Guanping Yan

About Guanping Yan

Posts by Guanping Yan:

Purpose

⋅

The mention of “purpose” is not unfamiliar to everyone, because almost everything people do needs a “purpose” behind the progress of things, and the steps planned are made with a purpose in mind. For Generation Z, who live in a world where everything is changing rapidly, they seem to have an unprecedented desire to achieve goals, which makes people further think about what the purpose of the fashion industry needs, and how brands should better communicate the brand concept. （Dr. Nina Van Volkinburg, UAL lecture, Oct 23 Monday）

When people need to achieve something, they need to have an end goal to guide them to achieve their goal. So for the brand is even more so, its ultimate purpose must be to attract more customers to generate purchasing power. The external image of the brand is the key to the brand appeal, which includes the brand concept, core values and other conceptual factors. To clarify the brand mission and vision, the brand itself can better recruit employees who fit the concept, improve the cohesion of employees, give the brand more guiding role, and efficiently achieve the work goal. In terms of work content, it is helpful to develop brand strategies that are more suitable for the brand itself. Unique brand ideas are easier to attract the masses and will not be submerged in the huge brand ocean. （Hollie Arnett，2022, said ‘6 reasons why you need a vision, mission, and values for your brand’）

In Attest’s data survey on consumer profiling, it is shown in an article that Generation Z’s emphasis on product service quality and cost performance is very high at about 30%, ranking in the top two. （Attest（2021），How brands can win trust of Gen Z, Available at: https://dashboard.askattest.com/survey/SWQ4WFEVMQDSXN%5C/results/overview

Accessed: 29 October 2023）Gen Z will be more concerned about affordability, brand value, whether the brand itself has a stronger management of objectives and other very practical issues when buying products, from this point of view they prefer brands to be more sincere to customers. In addition, the biggest feature of Generation z is to be familiar with the Internet, so brands should make full use of this feature, find ways to increase exposure and possibilities in multimedia social networking, and innovate in ways and methods, so as to meet the brand’s purpose and the pursuit of personalization of Generation Z. （Attest（2021），How brands can win trust of Gen Z, Available at: https://www.askattest.com/blog/attest-investigates/how-brands-can-win-the-trust-of-gen-z  Accessed: 29 October 2023）

Liked Liked
No Comments

Profit

⋅

Profit, as a part of sustainability, it means any behavior to realize benefits should be based on the damage to resources and the environment. So that at the same time, economic growth needs to shoulder related social responsibilities. In order to achieve long-term economic gains, it is necessary to consider sustainable ways and methods to explore a variety of profit possibilities. （Coolset, 2023）

When it comes to revenue, the size of the fashion industry should be considered. As can be seen from the chart, from 2021-2023 February, the market size value of the fast fashion industry increased to $122.98 billion（Statista, Feb 2023）, the speed is still considerable. Fast fashion is a large part of the fashion industry, and its growth is enough to see the rapid growth of the fashion industry as a whole. According to the chart 2, except for the trough period in 2020, the global market size remained at about $1.5 billion in other times, and achieved a new stage of growth in 2023（Sustainable Fashion Worldwide 2023, P3）. In general, the global fashion market has shown a new growth trend after the epidemic, which makes people have a new wait-and-see attitude towards the fashion industry and a more positive development attitude.

（Statista, Feb 2023）
(Sustainable Fashion Worldwide 2023, P3）

The network of fashion industry makes a significant role in making profit for the industry, the cooperation between different departments has created the smooth development of the industry. For example，the manufacturing industry provides the most suitable cost solutions for the retail industry to seek profit margins to achieve the greatest possible profit. In addition, the cooperation between fashion design and Marketing Department is also very important. The Marketing Department needs to understand the design concept of the product to better publicize it and gain more purchasing power and potential users. In order to achieve sustainable economic development, the design and materials production sector will not continue to work on more environmentally and socially beneficial materials research and development.（Fashion Industry,John S.Major, Oct 6 2023 https://www.britannica.com/art/fashion-industry）

Even though the industry is growing, the whole economic market is still unstable. So it’s good to find a way to stand on their feet as much as possible. In order to better stabilize existing consumers and further attract potential targets, brands should analyze consumer structure and psychology, combine their own advantages and market trends, create new design directions and concepts, create their own uniqueness and maintain it, so as to have both recognition and new development ideas, the brand can be more durable survival.

In fact, creativity or art is not at odds with business. A good combination can achieve each other and can also make art more widely known and increase the national popularity of fashion. If a creative director of a brand and want to better link the two, he/she needs to have a rich accumulation of artistic knowledge, as well as a good market combination ability and business operation awareness, so that better guidance can be made for product design more suitable for different types of consumers.

Liked Liked
No Comments

People in sustainability

⋅

People as one of the main parts of the world, naturally take an important role in the sustainability. Almost every stage，people from all over the world are enrolled, however due to the diversity, it’s important for people to learn about tolerating，accepting all kinds of situation like different culture, races，etc. In the fashion industry, from practitioners to customers, people should improve themselves and try their best to achieve equal treatment, eliminate discrimination, let people get along better, and let culture better integration. So that people would be more willing to engaged into the fashion world.

As a buyer in fashion field, one of the most significant step is to learn about who are the target costumers? Nowadays, Gen Z is a major force in the consumer base, it contains people from 1996 to 2010（Mc Kenny & Company，2023）, they almost grew up with the digital age, and with the occurrence of various major events, perhaps because of this, they rely more on internet to get different kinds of information like fashion trend. Even though they live in a rapid development age, it doesn’t mean there is no problem happen today, they also face them such as climate change, racial problem and some kind of diseases, so that they pay more attention to these aspects when they are shopping or choosing a brand.In conclusion, if a brand wants to attract Gen Z, firstly to learn about their values on fashion, thinking if their brand concept is accord with their value and try to find a breakthrough, or combine with some new technology like AI or Naked eye 3D, what are unique, to pique their interest.

For example, Rihanna’s brand has shown her attitude to diversity many times. Since 2017, she launched Fenty Beauty which contains most inclusive color range, increasing the color from 40 to 50(Teenage Vogue, 2019), almost every costumer can find suitable color for themselves. Then she published Savage X Fenty in NYFW in 2018(Teenage Vogue, 2019), with black women, fat women, pregnant womento show the diversity of bodies. That’s really an incredible successful case in diversity and what’s costumers really needs.

A successful brand must have effective people skills to train their employees, especially when they face different clients, patience, communication skills and the ability to solve accident conflict  are essential skills that they need to have. Furthermore, in order to welcome more consumers and staff, they need to make their brands more diverse，from the details of production to their employees’ backgrounds. In this way, brands can realize most part of sustainability, as it based on excellent people value.

Liked Liked
No Comments
Planet

Planet

⋅

Planet as an important part of sustainability, it is also home to people, so sustainability by protecting the planet is undoubtedly the most fundamental and important step. Whether the health of the planet is healthy or not, scientists often consider from three aspects: land, air and water. (Lisa Peterson,2019) So as practitioners in the fashion industry, and how can people reduce the impact of fashion production on these three aspects while generating benefits?

Firstly，it’s important to learn about what’s the “circular economy”, in this way, more effective action can be taken to make changes to whole industry. From the picture is that all the seven pillars contain four main parts: Biological, humanities, resource, value. Which are very similar to the pillars of sustainability. In terms of protecting biodiversity, people should not only pay attention to the protection of the organisms themselves, such as less use of animal fur to make fashion products, but also take action to protect their habitats, which is related to the environmental pollution in the production process, such as water quality, air, soil, try our best to reduce the damage to these aspects in the production tools and processes. What’s more, fabric basket over the world really lacks diversity, there are over 68% textile based on oil and except for the 26% cotton fabric，we can only use 11% other fabrics and wools only occupies 1%. （Katarina Rimarcikova，Monday lecture 2023,LCF）In this way, it is not difficult to see that the fashion industry’s consumption of resources and impact on the environment is actually very large, and if people can combine degradable materials, then it will become easier to decompose them. With regard to humanities and value, as people on the planet, but also a part of the fashion industry, from industry leaders to consumers should have a consensus, our action is not only to create high economic value, but also should be a higher degree of ideological civilization products, so that these precious wealth passed down from generation to generation.

The fashion industry should be most relevant to SDGs Goal 12, which is called “RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCUTION”. That means to achieve economic growth and reduce the biological footprint on the basis of changing production and consumption patterns and resource use. At this time, fashion companies should consciously assume the responsibility of balancing economic growth, consumers and environmental sustainability. From the research and development of product materials to the promotion of consumers to buy more sustainable products, production through technology to improve the environmental protection of raw materials. To open up the fashion industry to a certain degree of transparency, so that everyone involved in it can monitor it, generate consensus, and take action to effect change.

Liked Liked
No Comments

My Favorite Brand

⋅

LOEWE, a luxury brand that has been set up over 150 years, it always committed to craftsmanship and tanning techniques. However, there is a big change happened to it, that is Jonathan Anderson’s coming in 2013.

As the magic man joining into the brand, LOEWE seems to have a completely new look based on the traditional culture, started to publish a lot of new products such as Puzzle, Flamenco and so on. Since then, LOEWE showed up its new characters, enjoyable and tasteful.

Liked Liked
No Comments