
You know what we hate? When you buy the hottest jeans, shoes, bag, sunglasses, shirt, belt, whatever, only to see someone else with it……and find out they got it on sale. Such a buzzkill.
Want to know what’s worse? The fact that most fashion brands are owned by parent companies. This makes sense, as the parent company provides fianancial stability, so that the brand can afford to take risks with designs and expand into other lines (fragrance, diffusion, home, children’s). There are millions of other reasons why this works, but we’ll save those for Management 100.
What gets annoying is that many of these brands are produced with the same material and equipment as the other brands in their parent company. So if you buy a pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans, would you be happy if you found out the denim was actually a slightly nicer version of Lee’s? Both Seven and Lee jeans are owned by the same parent company, VF Corp. Although we aren’t sure that they use the same denim, the thought that we are really getting Lee at Seven pricing is understandably irritating.
How about more high end designer brands? Some Bottega Veneta woven belts cost a whopping $540 dollars, whereas sibling company YSL sells belts from $395. While this price difference isn’t huge, we’d like to believe that when we pay for BV, we’re getting BV and not YSL styled differently. The “Made in Italy” heat stamps on Bottega belts do look suspiciously like those on YSL and Gucci belts….not surprising, considering all three are owned by French luxury conglomerate PPR.
Or how about Diesel? Would you feel comfortable paying $745 for a pair of Dsquared2 jeans that were made with Diesel materials? Granted, the styles may be different, but isn’t the whole point that you pay for quality and style? So if we’re shelling out a month’s rent for a pair of jeans (which, by the way, we would never do; $745 for denim is obscene), we would expect Dsquared2 to be styled differently and made better.
What do you think? Would you rock a Valentino shirt if it was produced in a Hugo Boss factory?