Reckoning With Reopening the Economy

The Future of Travel Retail [View on Web]( [Add to contacts]( [New reader? Subscribe]( [BoF]( THE DAILY DIGEST ADVERTISEMENT [White Paper 3 CNL 27Apr20]( FROM THE EDITOR Dear BoF Community, In the midst of the worst economic environment that the modern fashion industry has ever faced, most executives have now shifted their focus from pure crisis management to solving problems new and old. First there’s the question of the fashion calendar and the anachronistic system of pre-collections and main collections, designed for the northern hemisphere even though so many new fashion customers are in the Global South. In our BoF Professional 'This Week in Fashion' briefing, Vikram Alexei Kansara explains [why traditional fashion seasons are obsolete](.  Another question on everyone's minds is [what stores will look like when this is all over.]( This week, Brian Baskin got a peek inside post pandemic fashion retail, featuring luxury drive throughs, shopping by appointment only and selling beauty without testers. But as Brian notes, many retailers needed just hours to close their stores when the lockdowns began. Reopening retail, and winning back customers, could take months more. It's going to be even more challenging to get travel-related retail up and running again. Forty percent of luxury consumption is linked to travel, quite possibly the only industry hit harder than fashion during the crisis. And as travel is inextricably linked with fashion retail, especially for luxury products purchased by travelling Chinese customers who made 166 million trips abroad last year, accounting for 50 percent of their consumption, airport retail has been hit particularly hard What will travel retail be like in a post-pandemic airport when there are more security checks and health checks than ever before? And is fashion week in September even a possibility? To get the lowdown, I [spoke with my friend Rafat Ali, founder and chief executive of Skift]( which is kind of like BoF for the global travel industry. Bottom line is that he sees no way for fashion shows or any events to happen before the end of the year, and travel will take many years to get back to 2019 levels. So, it seems, we're in this crisis for the long haul. There is no magic cure. And though some experts are touting the potential for a vaccine as early as September, pointing to [groundbreaking progress at Oxford University where scientists started working on a coronavirus vaccine in January]( it will still take years to inoculate a global population of 7.5 billion people. We are going to have to get used to living with the virus for some time yet. Imran Amed, Editor in Chief THE BOF PODCAST [Podcasts]( [The BoF Podcast: Rafat Ali on the Month the World Stopped Travelling]( BY BoF Team [In the latest special edition of the BoF Podcast, Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the travel news site Skift, talks to BoF Editor-in-Chief Imran Amed about the tourism standstill following the outbreak of Covid-19 and its impact on travel retail.]( WHAT I'VE BEEN READING [This Week in Fashion]( [Why Fashion 'Seasons' Are Obsolete]( BY BoF Team [This week, Saint Laurent said it would skip Paris Fashion Week and set its own schedule for showing collections for the rest of the year, raising deeper questions about following universal fashion seasons in a global market.]( To access this article, become a BoF Professional Member [JOIN]( [Intelligence]( [What Will Stores Look Like When They Reopen?]( BY Brian Baskin [From luxury drive-throughs to sanitised garments, retail is going to be drastically different from now on.]( To access this article, become a BoF Professional Member [JOIN]( [Intelligence]( [The State of the Direct-to-Consumer Market]( BY Cathaleen Chen [Online brands were facing profitability challenges before the crisis struck. Now, they must confront dramatically lower valuations and the possibility of being sold in distress — or worse.]( To access this article, become a BoF Professional Member [JOIN]( [Intelligence]( [How Covid-19 Changed the Resale Market]( BY Chavie Lieber [Secondhand fashion platforms like Poshmark, Depop and Thredup are seeing high demand during the pandemic. But will it last?]( To access this article, become a BoF Professional Member [JOIN]( [Intelligence]( [When Pandemic Marketing Goes Too Far: How to Avoid #COVIDwashing]( BY Alexandra Mondalek [Sentimental commercials about how we’re all in this together are beginning to fall flat. There are other ways to reach consumers.]( To access this article, become a BoF Professional Member [JOIN]( [IN OTHER NEWS]( [Gap Inc. 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