Gap to close all 81 stores in UK and Ireland
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> How did your time at The Gap shape your thinking about what you do at Herman Miller?
> I interviewed a guy who became my head of digital. He had worked in retail, and he said, “Do you know what excites me most about coming to this industry? I feel like I’m going from making landfill to making heirlooms.”
The fashion industry is the landfill industry.
Unfortunately the people (mostly women) who drive this are addicted to the churn of clothes. It's not about a basic need to be warm and protected. It's about maintaining a constant source of novelty by buying new clothes almost every week. In my experience, half of the clothes they buy don't fit and/or they don't like them when they get them home.
When I was little my mum used to buy most our clothes second hand from car boot sales and the like. I can't believe people buy brand new children's clothes. You know they are going to grow out of them. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, second-hand clothes have been largely stigmatised and many people won't even consider them. I have recently seen apps which specialise in second-hand clothes. This would be great but I think it's going to take a lot to convince people not to think of clothes and consumables.
What does that even mean? Does the water just disappear?
Instead, cattle adapted to grazing in those arid areas could be a better and more environmentally friendly use of the land.
Presumably you've tried UniQlo too?
I've tried UniQlo but so far have been unable to find an item I want to buy in there. I seem to recall on a recent visit that their winter coats have goose down, which I avoid.
Isn't that "A Thing" with Japanese companies? :)
Well, as long as their retail stores don't all disappear, I'm ok - I don't much like shopping for stuff like thay sell online.
But that is changing, my guess is that UK is lower down on the list for those upgrade. I mean those online improvement only started with Japan and China in the last few years.
Uniqlo is the only store that hasn't yet repeated this mistake.
why?
1) Sticking Gap on everything. That kind-of logo/advertisement in huge lettering is great on the way up, but not on the way down. Superdry take note. You could not pay me to wear either.
2) Pricing and price point. It's frankly been bizarre for years. Overpriced when compared to new competitors, such as Uniqlo. Not quite good enough to compete with other stores, such as Levi's or more designer brands. Its position in the market felt awkward in recent times.
I still buy chinos and plain t-shirts from Gap. No logo and so nobody knows. Despite their crazy vanity sizing, they still offer a range of sizes unlike Uniqlo, which only offers tailoring in-store at present in the UK.
Tommy Hilfiger and Guess are doing the same and it's obnoxious.
People want to show off their brands, and I'm ok with that, but as a nerdy guy who has never had style as a priority (though I'm quite militant about the cut of one's suit being just right), it just isn't me, so that's always ruled out GAP for me in the past.
If a brand splashes their name across the clothes they sell, I'll avoid them, but this limits options a lot of the time.
When it comes to Superdry, I like a lot of their clothing and own a few pieces of it, but I often choose not to wear many pieces because of the branding. I have some really nice jumpers from them which have a little label on the arm, which I find unnecessary. For work I'm more casually dressed than outside of work so I keep the Superdry branded stuff purely for work.
A couple of years ago I found Uniqlo, it was basically perfection, they have a line of chino type trousers I like the fit of, and a T-shirt I like the cut of, as well as some light jumpers, no branding or markings whatsoever, so I bought about ~20 of each in various colours (some of which go unworn to this day because they were a little too wild), and then a year or so later bought another ~10-15 of each.
EDIT: Trying to work on making my writing/comments less bullet pointed and monotonous so restructured a bit.
Uniqlo seem fairly on the ball. The single length trouser size is very astute, although problematic for me as I live outside of London. Basically, I don't bother to buy trousers from them as they will never fit. T-shirts and sweatshirts are fine though!
I first came across Uniqlo when I was in Japan, and their "shove everything in this box and close the door to scan your items into the self-service checkout" impressed me (as an Engineer, I enjoy these things). They recently, in the past year or two, caught up here in the UK and the store I visit has them now.
Also I find their face masks to be the best fitting and most comfortable out of the many, many brands I've tried.
Chinos are a brand all of their own, just not a trademarked brand. They're usually (if they're pastel coloured) relatively conservative, business casual, more formal than jeans but less formal than a suit. A bit middle-aged, or something you'd expect to see a businessman in on the weekend. You can't really escape branding when you appear in public. Even if you showed up naked, it would be a brand.
I think there's a decent listing in https://www.upcounsel.com/trademark-vs-brand on the elements of brand:
Identity
Image
Personality
Character
Culture
Essence
Reputation
As a child my parents dressed me in corduroys, as a teen I refused to wear blue jeans, always wore casual shirts.
School uniform was a blazer, sixth form was a suit. Even amongst a school full of suits my English teacher accused me of being "debonair" and "dapper", University was dark jeans, t-shirts, hoodies.
The early years of my career as a Software Engineer I wore shirt/tie, but got sick of standing out for being a smartly dressed software engineer and switched to chinos, converse and hoodies.
Since becoming a parent I maintain chinos, boots, t-shirt, jumper, wool coat out of work, and hoodies, chinos, converse, t-shirt for work.
Outside of Converse I've never worn trainers (Reebok, Nike, Adidas etc) in public unless I'm running.
I heard an interview with Angela Leadsom that it is very difficult to take people off furlough. Many people found another job while also getting furlough pay and are resisting going back to work. Under UK labour laws the employer needs to accommodate employee needs with regards to health and safety. So if an employee says they would come off furlough but feel unsafe about the working environment, it is hard to resolve that.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116638/uk-number-of-peo...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/labor-force-tota...
A serious government would just end furlough. Businesses had more than a year to adapt their working conditions to be safe, while also having their wage bill paid by the taxpayer. It's time for them to take their responsibilities seriously.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/coronavirus-job-ret...
This BBC article says there's currently 1.5m still on furlough:
Back when I was young, we'd loose a finger or three on occasional workshift and never complained! Just plaster over them and get back to work!
That's after walking 13 miles to the factory, in a blizzard, uphill, both ways!
Having said that, I'm sure everyone has a story of how a cheaply priced item of clothing turned out to be of better quality and durability than a equalivent expensive item.
(Aside: In the UK, I'd place clothing retailers like John Lewis and Marks & Spencer in the mid-price to high-price category.)
Those do typically have shit quality at bargain prices, but as soon as you pay more than, let's say 10 EUR for a simple shirt, the quality is quite good (certainly better than C&A or most branded merch).
That might be an avenue worth investigating for you as well!
Please mind what I said above though - I've trialed some <10 CHF shirts that completely warped and fell apart after a few washes, so don't expect too much for too little.
I can recommend the "B&C Mens V-Neck T-Shirt TRIBLEND" for V-neck shirts and the "Fruit of the Loom Mens Poloshirt PREMIUM" for polos.
Obviously, YMMV.
There's plenty of the latter out there if you're looking for it[0].
But there's two separate approaches for people who hate that markup: lowering the markup or increasing the production cost. Given current industry standards, I think the second approach is reasonable. It's also very easy to do, if you can afford to.
Clothes should be like many other things: cost more, have better quality, longer lifespans and have less negative impact on those who produce them and the environment where they are produced & recycled.
Maybe that's... not the usual type of negotiation, but making them laugh also seems to work. Problem being I got the giggles myself.
An average wage for a factory worker in Bangladesh seems about $0.33 USD; in Cambodia it's $0.85 USD; other countries are somewhere in between.
I don't know how many clothes a single worker can make, but let's be extremely conservative and say it's two pieces of clothing per 10-hour workday. So that's between $1.65 an $4.25 in wages for a single piece of clothing. I suspect it's actually much much less (but can't find any resources on this at a moment's notice). Even this amount is ... not that much. A 50% or even 100% increase would make a huge difference in people's lives, while having a fairly minor impact on this end.
I grew up fairly poor and for the first 25 years or so I basically never had enough money for anything, so I understand that "a few € more or less, who even notices?-attitude that someone more well-off/middle-class might say is actually not so easy. I know from experience that those "few euro" actually can be quite significant. This is one reason Primark is so popular in the first place.
But still: the difference is stark, and there is little doubt in my mind what is clearly The Right Thing™ to do is here.
I understand that companies want to keep costs down, and that's perfectly reasonably, but this is just ridiculous and extreme. In many cases workers barely have enough money to buy food. And for what? So it's €1 or €2 cheaper? I find it so hard to believe that, as I said in the first line, I must not understand the economics of this somehow. Or maybe I do and people involved in this are just ... ugh...
You’re just observing how capitalism works. It’s why some of us would prefer rationally and democratically planned production motivated by needs.
Actually, recently I've been thinking that our legalistic attitude towards a lot of these problems is actually the core issue. "It's legal so therefore we can do it". Well, okay, but that doesn't mean it's ethical. On the other hand we also don't want a government that can make arbitrary decisions on what is or isn't "ethical", but I do think a lot of problems could be solved if we would just focus more on what "the right thing" would be rather on that what is legal by the letter of the law. This is a thought I only had the other day and haven't fully fleshed out my thoughts on this yet though.
What you're describing sounds like "democratic communism", and that didn't really work out especially well in the past. A lot of communist countries started out with democratic aspirations; "any country with the word democratic in the name isn't democratic" is an old joke, but it's also true.
Even if we manage to avoid the "tyrant problem" we're still left with a central planning that may not necessarily make the best decisions, and I'm not so confident that any democratic controls we put in place would correct for that. A significant amount of China's problems in the 50s-70s for example weren't out of sheer tyrannical malice like in Stalinist Russia, but just gross incompetence of the leadership. Not a "democratically planned" economy, granted, but still an important lesson to heed IMHO: when a centrally planned economy screw up the effects can be disastrous.
A lot of what is commonly believed about socialist countries is in fact propaganda by capitalists. Most of the actual problems were and are caused by being under constant siege by capitalist countries.
Socialism is the process of the working class gaining state power and overthrowing the capitalist class. There will still be contradictions and problems, but with planning we at least have a chance to solve them. Leaving it up to markets or the dictatorship of a few capitalists is admitting defeat from the start.
The way I'm reading this is that the problems in Stalin Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North-Korea, etc. was/is caused by capitalist countries. And while these were "the worst of it", the practical implementations in many other countries wasn't exactly great either. I don't know of a single example where it worked well, and that's not for lack of trying.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant. It would help being a bit more concrete.
The USSR was actually very successful, especially during Stalin’s time. It went from a semi-feudal country to defeating the Nazis and into space. Eventually it lost the Cold War to the capitalist countries, through infiltration and direct aggression.
All of Eastern Europe was similarly quite successful compared to the conditions from which each country started. Merely ending the periodic environmental famines through industrialisation and collectivisation was a remarkable achievement. My grandparents and parents describe astonishing change in very few years and better conditions overall than today.
China started from an even less developed stage and industrialised very quickly. The material condition of most workers improved greatly, despite the limits imposed by capitalist countries. Later on, other concessions were made so capitalists would no longer block trade and development. And yet the working class is still in control of the state, as we’ve seen during COVID when the state took more direct control of the economy to save lives at the expense of profits.
The DPRK was bombed to an incredible degree by the US, which is still officially at war with it. Despite an almost complete blockade and even losing its socialist trading partners, it persists and to a small extent prospers. Cuba is in a similar position, doing remarkably well despite capitalist aggression.
Vietnam also developed remarkably quickly, despite occupation and a devastating war. Like China, it made concessions to capitalists in order to develop, while workers retain state power as a class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
Curious definition of "success".
Guess that must all be "propaganda" too.
You could also talk to older people in Eastern Europe like I have, their experience doesn’t match such exaggerations.
That’s...true, but not in the way you seem to intend it. The focus on regimes espousing Leninism and its descendants to typify “socialist countries” as opposed to those following what Marx described (and objected to, but Marx doesn't encompass socialism any more than Lenin does) as “bourgeois socialism” and “democratic socialism” is a pretty big problem, especially when dismissing Western socialist movements, which are mostly in those categories, not Leninism or its derivatives.
Lenin expanded on Marx, but did not reject his work.
The only keyword I was able to find regarding cotton fabric quality was "ring-spun" vs "open-end" cotton.
The brand in question is Cropp (of Polish LPP, which makes most T-shirts in Bangladesh), but this degradation seems to be industry-wide. Even buying T-shirts from higher positioned brands doesn't make a difference. They're all crap quality.
In India, GAP apparently uses their retail stores in an omnichannel strategy to "warehouse" products closer to customers in an attempt to provide next-day delivery. [1]
[1] https://yourstory.com/2021/06/fashion-brands-omnichannel-fli... (paywalled, use reader-mode)
I think this is more about last-mile fulfillment.
I believe this is the eventual move a lot of brick and mortar stores are going to make to compete with Amazon. I've been told by a Best Buy manager their end goal is to turn a majority of their stores into fulfilment centers.