Fashion Lady Crap

Archive for the ‘Mango Fashion’ Category

Winter is here and it is time to dress the part in order to keep from getting sick. Getting your everyday winter wardrobe ready ahead of time always helps; because the things that you have had in storage; may have a stale smell; or at the most an unwanted smell which needs to be taken out, usually by having them cleaned. Your Fur Snow Boots are no exception.

You may be in need of some new Fur Snow Boots for this new winter season, just to keep up with the fashion trend. There are some things to consider when you purchase a pair of new Fur Snow Boots. The purpose of wearing snow boots is to keep your feet dry from bad weather. The reason for keeping your feet dry is that frost bite could set in if you are not wearing the proper type of boots.

In today’s world people may not be able to purchase real Fur Snow Boots because real fur does cost a lot of money. However, synthetic fur is much less expensive, and the fur lining looks just as good as the real fur itself. With all the restrictions on hunting animals, real fur is hard to come by for fur lined boots being mass produced. There just aren’t enough animal furs to go around to the public. However, if you really want real Fur Snow Boots then you can find some by doing some research on the internet. You should be warned that some snow boots may be labeled Real Fur, and when you get them, they could have synthetic fur instead. So you will need to keep (print out) the information and the name and catalog number from the website, so that any dissatisfaction can be dealt with by the websites customer service department.

You definitely want to stay in style. So the style of snow boots which you chose may help you look great. Not all snow boots are weatherproof, so it is a good idea to purchase some weatherproofing spray, (if you buy suede boots), or weatherproofing wax, such as mink oil to treat regular leather snow boots.

Although Fur Snow Boots help keep your feet and legs; that doesn’t mean go out and buy a pair of Fur Snow Boots that go all the way up your legs. It means be practical when you buy them. In other words knee high snow boots would look more appropriate; however, boots that go mid calf will do the job of keeping you just as warm.

You may be able to find a pair of nice Fur Snow Boots at one of your local department stores; however, you may choose to research them over the internet. If you find a pair you like and decide to purchase them; you can use the websites online secure and encrypted page to order them. The website knows how important your personal information is so there is no fear for you losing your ID, or identity theft; and you do not have to worry about the website selling your information to a 3rd party.

Flashback! Nearly four decades back – lifestyle fashion stores were all the frenzy in the sixties where clothing retailers like Biba and Habitat offered great collection for the young consumers. They displayed model lifestyles lines and made buyers think “which one is better for me?” Most clothing retailers joined the league for the up and coming era of seventies like Marks & Spencer and Mothercare followed by the major player ‘Next’ in the eighties, which were largely preferred.

Meanwhile, the major Italian player ‘Benetton’ marched on high street with, offering colorful designer clothing for the whole family. Their strategy resulted affirmative with noticeably contemporary window showcase in all stores with independent units. The company was successful in Britain, however, having a long standing in the market, they witnessed failure to keep up pace with the accelerated high fashion pressure by the other European competitors, which are now the known as Mango, H&M and Zara.

The rise of these competitors on high street has been witness successful because of a higher demand for fast fashion. Styles showed in magazines and other advertorials are what people wish to wear. Top designers have created collection extensions, which cater people who can afford to spend their hard earned cash on triple figure. This resulted success to the affordable collection of European fashion brands

A Swedish player, H&M offered readymade clothing stores stocked with fashionable collection at reasonable costs. Its successful strategy was its own slogan ‘fashion & quality at the best price’ innovative design, reasonably priced and competent logistics. Based in Stockholm, a team of 100 fashion designers assures that nothing has been imitated from the runway platforms. They are mostly inspired from street-trends, movies, magazines and exhibitions. Impressively, the designs reach retail shelves within 2-3 weeks. H&M’s high profile designer tie-ups with Karl Lagerfield and Stella McCartney have resulted entire collections available to the mass people at lower prices. This strategy is supported by huge advertising campaigns, which easily compete with the major brands.

In a world of advertisements and promotions, there is one store that has made strategy to not to spend penny on advertising, “Zara”, a wing of Europe’s biggest, rapidly evolving and most triumphant fashion clothing retailers, Grupo Inditex. Other well popular stores in similar chain are Massimo Dutti, Bershka and Pull and Bear. Inditex operates business via more than two thousand stores in 56 countries. The first Zara shop was launched in 1975 at La Coruna, Galicia and at present it operates more than four hundred owned stores globally. In the previous five years they have witnessed sales up by 25 percent year on year.

Zara runs its own design and production unit in La Coruna, Spain, which leads cancellation of the large out-sourcing operations, like H&M does in over nine hundred firms. It is modern, offering up-to-date lifestyle yet standard clothing lines for men, women and children. Zara offers reasonably priced, radical clothing, however, not of the top quality, which will last only for some seasons.

As same as Zara, H&M can also put designs on retail shelves within three weeks. Its product assortment is cheap and small yet frequent, offering consumers huge selection that results repeated visits to their stores to find “What’s New”. Hitherto, Zara has launched over ten thousand new designs and most of these will just be attainable for few weeks.

Another Spanish player, Mango is a reputed multinational brand devoted to designing, producing and selling fast fashion and accessories only for women. Its clothing line includes Suit, Casual Sport, and Mng Jeans. It might not be as huge as H&M or Grupo Inditex, but has played excellent particularly in the UK.

No shopping malls resemble absolute with exclusive of these three brands. The pace of these companies in responding to changing consumer demands is an ideal proof to the retailing, producing and logistics skills needed in latest fashion industry. These new strategies are set up to develop aptitude to take advantage of the challenges of a competitive world market.

Besides the diversification in product assortments there is one thing common in all these brands that is “intelligent logistics”. Well-organized communication between sales staff directly to the headquarters and producers lead them to match steps with high speed turnover.

The fact is that buyers are becoming preference savvy and smarter in order to what they shop. Even though they always have their preferred designer, they are also acquainted that a throwaway piece of fast fashion from a retail chain store will complete their outfit choices. At so reasonably priced all of these retail perceptions play on Friday nights when people feels they have nothing to wear.

Retailers are sent in a scuffle to make-out the major catwalk trends from the drawing sheets to the sales shelves as fast as possible.

In the crazy world of commerce, few businesses are as predictably unpredictable as retail apparel. In this industry, retailers need to understand their customers intimately and make available clothing that matches the fashion of the time every time. Failure to do so is not only a blow to the brand but might severely impact the business’ profitability and future viability as excess inventory will have to be sold at scrap value. Nowhere is creativity and innovation more closely intertwined than in the fickle world of fashion.

Such was the challenge for PEPPO Fashions Group, an apparel distributor in Thailand, which manages labels such as Guess, Guess Baby/Kids, Guess Accessory Stores, Mango, Marciano and Castro. It has 12 standalone retail outlets and presence in 50 department store consignments in the country.

Operational nightmare

According to Palakorn Khisalang, IT Manager for the Group, department stores constantly refresh their layouts, and require tenants like PEPPO to move within the building several times a year.

“It’s a time-consuming and costly exercise for us to re-architect our IT network after each move,” Khisalang says. “Moreover, department stores often run promotional bazaars at central locations, making it difficult for our staff to conduct customer transactions away from their regular in-store counter. This in turn causes discrepancies between the actual transactions conducted and the receipts that were generated.”

As the Group expands, managing the IT operations based on a distributed architecture introduced significant network latency and became prohibitively challenging for a small team. This has a negative impact on the efficient collection of accurate sales data and thus hindered management’s running crucial sales analysis.

“Our staff needed to be able to get real time updates on stock availability from our back-end warehouses and head office in Bangkok. Although we had moved from a manual system to bar-coding, we still needed a solution that would allow the staff to register inventory while on the move, instead of having to return to a central computer terminal to enter data,” Khisalang explains.

Re-architecting IT around the business process

The company evaluated a number of solutions including deploying GPS and ISDN to ensure access to a single repository of data containing retail sales, inventory at the warehouse, and in-transit movement of goods. Each proposal failed on either cost or effectiveness.

One solution that appeared viable, however, was to introduce wireless technology at the retail sites and at the warehouses. The plan is for retail outlets to be equipped with thin client laptops and sales operators with wireless PDAs. This would allow staff to easily move around within the store, and between stores as well.

A centralized delivery mechanism for all applications was also deemed critical for the overall solution to work. The company evaluated a number of technologies and chose the Presentation Server from Citrix.

The Citrix Presentation Server centralizes the delivery of all the client applications the staff need — such as Microsoft Excel to run sales projections — without having to physically install these applications onto each device. The staff in turn can access multiple applications from any location.

“We enlisted the help of a Citrix Solution Advisor to implement the Citrix Presentation Server 4, with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 running on two HP ProLiant servers in the firm’s data center in Bangkok,” says Khisalang.

At the warehouses, the company used SYMBOL handheld devices to conduct inventory checks online via Citrix, with security over the network provided using a VPN combined with a two-factor authentication procedure comprising an RSA SecurID token and password.

Citrix was used to optimize inventory management process. As the access infrastructure foundation, Citrix Presentation Server provides staff with real-time access to a proprietary ERP solution called “PEPPOS” that is customized for retail management via PCs and wirelessly over PDAs. As goods move in and out of the warehouses, the bar code attached to each item is scanned, allowing the staff to track inventory movement. Previously, they had to walk to a LAN terminal to manually enter the data.

The new wireless solution resulted in a more efficient model for keeping track of inventory back at the warehouses, with front-line sales staff now having online access to the most updated information from virtually any machine in a secure manner.

“All of these factors played a strong part in our decision to deploy the Citrix solution to enable a mobile and wireless enterprise, and we believe that this innovative application of technology has enabled us to build a highly adaptable retail model,” adds Khisalang.

Part of the initial requirement in the choice of technology was the concern of user training. With only four members in the IT team, PEPPO needed a solution that would require minimal training for everyone involved in the use of the new mobile devices. PEPPO put considerable effort in identifying the right combination of hardware and software to effectively mobilize its staff and ensure safe and efficient access to company information.

PEPPO, however, still faces a number of business process and technical challenges to realize the full potential of wireless technology across the entire operations. From a business perspective, enabling a wireless IT infrastructure isn’t immediately possible across all of its locations because of constraints imposed by department stores. Even where possible, it can sometimes take a few months to finalize negotiation with the management.

Benefits gained through centralized delivery model

By centralizing application delivery and management on Citrix servers, and providing virtualized application access on PDAs, PEPPO is able to more easily handle department store counter relocations and periodic sales from central bazaars without having to reinstall point of sale terminals and other equipment, which saves time and money. At the same time, productivity for retail staff has improved because they no longer need to walk to and from fixed terminals to capture the data. Similar productivity improvements have also been observed at warehouses using real-time inventory tracking.

Centralized management has enabled PEPPO to keep IT headcount at four people, despite a significant increase in the number of stores and IT users. What used to take two weeks to install or upgrade software company-wide now takes only one hour.

“With the Citrix Presentation Server solution, we have been able to provide approximately 340 staff at 50 different locations throughout Thailand with secure remote access to critical business applications wirelessly via a 128 kbps ISDN connection from PDAs over a 802.11b/g WLAN interface,” beams Khisalang. These applications include Microsoft Office 2003, Oracle Database 10g, and PEPPOS.

Low-bandwidth printing has also been critical to business productivity at both the back-end and retail fronts. Accountants can remotely print the day’s transactions from the head office. Warehouse assistants can now generate delivery notes, invoices, consignment notes and price tags wirelessly as well. “We can now literally link data to a retail outlet anywhere in Thailand or the world overnight, unencumbered by the typical technology hurdles that other companies face,” adds Khisalang.

Surprisingly, the new solution has resulted in a significant downgrade in the bandwidth requirements of PEPPO. The company uses a 128 Kbps connection at each location back to the Citrix Servers at head office. Conventional technology would have necessitated a 512 Kbps or 1MB bandwidth demand. PEPPO estimates that it was able to save up to $1,600 in bandwidth costs per location alone.

“I recently attended a retail conference in Bangkok, where the focus
was on how IT can be used as an enabler for retail enterprises. Some of the technologies mentioned were the ones PEPPO have used several years ago. Many have yet to integrate these with wireless technology. I think companies in the retail industry stand to benefit from these technologies,” concludes Khisalang. ” Now that we have found the right formula to enable a mobile enterprise, we will continue to establish wireless infrastructure in our new stores as we expand our presence in Thailand.”