Fashion Centers

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Fashion Centers

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Chapter 4

Fashion Centers

Design and Buying Centers

Global Impact of Fashion

Fashion Centers

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Chapter Objectives

Describe a fashion design center. Define a buying center. Explain how design and buying centers impact local economies. Identify the most important design centers. Explain the importance of global sourcing in the fashion industry. Describe how cultural influences affect mainstream fashion.

Fashion Centers

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What Is a Buying Center?

Buying centers are concentrated in geographic areas where manufacturers promote their newest lines or a group of styles and designs.

buying centers a central district in a city where fashion businesses sell products to retail buyers

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Fashion Centers

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What Is a Buying Center?

The fashion industry is important to a city’s economy. Most cities have not-for-profit corporations that help promote a particular city’s apparel industry.

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What Is a Buying Center? The Importance of Buying Centers

Out-of-town apparel buyers generate millions of dollars for the local economy.

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Fashion Centers

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U.S. Buying Centers

The apparel industry designates particular market weeks to present different components of fashion products.

market weeks the major times scheduled by fashion producers to show fashions to buyers

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U.S. Buying Centers

New York’s Garment District is the primary buying center in the country. Many retailers avoid New York and use regional buying centers in cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, or Miami.

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U.S. Buying Centers

A larger regional center may have several building clusters, or marts.

mart a building that houses thousands of showrooms for a specific merchandise category

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Different marts may be devoted to specific apparel or accessory groups.

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Heart of the Fashion Industry

Design centers and buying centers represent the heart of the fashion industry. Design centers represent the centers of creativity. Buying centers represent the centers of commerce.

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Operating an e-tail business on an electronic channel—the Web—can be costly, due to design, delivery, returns, and operating expenses. Though Many larger dot-com companies crashed in the 1990’s, small stores like Harris Cyclery of West Newton, Massachusetts, actually increase sales using a basic Web site. Today, a third of Harris’s bicycle business rides in on the Web to get hard-to-find parts and personal service. Describe an e-business’s home page to your class after viewing one through marketingseries.glencoe.com.

For emerging designers wanting to sell their products, the choice for distribution is between clicks or bricks: online retail versus traditional in-store retail. Online stores are a great way to start a business without the overhead of renting retail space.

Web Power

However, building an online store means reaching customers and providing them with a way to view, pay for, and receive their purchases. To do this, many entrepreneurs team up with established e-tail Web sites such as Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon. Ebay is known as an online auction site, but it also sponsors online fashion stores.

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For more information, go to marketingseries.glencoe.com. 11

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What are three of the most important international design centers? What is the difference between a fashion design center and a buying center? How do fashion design centers and buying centers benefit the cities in which they are located?

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