But is this just a publicity stunt to increase revenue or do they really care? H&M imply they’re leading the industry towards a sustainability wave. H&M – Hypocrites or advocates for sustainable fashion? With continuous targeted advertisements, sales and discounts, it’s hard to resist. We show off our wealth, style and personality but once this temporary fulfilment is over, it’s a vicious cycle to continuously satisfy our rational materialistic values, becoming a desire not a necessity. Consumer purchase behaviours are driven by short-term pleasure. The fast fashion model has spiraled into a marketer’s dream. It amounts to over 80 billion garments being sold to customers annually. What is fast fashion?įast fashion is the mass-production of cheap clothes, a trend that has exacerbated with the influx of retailers, like H&M and Zara, offering never-ending seasons of new clothes. The problem isn’t what’s available to buy, it’s the throwaway culture of continuously buying new garments. That’s more than road transport and agriculture. By 2050, it is estimated that clothing production will account for 25% of the world’s carbon budget. These appalling consequences of the lucrative fashion industry are only going to increase as consumers continue to buy cheap clothes. 20% of industrial water pollution stems from textile development and this booming industry emits 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world, coming second to the oil sector. Both launched sustainable and ethical clothing collections, but do they really care for the environment or are they simply contributing to the monsters in our closets? It said it hoped its online business would expand 25 percent this year.H&M and Zara are the two largest fashion retailers in the world, contributing enormously to the fashion industry being worth $2.4tn. H&M has insisted it has a plan, saying it would slash prices to reduce the stockpile and slow its expansion in stores. Analysts at the Swiss bank UBS said in a note to investors this month that they had come away from an H&M presentation in November “with no clear view on why focus on the core customer had been lost, and what was being done to fix it.” Rahul Sharma, founder of Neev Capital, called H&M “a slow-motion wreck” after the release of the first-quarter results. But H&M, which also owns brands like Cos, & Other Stories and Arket, has fallen behind the pack.Īnalysts have been downbeat on the Swedish company’s outlook. In the digital era, the challenges around offering trendy apparel before it goes out of style have mounted, particularly as growing numbers of shoppers choose to buy from their smartphones and become more quality conscious.ĪSOS is an online-only retailer, and Inditex has managed to ramp up its digital sales. They profited off their ability to generate, at a vast scale, rapid translations of runway fashions into low-priced clothing and accessories.īut while luxury brands have enjoyed a rebound in fortunes in recent months, fueled by millennial appetite and a recovery in demand from the lucrative Chinese market, mass-market companies have had to deal with enormous changes. Since the early 2000s, business has largely boomed for fast fashion retailers such as ASOS, H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara. The company had to close stores in South Africa and faced a social media backlash after it ran an ad in January showing a black child model wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” Also, it and other retailers in Europe are girding themselves for an expected push by Amazon into clothing retailing, one that Amazon has already been making in the United States.
H and m ad scandal series#
It is the latest in a series of issues for H&M.