Streetwear is defined as a highly personalized fashion style, which reflects the characteristics of California's surfing and skateboarding culture, basketball and hip-hop culture, and is transformed into a fashionable element (Mayan, 2012, p2). Nowadays, people's interest in streetwear is increasing day by day, and the influence of streetwear has spread to various fashion markets. It has changed young people's perceptions of luxury and brought some streetwear brands into the mainstream market. (d’ arpizioetal, 2017).
What is the Supreme brand?
Supreme from New York is one of the well-known streetwear. In 1994, Supreme opened a small skate shop in New York City. And then, the brand has continued to expand and successfully developed into a well-known luxury street brand. (Document Rajendran, 2012) Now the brand has successfully attracted more and more young followers to promote the uniqueness of the brand further. Supreme has opened 11 stores worldwide, namely the United States, Europe and Japan (Figure1). Supreme is limited to new products on Thursdays in Europe and Saturday mornings in Japan and is released through its online store and international retail store Dover street market (Streetwear Official, 2017).
Figure1: Supreme store in London
Source:(www.alamy.com, 2020)
Customer behavior
The supreme target group is for young people aged 15-35 (Winter, 2017). According to Chayka (2012), the brand's loyal fans are often the youngest, and for consumer behavior established by the brand, the main characteristics are habit and loyalty. The first is that Supreme promotes new products every week. Supreme seizes the psychology of followers. Customers want to display the most personalized and up-to-date products, so consumers and Supreme have built a sense of trust. Regarding Maslow's hierarchy of needs, consumers buy brands to achieve self-realization and self-esteem. This means that the supreme meets the psychological needs of consumers (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).
Figure2: Percent change in search volume for UK leading designer fashion brands in 2018
Source: (statista.com, 2020)
Marketing strategy
At the beginning, the Supreme ’s brand positioning was skateboarding, and its target customers were skateboarders. Even though it has become a world-famous fashion brand, it still follows tradition when it comes to advertising. Like Figure3, Supreme upcoming products always post videos on its official Instagram account, with skateboarders wearing Supreme new product skateboards on the street or in the park (Instagram.com, 2018). Supreme maintains the original idea to promote each new product.
Figure3: Skateboarder wearing supreme clothes on the streets of New York, USA
Source:(https://www.instagram.com/p/B6_hh27Bs8M/?igshid=uc32gmudm44n,2020)
As streetwear becomes popular at every level of the fashion industry, Supreme tends to establish marketing strategies based on consumer needs and desires. Supreme implemented a limited supply strategy on each product sale and kept the price low, which established a wave of brand demand and attracted the attention of fans.
Collaborating with other famous brands is one of Supreme’s most famous marketing strategies. For example, supreme will choose to collaborate with The North Face (TNF), one of the most popular outdoor leisure brands in the world, at least once a year. Their collaborative products include T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets and parka coats, while the retail price range is from 38 to 988 GBP. On 25th April 2019, Supreme released its collaboration tee and hooded sweatshirt with Swarovski to celebrate its 25th anniversary, all these products contained the most significant feature of these two brands, the Box Logo of Supreme and the crystal of Swarovski (Supremenewyork.com, 2020). According to the data from the largest non-official supreme community, all the products of this release were sold out on their official website in 10 seconds and the fastest one was the large size grey hoodie which was sold out in just 3 seconds(Supremecommunity.com. ,2020). Another crucial data that we need to know is resold values of all these collaborative products are much higher than their retail prices. Figure4 for example, the fastest sold hooded sweatshirt worth at least 1300 GBP in the secondary market now considering its retail price was only 558 GBP (Stockx.com., 2016).
Figure4: Supreme Swarovski Box Logo Hooded price in Stockx
Source: (Stockx.com., 2020)
Under digital advertising, the streetwear Supreme's marketing strategy has caused a sensation. The supreme has driven young people to pursue the trend of street fashion, and young people are likely to continue to influence and shape the future of luxury fashion. supreme has always been loyal to its own brand, providing customers with a unique model and maintaining its appeal, bringing success to its own brand.
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References
Chayka, K. (2016). Reign, Supreme. [online] Racked.com. Available at: https://www.racked.com/a/supreme [Accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
D'arpizio, C., Levato, F., Kamel, M. and de Montgolfier, J. (2017). Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, Fall–Winter 2017. [online] Milan: Bain & Company. Available at: http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/luxury-goods-worldwide-market-study-fall-winter-2017.aspx.
Mayan, R. (2012). “The Development of Streetwear and the Role Of New York City, London, and Supreme NY”. Theses and dissertations, Paper 924.
Instagram.com. (2018). Supreme. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/supremenewyork/?hl=zh-cn [Accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
Streetwear Official. (2017). Supreme. [online] Available at: https://www.streetwearofficial.com/collections/supreme.
Supremenewyork.com. (2020). Supreme. [online] Available at: https://www.supremenewyork.com/news/559/images?image=0 [Accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=Supremecommunity%2ecom%2e (2020). Supreme Drops, Prices, Restocks - SupremeCommunity. [online] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2esupremecommunity%2ecom%2F [Accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
Stockx.com. (2016). Supreme Swarovski Box Logo Hooded Sweatshirt Heather Grey. [online] Available at: https://stockx.com/supreme-swarovski-box-logo-hooded-sweatshirt-heather-grey [Accessed 8 Jan. 2020].
Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs.
Winter, M. (2017). Supreme Customer Profile. [online] Issuu. Available at: https://issuu.com/mollywinter/docs/supreme_c1a9a0e5e86512.
