process to improve efficiency. Their manual and outdated sample tracking approach, organizing samples in multiple Excel spreadsheets, was not only inefficient but also failed to meet their need for real-time sample location tracking. Moreover, they struggled to optimize their event organization to accommodate greater capacities. The brand was also unable to monitor its PR and media placements, leaving them with no way to compare performance across channels or demonstrate a clear return on investment (ROI) for each campaign.
What was needed was a comprehensive, multi-product solution to address their brand performance needs. After implementing Launchmetrics Samples and Events tools, Jacquemus reduced its sample loss and increased team efficiency—delivering 30% more samples by leveraging Launchmetrics’ cloud-based tracking system. This resulted in more opportunities to participate in fashion shows and events, generating €1.7 million in Media Impact Value (MIV) during the Fall/Winter season of 2021. With Launchmetrics Discover, Jacquemus was able to measure the success of its campaigns with clear ROI metrics, simplifying the identification of the most influential voices driving brand success and streamlining the creation of marketing budgets and strategies.
The outlook for 2025: technology will be essential
Fashion in 2025 will still have plenty of the challenges that the previous year had, and possibly some new ones. However, the same can be said about opportunities.
While technology is already deeply embedded in every aspect of fashion, it will be critical for the fashion businesses to persist in turning its potential into tangible outcomes. Success will hinge on collaborating with partners, using the best in class technology tools, implementing actionable strategies, and continually adjusting these efforts to align with the changing priorities of the fashion industry.
This task is undoubtedly demanding yet equally exciting. Lectra’s technology simplifies the journey by supporting and empowering its fashion industry partners – connecting processes, data, and people while equipping them with the tools they need to take on the challenges and opportunities the new year will bring.
About our partner: With over 40 years of industry experience, Lectra’s powerful software, hardware and services build agility and efficiency into every step of your process, from design to production. Drawing on a rich history of innovation, our fashion-specific solutions have helped over 21,000 retailers, manufacturers and brands worldwide provide the quality, fit and speed their customers demand. For more information visit www.lectra.com
