How to strengthen and make your brand more sustainable

2025 has become a year of survival for many fashion brands in the challenging and rapidly changing conditions of an overheated market: declining traffic, the closure of entire chains and companies, the consolidation of sellers on marketplaces, the shift of customer traffic from offline to online—all these and other factors have impacted everyone, especially the weaker ones, those experiencing various challenges. The market has shifted to savings consumption. Some consider this a crisis, but our expert, Dania Tkacheva, a business consultant specializing in sales management and strategic development for fashion brands, calls it the maturation of the market. She offers distressed companies her own tool for diagnosing their business and opportunities for recovery and recovery. She calls this tool the Brand Maturity Pyramid.

Denmark Tkacheva -

business consultant on sales management and strategic development for fashion brands. 21 years of sales management, 13 years in fashion retail, ex-regional sales manager for Nike Russia. Author of articles for Forbes, Kommersant, RBC.Pro, speaker of the business program of the CPM, Textillegprom, Interfabric exhibitions, and the Tinkoff conference. My business", Fashion factory School. Member of the Council for Electronic Commerce of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. https://t.me/DaniyaTkacheva

In an overheated market, weak brands disappear, while strong ones restructure and strengthen. A crisis is a time of opportunity; it always tests the strength of a brand's strategy, not its product range. It tests not the number of SKUs, but the meaning behind the product, whether it has a meaning that is meaningful and valuable to the customer. That's why I developed my own self-diagnostic tool to help fashion brands. No, not an alternative to Maslow's pyramid, but a brand maturity pyramid. Ultimately, what matters isn't what a brand sells to consumers, but the meaning it conveys through its products and services.

This self-diagnostic tool will allow brands/companies to independently assess where they stand now and how they can further strengthen their brand and make it more sustainable. It doesn't matter what you sell. What matters is how you think.

So the base of the pyramid, or the first level, is  pProduct-driven brands, survival level.

Product-driven brands exist in the product, not in the consumer's mind. There's no brand, but a set of SKUs—cherry picking, as Nike called this approach to assortment. The owner thinks not strategically, but in SKU launches: "Let's release ballet flats in sizes 4 and 44, and revenue will skyrocket." Today, ballet flats, tomorrow, two t-shirt SKUs, the day after, tank tops, and on Friday, a knockoff sneaker from the adjacent product listing. This kind of trick is generally only possible in e-commerce on multi-category marketplaces like Wildberries, Ozon, and, of course, Sadovod. Marketing? Whatever it takes, the main thing is that the listing ranks well.

Therefore, such a brand has no history, no communication, no community. With such a business model, it's difficult to attract traffic because the brand lacks a distinct identity, and therefore, no loyalty. This leads to a strong dependence on marketplaces, declining margins, a lack of brand recognition, and highly price-inelastic demand, as consumers don't understand the product's value and therefore evaluate it solely based on the functional needs the clothing or footwear solves.

Common mistakes in marketing: They sell product items, not concepts. Therefore, when they're in the mass-market or mid-price segments, they always experience price pressure.

How to grow a brand? Move from product-based logic to category management, from SKUs to drops, from drops to collections and seasonal assortments, and expand into other sales channels. Once seasonal planning and assortment management are in place, the business begins to thrive and can expand beyond marketplaces.

At the second level of the pyramid – tRend-driven brands, this is already a level of adaptation.

It's clear that trend-driven brands have already made progress. They win seasonally, but lose time. Why? They respond strongly to seasonal trends. Their teams don't just produce products, but monitor trends, adapting colors, silhouettes, and shapes.

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These brands already have a strong product development department or at least a one-person owner-designer who, as they say, sleeps with a laptop. They're sprinters: fast, but not always forward-thinking. These brands have strong product teams, and their designers live on Pinterest. These are often mid-market brands, strong but very similar to each other, having prepared for the season based on the same trend reports. They manage to produce on time because it's important for them to be on trend. They create fashion, but not meaning.

They can be found on Lamoda, in department stores, in their own online stores, and in offline retail at a simpler level: shopping centers of category B and below.

A Common Mistake in Marketing and CRM ChannelsCommunication is built around new products: "new collection," "new season," "new color." There's no brand identity, so such brands struggle with repeat purchases and loyalty. Customers often don't remember their names, and they lack consistency, which means they lack trust.

If a brand wants to grow, it must move from meticulously following fashion trends to creating its own visual and semantic code, learning to write not just a newsletter, but a brand narrative and revealing its value.

At the third level of the pyramid – story-driven brands, level of influence.

Story-driven brands don't sell products; they sell a brand's coordinate system and universe, no matter how pompous that may sound. This is the top league of brands. Here, it's not the product that defines the story, but the product's story. Collections are driven by concept. Meaning drives sales and drives long-term sales, attracting an audience with similar values ​​who also value the brand's meaning and narrative.

Such companies develop visionary creative directors, strong product teams, and those "category leaders"—not managers (!)—who can communicate the concept across each product line. The brand develops a strategy, a meaning architecture, and a recognizable brand voice.

Here, brands often operate with high margins, are more stable, and have a community and emotional capital.

Marketing and CRM channels focus not on promotions but on meaningful campaigns that convey "this is why this product was created this way." Communications begin with context, continue with a story, and only then do they tell the story of the product, leading to a smooth conversion into an order. But the risks here are also high: you can get carried away with the concept and lose touch with the consumer, or, conversely, get stuck and become a sluggish brand.

The advantages at this level include sales growth directly proportional to the clarity and consistency of the brand's story. Customers feel a sense of belonging, and the brand's values ​​become theirs. And where there's added value, margins are always higher. Such brands are typically found in the upper-middle segment and above, establishing themselves in Class A shopping centers, premium/luxury street retail, and concept stores. They have their own apps, and, of course, they are represented on Lamoda, TSUM, and other retailers.

2026 will continue the trends of 2025. According to RBC Market Research, 61% of surveyed companies cite price as a key factor in customer choice. This means the crisis is pushing brands' audiences down the pyramid. Trend-driven brands will be one of the most vulnerable segments: if a brand lacks value beyond trendiness, customers will choose marketplaces. Therefore, to maintain margins and sustainability, it's important to think above the fold: keep your product on trend, your communications relevant, and your sales consistent. 2026 is a time for strong commercial strategies and brands that can combine meaning and sales.

If we group the approach, we get a simple growth logic, which is reflected in this table: