The Fashion Businessa telephone and a credit card QVC, standing for Quality, Value and
Convenience, ‘the-mall-you-call’ allowed you to shop for everything from
clothes to cookware, day or night, from your sofa or bed. In 1993, the midst
of recession, 44 million Americans eagerly dialled QVC and its sister QVC
Fashion Channel and parted with $1.1 billion. Its rival, the Home Shopping
Network also did business of over $1 billion. QVC combined entertainment
with shopping, giving viewers the opportunity to talk to programme hosts
and celebrity guests on the air, participate in games show and win prizes.
QVC’s merchandise and appeal has been largely downmarket, kitsch or
downright cheap and cheerful. Q.1, described itself in the press release
announcing its launch as the ‘combination of a great speciality store and a
great lifestyle magazine’. The service was designed to reach a contemporary
audience whose needs were not addressed by existing home-shopping media.
The various promises of its press release read like a prescription for the cure
of the ills and anxieties of urban life:
How to look great without living in a gym, buying and cooking healthy foods,
gardening – even if you live in a city, cheap three-day getaways, great coffees and
teas of the world, cards and stationery for the lost art of letter writing, shopping
for your girlfriend, gifts grandkids will love, camping for beginners, great presents
shipped anywhere fast, housewares from the Italian countryside, creating a
bachelor’s kitchen, redecorating your apartment in a weekend, 50 ways to work a
little black dress, sweatwear for show-offs, clothes for men who hate to shop and
great trash reading for the beach.After television shopping channels came virtual retail, e-commerce as it is
known, which also began in the United States, where in 1994 Apple teamed
up with a group of mail order companies to distribute 30,000 electronic
versions of their catalogues on compact disc. With access to merchandise
from retailers such as L L Bean, Landsend and Tiffany & Co., users could
browse through catalogues on screen, or ask their computer to search specific
items such as mens’ trousers or dinner sets, they could even change the colour
of garments to assess different combinations. They were also given access to
supporting editorial material such as guides to fashion and financial planning
supplied by publications like Elle Décor and the Wall Street Journal.
In 1999 with millions worth of goods purchased on the Internet in the UK
alone it seems certain that home shopping will become a greater and greater
feature of retail, and the clothing business. At Marks & Spencer we recognized
this fact with the launch of Marks & Spencer Direct, our clothing catalogue
in 1998, and the Marks & Spencer online shop in 1999. We offered an initial
batch of 200 products, with the ambition of reaching 3,000, of which
approximately one third was anticipated to be clothing, within two years of