Trends

Sport brands dominate lifestyle clothing

The thin line between fashion and sporting brands seems to have disappeared when it comes to the clothing sourced and sold by stores catering for the athleisure or casualwear market.

Sportswear brand adidas is sourced by more buyers than other more fashion-orientated lifestyle brands, and Nike clothing outsells other brands for most of the respondents (17%) …

Clothing from other sportswear brands like Puma (50%) and Reebok (43%) are also among the ten most popular brands sourced by buyers for lifestyle clothing stores.

adidas (33%) and Nike (31%) are the two brands that are most likely to be amongst the top 3 brands sourced by the respondents, with sportswear brand Puma (14%) also featuring strongly among the top 3 sellers.

According to most respondents (17%) Nike is their top selling brand, while adidas is the #1 seller in 7% of their stores.

Considering that the respondents indicated that they sourced more than 100 casualwear brands, sportswear lifestyle brands are very strong in the market.

Surfbrand-fashion

Apart from sportswear brands, surfbrands have also made inroads into the lifestyle clothing market. (See Surfing through the Free State).

Even though surfing brands are not stocked in most of these stores (only 30% of the respondents source Quiksilver and Billabong), Quiksilver follows Nike as the #1 seller (12% of respondents) and Billabong is the top seller for 7% of respondents.

Surfwear brands are also amongst the top 3 sellers in most of the stores the respondents source for — namely Billabong (21%), Quiksilver (19%), Roxy (10%) and Lizzard (7%).

These buyers do not source for any hardcore surfing stores.

Fashion flair

The most popular fashion/athleisure brands amongst buyers are Lee (59%), Soviet (57%), Dickies (50%), Polo and Samson (45%) and Canary Island (39%).

SA brand Loxion Kulca (slang for Location Culture) is gaining popularity and is sourced by 36% of the buyers who responded — the same number that buy Fila, and more than Levi’s, Jeep, Hi-Tec clothing and the surf brands.

It is interesting that while this urban streetwear brand is so popular, other homegrown brands like Craig Native, Maya Prass and Stone Cherry does not get any support from this market sector.

For that matter, nor does top fashion brands like Jenni Button or Calvin Klein ... yet Pierre Cardin is amongst the most commonly sourced brands.

Consumer preference

But the number of buyers that stock a brand does not necessarily translate into popularity amongst consumers ... although as one can expect, the top sellers are also the most frequently sourced.

The fashion/lifestyle brands that are one of the top 3 sellers for most of the respondents are Dickies (26%), Jeep and Converse (21%), Soviet (19%), Levi’s (11%) and Polo (10%).

The same brands also feature amongst the #1 best sellers, namely Converse, Dickies, Jeep (according to 10% of the respondents) and Levi’s, Polo and Soviet are the top seller for 5% of the buyers who responded.

Because we asked information from the buyers that would be responsible for apparel sourcing for a store (or group), it is obvious that store house brands would not feature high on the list. After all, a store brand would only be sourced by one particular buyer.