Is Lane Crawford better placed than other department stores to survive the pandemic?

Lane Crawford president Andrew Keith has been at the centre of discussions about the future of the luxury fashion industry after the Covid-19 pandemic

The pandemic will change the fashion industry. How well positioned is the department store, with 170 years of history in Hong Kong and China, to take advantage?

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A young fashion designer presents her work at Lane Crawford's Global Creative Callout in Hong Kong, a chance for their creations to be stocked by the department store. Young Chinese designers represent the future of fashion, says its president, Andrew Keith.

Published: 7:15am, 14 Jul 2020Updated: 12:46pm, 14 Jul 2020

Back in May, while much of the world was in lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic and deep into an economic downturn that as yet shows no signs of abating, a group of fashion designers and retail executives banded together to “fix the broken fashion system”.

Led by Belgian designer Dries Van Noten and Andrew Keith, president of the Hong Kong-based stores Lane Crawford and Joyce, this cohort of industry insiders sought to address a number of issues that afflicted the fashion industry long before the current crisis began.

Among the issues they discussed were a confusing delivery calendar that has coats arriving in stores in July and summer dresses in November; the relentless pace of fashion weeks; the numerous collections that brands are expected to produce every year; and the constant discounting at department stores and online.

“I felt very strongly that we were facing a landslide of discounting if we didn’t do anything about it, so I reached out to brand partners like Dries Van Noten,” Keith says. “We agreed that as an industry we have always discounted our way out of trouble, and we needed to stop that vicious cycle.”

Andrew Keith, president of Lane Crawford and Joyce Group, takes part in a panel discussion in Hong Kong with Tasha Liu (left), co-founder of Shanghai multi-brand concept store Dongliang, and fashion designer Huishan Zhang. Photo: Keith Tsuji/Getty Images

The discounting dates back to the global financial crisis of 2008, when US retailers launched clear-out sales of unsold merchandise. As a consequence the US market never recovered, because the luxury customer grew accustomed to not paying the full price for goods. This affects the bottom lines of emerging labels in particular.

“Big brands have a scale of operations and infrastructure that enable them to deal with situations like this in a more robust way, while young brands don’t have the finance or capability to deal with the disruption that we’re dealing with at the moment,” says Keith. “But while conglomerates have significant resources, they often lack the level of innovation and agility of young brands.”