Burberry Continues to Embrace the Luxury Fashion-Technology Connection
Burberry has had a big week, thanks in no small part to its continued dedication to technology.
In addition to fairly routine orders of business for a fashion house of its size and reputation – like the Times Square launch of a makeup collection with Sephora with model Suki Waterhouse – the British luxury brand, identified worldwide by its signature tartan that adorns everything from scarves to the lining of its equally iconic trench coats, made two tech-focused announcements that demonstrate there is no slowing its long-held willingness to stake a claim in the tech world that other legacy brands have been slow to embrace.
First came Monday’s news that Burberry would be the first brand with their own global, dedicated channel on Apple’s fledgling streaming music service, the aptly named Apple Music. The partnership makes sense on a number of levels; Burberry has a long history of supporting British musicians – see also the continuing Burberry Acoustic project and CEO Christopher Bailey’s well-documented music obsession – and Apple has frequently behaved like it considers itself a luxury brand, now even explicitly positioning itself alongside luxury names like Hermes.
The biggest connection, of course, is the fact that Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s SVP of retail and online stores, was famously poached from her post as CEO at Burberry by the tech giant in 2013, one of the most prominent examples of the war for talent between fashion and technology companies.
But Burberry’s inroads into technology aren’t just built by convenience and upon existing relationships. This week also saw the announcement that the brand will debut its Spring 2016 collection on Snapchat. Unlike Misha Nonoo’s “Insta Show,” which replaced a traditional Fashion Week presentation, the Snapchat preview is an additional element, to be executed a day ahead of Burberry’s standard runway show during London Fashion Week. Users who follow Burberry on Snapchat will have access to footage of the collection for 24 hours before it disappears (like all content on the platform); once it’s gone, Burberry will continue to share video, including behind the scenes clips from the runway show. Snapchat will also aggregate user content captured at the runway show to populate one of its own Live Story features, also available for 24 hours.
Throw in the recently-launched online customizable Scarf Bar, plus Burberry’s history as the first to utilize Twitter’s “Buy” button, the Periscope broadcast of its “London in Los Angeles” show this past spring, and its well-maintained Instagram and Facebook pages, and the brand remains peerless in the luxury sector in terms of an unrelenting commitment to digital evolution.
So what’s the payoff, aside from a thumbs up from the tech world? In addition to huge consumer engagement to the tune of 100 million impressions for the Periscope broadcast alone – a record-setter – Burberry’s financial outlook looks decidedly optimistic. Just this week, The Motley Fool cited Burberry as a favorite growth stock.
A direct correlation between tech engagement and financial viability may be somewhat difficult to prove decisively, but in certainly can’t hurt to have that many eyes on your brand in an increasingly crowded marketplace. And that’s a luxury that being an early adopter often affords.
