On a recent morning at the Fulton Mall michael kors outlet usa sale Macy¡¯s, a woman named Alethea Taylor, who lives in Crown Heights, was taking pictures of the bags with her phone, to pass on to her partner, who she hoped would buy her one for her 40th birthday. She already had three. Another woman, with two children in tow, had already bought several of the bags, some of them on layaway. One particular tote, costing $358, was sold out at this particular Macy¡¯s, and at a branch in Parkchester in the Bronx, a saleswoman said, but it was available if you were willing to travel to the Roosevelt Field mall on Long Island.
Michael Kors products are sold in its own 400 retail stores and in 3,700 department and specialty stores world-wide. Shown, an employee arranges bags at a Kors store in Seoul. ENLARGEMichael Kors products are sold in its own 400 retail stores and in 3,700 department and specialty stores world-wide. Shown, an employee arranges bags at a Kors store in Seoul. Bloomberg News
Unlike Tommy Hilfiger, who mad michael kors watches sale e a conscious effort to connect to hip-hop stars and by extension communities of color, Michael Kors has made no glaring attempt to reach a diverse clientele, though his appealing turn as a judge on ¡°Project Runway¡± gave him broad celebrity. His company has not advertised in Ebony or Jet, a spokeswoman for Johnson Publishing, the company that owns the magazines, told me. And Michael Kors advertising campaigns tend generally to portray the habits of a singularly narrow demographic.
As Kors tries to reach a wider audience but also retain its luxe status, it also faces a challenge in identifying the right mix of merchandise. For example, Idol told investors Thursday that a bucket bag in its most recent line didn¡¯t sell very well. The bucket style was incorporated because that shape was hot among high-fashion types, and yet it just didn¡¯t catch on with a broader audience of aspirational shoppers.¡°Every now and then, you¡¯re going to get it wrong,¡± Idol told investors.Kors is going to have to learn from those kinds of mistakes ¡ª and the mistakes made by its rival, Coach ¡ª if it is to keep growing.
As its products gained buzz and the IPO gave it an infusion of capital to grow, Kors expanded aggressively, its store count mushrooming from 231 in 2011 to 703 in 2014. The company was consistently seeing stratospheric comparable sales growth; in the second quarter of fiscal 2013, that figure soared as high as 45 percent.
The irony, of course, is that the kin michael kors watch cheap sale d of woman the ads depict is not the kind of woman who is going to buy a $300 bag, because she has a closet full of $5,000 ones at home. There is a perverse logic to the emergence of Michael Kors as the ultimate aspirational brand during the country¡¯s most dramatic period of social inequality. In New York, census figures released this week indicated an ever more expansive divide between rich and poor. One of fashion¡¯s cruelest means of trickery, one of its prevailing intoxicants, is to offer the illusio michael kors bag cheap sale n of wealth when thn of wealth when the reality is too distant to inhabit.