Underwear — the final frontier

malls and shopping centres have become beacons of boredom, monuments to mediocrity and havens of ho-hum.” He says typical fashion buyers are driven by sales. If it’s not going to sell in droves, then it’s not worth buying.

So a store will buy hundreds of the same item, in different colours and sizes. Other stores do the same and “voila . . . mass boredom”.

E-tailers don’t have to stock hundreds of any one item. They can carry multiple items without tying up lots of capital and floor space. So they can afford to stock the next cool, new and unique product, making the shopping experience so much more exciting than trawling through sameold stores.

The analyst probably has a point. But I’m yet to be convinced Amazon can conquer the final frontier: lingerie.

Amazon this month announced plans to start selling its own line of competitively priced women’s intimate apparel, competing head-on with industry stalwarts PVH Corp (Calvin Klein) and L Brands (Victoria’s Secret).

Lingerie has been one of the last categories to give way to e-commerce because fit, feel, look and lift are hard to assess online. But Amazon thinks its US$10 bras can compete with Victoria’s Secret’s US$40 lacy numbers, and customers won’t mind buying lingerie the same way as they buy books and electronics. We’ll see.

Victoria’s Secret’s stores and models could never be described as boring or ho-hum. Hopefully, that factor alone might ensure survival in the last bastion of apparel retail.