“In a crisis, the one who is not afraid to stand out wins”

The wrong side of the trend is also a trend, but retailers often forget about it, preferring to follow the obvious fashion trends. The flip side of a particular trend forms its integrity, maintains the diversity of offers and leaves the winner to those who choose it. Such logic adhere to the company "Econika". In a crisis situation, the company management decided not to follow the obvious trend, offering the consumer cheap goods, but to produce shoes in the mid-price segment and rely on the uniqueness of the product.

“Now everyone says that the consumer wants to save, he chooses something more universal, something that will serve him for a long time. This is really a trend in the market. But since most retail players began to follow this trend, it turns out that the crisis provides an opportunity to stand out against this background. The one who does this first - goes against the market - starts to win, ”said Sergey Sarkisov, vice president of Novard Group of Companies, co-owner of the Econika shoe chain chain, at the REX 2016 exhibition. “When we started doing collaborations, it gave us a serious win, the collections of Econika became much more attractive.” It is about brand collaboration with Alena Akhmadullina. This spring, the second limited edition was launched, created in partnership with a Russian designer. “As part of the rebranding of the network, we will do collaborations within our collections constantly. We will cooperate with completely different personalities in the market, not only with designers. And all these collections will be limited in order to attract attention and be sold at the maximum margin, ”Sarkisov said.

Also recently, the Novard group launched the Portal monobrand network, which offers fashionable shoes of the middle price segment - the least promising in a crisis, according to many experts. “Until now, Russia has not had a domestic shoe brand in the middle price category of good quality, designed for a fashionable audience, and the collections of potential competitors are becoming more basic and conservative,” explained Alexander Iliopulo, head of the Portal network. He managed to open already three stores of the new network, by the end of 2016 of the year it is planned to open three more points, and by the end of 2017 of the year - to double the number of stores.

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Sports shoes are another trend that, on the one hand, unifies demand, and on the other, creates the need for exclusive offers. It is impossible not to notice that now new sneaker and street shoe stores are opening everywhere, the legendary sports models of famous brands of past years are re-released, and loud collaborations are being formed. According to a recent report by Obuv Rossii GC, sales of sneakers in April were two times higher than planned. “This is not the first season we have been observing a trend that casual shoes are in great demand among customers. This trend came to us from Europe, where the sale of such shoes already accounts for 50% of retail revenue. - commented Elena Khvorova, head of the procurement and sales department of GC “Obuv Rossii”.

The craze for sports style caused a willingness to take extreme measures for the sake of differences. In winter, we watched in Moscow crowds of young people standing in line in the lines for a limited-edition model of Yeezy Boost 350 Black sneakers, created by the famous rap artist Kanye West for the Adidas brand. And recently, as part of the Shoes are everywhere campaign in the Tsvetnoy department store, Street wave studio artists painted ornaments for everyone, and the ID Sport workshop applied their initials and texts to shoes using a thermal press.

All these phenomena reflect the eternal need of customers for unique products within the framework of the general trend. And as practice shows, they are willing to pay for meeting this need, despite the crisis.