Mid-Price Luxury Thrives in Tough Times

I’m looking for bright spots to post this week and this article on fashion brands doing well caught my eye. I am particularly heartened to see the booming Isabel Marant numbers. Like every other wannabe honorary French femme, I love her masculine/feminine balancing act and attempt to re-create it on my own (with uneven results!)

Brands like Tommy Hilfiger, D&G from Dolce & Gabbana, and Tory Burch, all selling below the luxury designer category, are growing now because they expanded or reorganized, repositioned collections or introduced new lucrative lines before the first signs of the recession.

Sales of the Tommy Hilfiger Group, a unit of Apax Partners, a private equity investment group, rose 21 percent, to $1.6 billion, for the financial year that ended March 31, according to Fred Ghering, Hilfiger’s chief executive officer.

In 2006, the Dolce & Gabbana group brought the collection’s production inhouse, ending a license arrangement with Ittierre group of Italy. Since then, the collection has had average sales growth of more than 8 percent a year, reflecting its more sophisticated styling and fabrications. For the financial year that ended March 31, D&G sales were €706 million, or $1.04 billion, roughly 44 percent of the group’s revenue.

Tory Burch does not disclose its revenue, but sales are expected to rise modestly this year to $200 million, thanks in part to increased wholesaling outside the United States.

There also are companies that do not appear to be doing anything special, like Isabel Marant of France, and yet are growing at a healthy rate — more than 20 percent a year, according to Isabel Marant’s chief executive officer, Sophie Duruflé. Wholesale revenue for Isabel Marant and its secondary collection, Etoile, rose 29 percent last year, to €25 million, and they are expected to increase 35 percent this year, said Ms. Duruflé. Isabel Marant plans to open a store in New York’s SoHo area next year.

Buyers are particularly vocal in their praise for such midrange lines.

At Harvey Nichols in London, U.S. labels like Milly, Rebecca Taylor and Tory Burch have “performed really well” this fall, said Suzanne Pendlebury, the womenswear buyer. She noted that separates from brands like Vanessa Bruno from France, Diane Von Furstenberg, 3.1 Phillip Lim, Anglomania and the Danish labels Bruuns Bazaar and Malene Birger are seeing strong growth because “with these labels, rather than buying one expensive designer piece, you can afford to buy a few items that work together and produce different looks.”

At Bon Marché, Ms. Chapellu said that contemporary labels like the Marant collections, Vanessa Bruno, Marni, Marni’s Summer and Winter Edition and Marc by Marc Jacobs have all sold well this fall.