The Cancellation Of The Show Is Inevitable, But How Much Room Is There For Women's Underwear Industry?

In July 30, 2019, according to Shanina Shaik, the secret show, which had been held for 24 years, was cancelled this year. This news undoubtedly impacted the whole underwear, especially the ladies' profession. Why is the cancellation of the secret show? What does this mean for women's underwear industry? How much room for development of the underwear industry? What are the future trends?

The decline of ratings is the inevitable choice for the cancellation of the secret show.

Since its beginning in 1995, the "Wei Ming show" has been developing into a culture after 24 years. From model to dress, and then to style, the show has been quietly leading and changing the trend of underwear, attracting worldwide attention. Now, the news of the secret show has caused a great sensation in the global women's underwear industry. But the cancellation of the secret show is not without signs. It can be seen from the ratings of the secret show.

Since the beginning of 2015, the ratings of the show have declined significantly. In 2018, the show reached the lowest rating in history. On ABC television's first broadcast day, only 3 million 300 thousand spectators, of whom 18-49 years of age rated the ratings from 1.5 in 2017 to 0.9, refreshed the lowest record last year.

At the same time, the cost of hosting the exhibition is still high. It is understood that the annual fee of the venue is 20 million dollars, which is the most expensive show in the fashion circle. However, in the case of declining ratings and limited sales promotion, it is obviously not economical to organize a high priced exhibition. Perhaps Victoria's Secret is also consciousness. In today's era of Internet based information dissemination, TV shows are not very suitable for fashion shows, so they decide to cancel the show.

The market share declined sharply, and its growth was worrying.

In addition to the decline in the flow of the secret show, the underwear brand has been deeply affected by various negative events in recent years, such as the retirement of veteran angels, denial of transsexuals and the rhetoric and sex scandals of large scale models. It also caused a sharp decline in the market share of the company and hit the growth of its business performance.

In terms of market share, according to the report issued by Coresight Research, in 2018, the share of women in the women's underwear market in the United States decreased from 31.7% in 2013 to 24%, while the market share of emerging competitors such as Thirdlove and Savage x Fenty increased sharply from 36.2% in 2013 to 36.2%. In fact, the United States has always been the main battleground for Victoria's Secret underwear sales, and the sharp decline in its market share means that its competitiveness in other markets may also be weakening at the same time.

In terms of sales performance, the growth rate of sales volume of general merchandise also declined in the past 2011-2018 years, and the first negative growth occurred in 2017. In 2018, its sales continued to decline, down 0.2% from the previous year, to $7 billion 375 million. It is expected that in the short term, there will be a big improvement in its growth.

Wei Mi Cheng's performance was "a drag" and a large number of stores were closed.

As a core brand, it has become the biggest bottle of L Brands of the parent company. L Brands, the parent company of the company, has made clear in its earnings report that the company's overall business situation has been hit by the poor performance. On the one hand, in terms of company performance, sales, operating income and net profit of L Brands declined in 2018, with revenue falling by more than 30%.

On the other hand, the stock price of L Brands has been declining continuously since 2014. As of August 5, 2019, the closing price of the parent company was $23.77, or 76.28%, compared with $100.22 in November 4, 2015.

Therefore, in the face of the weakness of the growth of the company and the performance of the parent company, L Brands also took measures to close a large number of stores. For example, there are 1143 stores in the United States and Canada, but between February 3, 2018 and February 2, 2019, only 3 new stores were opened, and 30 stores were closed. In the British area, there were 79 stores in the UK, including 23 new outlets and 4 stores closed. In February 28, 2019, Victoria announced that it would close 53 stores in North America in 2019 to maintain sustained business development.

The future of underwear industry is still vast. Asia Pacific is the largest market.

Despite the poor sales performance of Victoria's Secret, this does not represent the development of the global women's underwear industry. In fact, the women's underwear market has been known as "the last piece of cake in the clothing industry", and the future global women's underwear market still has great room for development. According to Euromonitor data, in 2018, the size of the global lingerie market, including underwear, was about $83 billion 300 million, an increase of 6.25% over 2017. At the same time, Euromonitor estimated that the average annual composite growth rate of global underwear for women will be around 5% in 2018-2023 years, and the market size in 2023 is expected to reach about $94 billion.

From the regional market perspective, the Asia Pacific region is the world's largest market for women's underwear. In 2017, the market scale accounted for 45.33% of the total market share. In addition, Western Europe and North America accounted for more than 15% of the total market share, while Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and other markets had relatively small market share.

Grasp the development trend of women's underwear, and gain the brand's continuous growth force.

Faced with such a wide market space, many underwear brands, including Wei Ming, want to stand out and achieve sustainable competitiveness, we must firmly grasp the development trend of underwear industry.

First, in the regional market layout, we should attach importance to the Chinese market. From the perspective of the growth of women's underwear size, the market growth of Chinese women's underwear is obviously faster than that of the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, France, Japan and other countries in the 2012-2017 years. China's growth rate is 11%, much higher than that of the second tier Britain and the United States, while the growth rate of women's underwear industry in Italy and Japan has declined. We can see that China's underwear market has strong growth potential and the future development prospect is worth looking forward to.

Second, we should pay more attention to the comfort of underwear in the design of underwear products. In 2017, EBITED analyzed the sales of 80 underwear retailers including the world trade organization, and found that the sales of underwear and steel braced underwear were greatly reduced, while the sales of sports underwear and new type of non steel underwear were greatly increased. It can be seen that comfort is more and more beautiful than ever, becoming the first consideration for consumers to buy Women's underwear.

Third, in marketing and channels, we should actively expand online channels. There is no doubt that in today's Internet era, the channels for consumption to acquire information and shopping are becoming more and more online. On the one hand, in advertising and marketing, compared to print advertisements and TV advertisements, nowadays, the market acceptance of pop singer MV advertising implants, variety show and film and TV drama sponsorship, net red marketing and other new ways is even higher. On the other hand, in e-commerce sales, Internet underwear retailers such as Third Love, e-commerce giant Amazon and other traditional underwear brands have all set up the Internet underwear field to divide up the growth of the underwear industry.

To sum up, the development prospect of the global women's underwear industry is still broad, but the current development of Victoria's Secret is not optimistic. The reason for the cancellation of the "secret show" this year is directly due to the decline in TV ratings. The deeper reason is that in recent years, the product design, online marketing and undersales of the main markets in Europe and the United States, which are mainly sexy and beautiful, have also led to the weak sales of underwear, and it is difficult to pay the high cost of the exhibition. As a matter of fact, it also realized that its own development was insufficient. Especially in the market layout, it began to attach importance to the Chinese market. For example, in 2017, it hosted a "secret show" in Shanghai, and added new stores in many cities such as Hongkong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chengdu, Chongqing, Beijing and Suzhou. Author: Wu Xiangzhou