Boutique shelves are empty, premium brands are less and less willing to send fresh collections to our wild and cold land, and more modest brands take their place on boutique shelves. These are the conditions in which the premium segment retail lives in 2023. You have to get out, and it doesn’t always work out honestly. In any case, the buyer suffers, and ordinary sales assistants too. To uncover the inside of the work of premium stores, we sent our agent to the most canonical place for Moscow dandies and fashionistas – TSUM.
What things are sold in TSUM
After the start of the sanctions war with the West, duties on the import of luxury goods worth more than 1,000 euros into Russia increased, and the European Union also banned our compatriots from exporting them for up to 300 euros. Hence the lack of things from the latest collections. Often, items from collections even 5-6 years old are put up for sale, which is completely unsuitable for those who are chasing fashionable and fresh. Moreover, the cost of such things reaches the level of new collections.
Clothing brands in TSUM
However, one sale at exorbitant prices of unsold items is not enough. After all, after you have sold them, you need to take a place on the shelf with something, and now it is difficult to do this. The supply of new collections has come to naught, we have to look for new brands. Let not as famous as Prada and Gucci, but without any problems passing through customs.
One of them is the Korean brand GOEN.J. Sellers tell buyers about him as a rising star on the catwalks. They say that the designer is gaining popularity, and has already been presented at Paris Fashion Week, but in personal conversations, reviews about the brand are completely different:
But the prices even for such little-known brands are at the level of heaven. In the assortment of the department store, we managed to find things for which the prices on the official website and on the TSUM website differ by a multiple, for example, a sheepskin coat on the website of a Moscow department store costs almost 300 thousand, and on the brand website – a modest 100 and a few kopecks.
Ordering things
Buyers who do not want to overpay hundreds of thousands of rubles to buyers come to the rescue. This is the name of people who buy clothes abroad, transport them through customs, and then sell them to customers here at a premium. About 30 years ago these were called shuttles. In the range of their services, including bypassing duties on luxury imports.
The buyer’s commission under such a scheme is 15 percent for an order amount of up to 200 thousand rubles and ten percent if the amount is more. And even with such an extra charge, things turn out to be much cheaper than in the Central Department Store.
Elite second hand
The tricks that TSUM uses cannot go unnoticed by the buyers themselves. Our agent notes that many customers discuss among themselves that the central department store is no longer the same, and openly laugh at the incredible markups:
Probably, the leadership of the Central Department Store is aware of the gravity of the problems hanging over the country’s main fashion department store and is struggling with them as best they can. Recently opened a second hand store. The move is interesting: if you compare the cost of a new item from the manufacturer and on the counter of the Central Department Store is not difficult, then determining how much a used item should cost is already an order of magnitude more difficult. However, as practice shows, the buyer is on any product – even at the most insane cost.
It is not surprising that in such cases, the owners of the country’s largest brand store decided to withdraw money from Russia to the West and began to restructure the business.