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Today we cannot just separate online and offline... wise words by Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba, who is eyeing a $2.6bn deal to take the Chinese "Intime Retail Group" department store chain private. Source: FT.com This follows several offline moves by a number of "tradtitionally online" companies including Amazon, Made.com, Boohoo, Zalando, Farfetch and others. The main advantage moving from online to offline is the corporate culture of accepting and managing with multi-year losses to build a better business. Most offline businesses with online add-ons have a culture of carefully weighted KPI's on which bonuses and other advantages are...

H&M today finally announced the name and type of new brand they are launching. This ends a period of gossiping among many media outlets about the new brand. ARKET is Swedish for a sheet of paper, normally used when talking about high-quality paper. The first outlet will open in London with others following in Brussels, Copenhagen and Munich. It will be a higher priced product building on H&M's successes with Cos & Other Stories. Source: FT.com

Posted by Thomas Andersson, March 7, 2017. When looking at the UK fashion e-commerce landscape (excluding multi-channel retailers) it is interesting to note that the marketplace is divided by latitude as well as by consumer preferences. The value fashion sector led by Boohoo.com is primarily based in North England around Manchester whereas the mid-market fashion sector is spread out in middle-England. All of the luxury and high-end fashion e-commerce companies are based in London. More 'experimental' fashion e-commerce companies also tend to gravitate towards London, possibly due to its networking opportunities and existing start-up infrastructure. What can be learned from...

We have recently written on Farfetch and their plans to IPO in 2018 and were about to start writing on IPO plans for Liberty, acquired by BlueGem Capital in 2010, when we thought - yes, why not? They are so different but operate in the same sector! So we have thought and thought about this, and the more we think, the more it makes perfect sense. However, will Farfetch and Liberty staff think the same? More importantly, what will investors think? Our opinion is that the merged entity will be far better placed to push a valuation in excess of...

 Thomas Anderssontom@styleintelligence.com Most things are more complex than we think they are. It just struck me that Trump's fight with companies that open up factories overseas or outside the US is just this - more complex. If you add a tax on jobs that are moved outside of the US should there not also be a tax on machines and robots that are replacing US labour inside the US? So... the question is perhaps how this will impact the "Made in China" vs "Made in the US" labels? Or, how are robotics manufacturers setting themselves up for a possible fight...