The Anatomy of an International Fashion Retailer – The Giorgio Armani Group

Of all the international retailers, luxury fashion retailers are typically the most prolific as measured by the number and diversity of foreign markets in which they operate. Furthermore, for most, the contribution of foreign sales to total sales is equal to, if not greater than, that achieved by the most active international retailers (Moore & Fernie 2004). Yet, while the significance of the luxury fashion retailers’ foreign activities is now acknowledged in the international retailing literature, there have been calls for more in-depth, company specific appraisals of the strategies adopted by such firms (Doherty 2000; Moore, Birtwistle & Burt 2004). Doherty (2000) has argued in particular that further case study research in the area of fashion retailer internationalisation would provide much needed insights into the apparatus that supports their international success

The internationalisation of foreign fashion retailers into the UK - identifying the motives, methods and operational challenges

Fashion companies consistently prove to be the most prolific and successful of the international retailers. Success is attributed to small format size, single brand emphasis and economies of format replication. These factors contain the costs, and risks, of foreign market expansion. Evidence from the British fashion market attests to the aggressive expansion policies of foreign fashion retailers who, in the past decade, have disrupted the competitive equilibrium of the UK market. This study examines the motives, methods and management challenges that foreign fashion retailers face, and adopt, as they establish operations within the UK. Drawing from the wider international business and international retailing literature, seven research propositions direct the first, positivist research stage. Via a mail survey, sent to all foreign fashion retailers with stores in the UK, the study identifies that these are proactive internationalists, drawn to the UK to exploit the opportunities afforded from niche markets and brands with significant consumer appeal. The research also notes specific differences between designer, specialist and general fashion retailers in terms of motivations, entry methods, operating strategies, critical success factors and the problems they encounter. The second phase of the research is interpretivist in nature and examines the actual process of internationalising fashion retail operations within the UK from the perspective of seven case companies. The study concludes that the foreign entrants remain within the British market for reasons of exceptional profitability, reputation and consumer and competitor intelligence. The central contribution of the study resides in the identification and analysis of the facets integral to the actual process of successfully internationalising fashion retail operations; notably the incremental development of effective central and local management structures, the clear demarcation of management decision-making responsibility, and the staged development of product ranging and development, brand positioning and distribution planning policies

The Mismatch in Distributions of Vertebrates and the Plants that they Disperse

© 2018 The Authors Little is known about how mutualistic interactions affect the distribution of species richness on broad geographic scales. Because mutualism positively affects the fitness of all species involved in the interaction, one hypothesis is that the richness of species involved should be positively correlated across their range, especially for obligate relationships. Alternatively, if mutualisms involve multiple mutualistic partners, the distribution of mutualists should not necessarily be related, and patterns in species distributions might be more strongly correlated with environmental factors. In this study, we compared the distributions of plants and vertebrate animals involved in seed-dispersal mutualisms across the United States and Canada. We compiled geographic distributions of plants dispersed by frugivores and scatter-hoarding animals, and compared their distribution of richness to the distribution in disperser richness. We found that the distribution of animal dispersers shows a negative relationship to the distribution of the plants that they disperse, and this is true whether the plants dispersed by frugivores or scatter-hoarders are considered separately or combined. In fact, the mismatch in species richness between plants and the animals that disperse their seeds is dramatic, with plants species richness greatest in the in the eastern United States and the animal species richness greatest in the southwest United States. Environmental factors were corelated with the difference in the distribution of plants and their animal mutualists and likely are more important in the distribution of both plants and animals. This study is the first to describe the broad-scale distribution of seed-dispersing vertebrates and compare the distributions to the plants they disperse. With these data, we can now identify locations that warrant further study to understand the factors that influence the distribution of the plants and animals involved in these mutualisms