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An "accessible luxury" brand is buying a "high fashion" shoe and accessories brand for £896 million as American mall traffic continues to decline and consumers have gravitated towards either extremely cheap or extremely expensive fashion products:
Many upscale retailers are grappling with plummeting sales and tepid profits. Mall traffic in North America has declined sharply, and deep discounting tactics have resulted in some luxury labels losing much of their luster with core customers.
Shoppers who have traditionally been loyal to the so-called middle market have gravitated toward brands at extremes of the style, and price, spectrum. That has benefited e-commerce giants like Amazon, fast-fashion brands like H&M and Zara, and luxury houses like Gucci.
And it has left companies like Michael Kors — once the runaway leader of the "accessible luxury market" — exposed.
[...] The shoemaker was founded in 1996 by Tamara Mellon, then accessories editor at British Vogue, and the Malaysian cobbler Jimmy Choo. It shot to fame thanks to a slew of celebrity patrons, including Diana, the Princess of Wales, and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who embraced its signature sky-high stilettos and the vampish aesthetic for which it became known.
After three cycles of private equity ownership, it became the first luxury footwear brand to list on a public market in 2014. Prices range from $425 for flat shoes to $1,795 for over-the-knee suede boots, while small clutch handbags start around $700, according to Jimmy Choo's website.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tonyPick on Wednesday July 26 2017, @08:14AM (5 children)
Meanwhile the New Horizons mission sends a space probe to Pluto for a grand total cost of $720 million [iflscience.com]. Oh, and NASA cut out the Pluto Fast Flyby and Kuiper Express (amongst others) because they couldn't get the budget.
But $1.2 Billion on a trendy brand name that sells expensive shoes is somehow seen as sane?
Everything you wanted to know about why the human race is fucked in the above sentences...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:33AM (4 children)
All that money has to end up somewhere. If it takes $30 to make shoes sold for $1,500, you have money going to the government (and NASA), employees, reinvestment in the business which means additional construction work and bla bla bla. The figure includes physical retail locations, som I think it would be hard to argue that a brand selling a lot more volume, like say Nike, isn't worth a billion if not much more. It is entirely sane for a luxury shoe business to be sold for over $1 billion. What might be insane or at least irrational is that customers are buying the luxury products when cheaper options or counterfeits exist. Or you could claim that fashion is irrational and fundtion is everything... but we know that argument won't go far because some people cleverly use fashion as a tool to get what they want.
I think you would like a world where people voluntarily decide to directly fund space missions instead of buying certain luxuries. In some cases universities can fund cubesats and the like with realistic funding targets. Then you get projects like Mars One that have made out of this world promises with little to show for it. Finally, NASA could try its hand at crowdfunding a mission. It would need a very good marketing campaign to raise hundreds of millions of dollars (most cool missions are at least in the $1-2 billion range). Maybe Congress could authorize dollar for dollar matched funds for what NASA can officially crowdfund, up to say, $1 billion a year. All on top of NASA's existing budget.
If you want to criticize something, criticze military spending. You can point to actual wasted money. Wars that didn't need to be fought, money that mysteriously went missing, the number of aircraft carriers, cost overruns well over $100 billion for the F-35 program, etc. And this is all money that the government has already extracted from businesses like Jimmy Choo, and Congress + the President have the power (to the extent that a bipartisan agreement can or needs to be reached) to decide how much of it goes to NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health...
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:23PM (3 children)
A lot of money the government spends it doesn't extract from businesses. It just borrows and 'promises' to pay it back later. Don't worry The Fed is in on it and are going to keep interest rates low for a little while longer. Have fun while it lasts :)
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:52PM (2 children)
I'm still waiting to hear the jew banker screams when someone suggests to Trump that he can just have the US Mint make a few dozen platinum coins with a face value of a Trillion each, and give them to the Federal Reserve to pay off the USA national debt.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
Don't you mean give them to his closest friends, and Putin.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:10PM
Repeating yourself there, aren't you?
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"