The borders of the retail landscape are blurring more than ever. Moving from a company’s brick-and-mortar store to its online marketplace to its Instagram page, today’s consumers expect a seamless, unshackled experience that allows them to browse, buy, and receive their goods not just whenever but wherever, as well. Slowly but surely, the world of…

Don’t sound the death knell for brick and mortar just yet; only a fifth of U.S. consumers are primarily online shoppers, according to the inaugural issue of Consumer View, the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) new quarterly report designed to measure consumer behavior and shopping trends in a shifting retail landscape. Further, if malls and shopping…

When it comes to sustainability in fashion, Adidas, Burberry, Gildan Activewear, Hugo Boss, and Kering come out tops, according to the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI World), an annual review that ranks the 2,500 largest companies in Standard & Poor’s Global Broad Market Index based on their economic, environmental, and social practices. As the…

Amazon’s world-domination tour continues apace. The e-commerce giant gobbled up Whole Foods last month for $13.7 billion, boosting customer traffic by 25 percent after dangling the carrot of lower prices, according to data from Foursquare Labs. And the company’s invasion into the brick-and-mortar landscape may not be over yet. Roughly a dozen Amazon bookstores have…

For today’s consumer, clothes are not merely clothes. They wick away sweat, coddle us from the cold, and navigate us through both calms and tempests. From athletic wear to bedding to even lingerie, “performance” is king, even when some of the measures are more aspirational than practical. All that tactical-grade reinforcement doesn’t come without a…

When President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Paris accord, effectively ending the country’s leadership on combating climate change, the backlash from the rest of the world was both immediate and vociferous. The United States is the planet’s biggest economy, as well as its second-largest producer…

Feel free to leave your quips about hemp-clad hippies at the door: If sustainable fashion is still viewed as a niche product, it won’t be for much longer. Once the purview of independent designers, “green” clothing has muscled into the mainstream. There are the industry North Stars who have made tackling fashion’s less telegenic issues…

Fabric. Fabric. Fabric. If textiles are the Marcia Brady of the garment industry, then buttons, zippers, fasteners, and trims are the Jan. They may not be sexy, but they’re certainly indispensable. Divested of zippers, coats would be ineffectual buffers against the cold. Without buttons, pants would puddle on the floor. If hooks and eyes suddenly…