Emerging trends in shopping behaviors among new generations in America

Clothing Retail: The Case of Brandy Melville in New York and Collaborative Shopping Among Girls for Casual Wear

Managing a preadolescent daughter is quite a challenge. It probably always has been, but now the widespread use of mobile technologies among children under 14 presents new challenges for parents.

To clarify: for a pre-teen, a "smartphone" essentially means one thing: the iPhone. Android doesn't count; Google doesn't count; nothing else matters... only the iPhone. Paradoxically, it doesn't even matter that the iPhone is made by Apple; that's entirely secondary.

Another notable phenomenon is that, at least in the United States, preadolescents are increasingly participating in purchasing decisions, choosing independently what to buy, which products, and which brands. All enabled by the iPhone.

Teens and Tweens in the United States

• Indirect purchasing power of $43 billion per year
• Average monthly spending on clothing: $54 (tweens) and $64 (teens)
• Over 60% of tweens (children under 12) own a cellphone, and of these, 50% are smartphones

In this context, preadolescents,who are not fully independent decision-makers, can contribute significantly to influencing style and trends.

Accompanying my 12-year-old daughter to her favorite clothing store in New York, Brandy Melville, changed the direction of this article, steering it toward a much broader phenomenon.

We've previously written about Brandy Melville. An Italian brand of young fashion for teenagers, it designs, produces, and sells a clothing line that has been highly successful in the United States, allowing BM, which started sales in California, to open stores in New York as well.

Characterized by a simple look, BM's fashion lines are designed in one size (great simplifying logistics), produced mainly in Italy but also in China, and feature rapid turnover. Following in the footsteps of youth-focused fashion pioneers like Zara and H&M, the brand has surpassed and even eliminated the concept of a traditional "collection". 

But the real stroke of genius of Brandy Melville lies in its focus on a target audience — teen and pre-teen girls (the so-called "teen" and "tween" segments) — and in the execution of a perfect marketing strategy, at least in the United States, for this consumer segment: harnessing social media by enlisting members of the target audience as "brand ambassadors" to their peers, especially on SnapChat.

SnapChat

SnapChat is an instant messaging service and smartphone application. It allows users to send photos to friends for a set number of seconds before they disappear. SnapChat was founded in 2011 by Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel, with headquarters in Los Angeles. By 2013, the service was transmitting 30-50 million messages daily and had a valuation of $3.9 billion based on Facebook's acquisition offer in November 2013.

This is the context within which I observed a new shopping trend during an afternoon of shopping in New York with my daughter.

The Brandy Melville store in New York is highly successful, with dozens of young girls browsing through clothing items at any given time. All of them hold iPhones and use them constantly to communicate with someone while examining the displayed clothing. This is the new trend in retail purchasing behavior among teen and pre-teen girls in America, at least in the realm of young fashion: collaborative shopping conducted through an app called SnapChat.

Here's how it works: I, a young girl, walk into the store, connect to SnapChat with one or more friends, look at the clothing items, comment on them, and show them to my friends using SnapChat. Together, we decide what "we" like and what I should buy.

We are already beyond simply entering a store in New York and sending a friend a photo of a clothing item I purchased. We are now using an app, SnapChat, that facilitates the formation of a purchase decision on the spot between two or more users conferring in real-time about what they like and which fashion item to buy.

It's a dramatic shift from the classic purchasing process and even the relatively "new" trend of sharing photos on Facebook. And it’s all done with disarming spontaneity and naturalness. My daughter spent two hours shopping with two of her friends via SnapChat: one friend was in Stockholm, and the other in Valencia, Spain.

For now, I paid the bill. But soon, my daughter's generation will be able to form decisions, purchase, and pay entirely independently. Today, this trend in new retail purchase processes in the United States is limited to teens and pre-teens in sectors familiar to them, such as youth fashion.

Tomorrow, these now-teen and pre-teen consumers will grow into professional women, wives, and mothers. They will apply the same purchasing decision processes to new sectors: furniture, home goods, cars...

This is a trend in retail purchase processes worth reflecting on. Facebook, email, Pinterest, Twitter, the phone [!] ... are all communication methods that this segment considers obsolete or irrelevant to their lifestyle. SnapChat, FaceTime, SMS, and Instagram [plus other apps unfamiliar to most] are the new modes of interaction.