Can you spot allsaints.com massimodutti.com whistles.com which leather jacket’s from a supermarket?
by Fiona McIntosh OTHER GEMS TO PICK UP WITH YOUR GROCERIES
THE real leather is soft, with a stylish matte grey finish, the cut is fitted but not too tight and the stud details are catwalk-worthy. But the most extraordinary thing of all about this biker jacket is not just the price — a surprisingly affordable £95 — but that you can pop it in your trolley with your salmon fillets and fabric conditioner.
The jacket will be available to buy from 191 Sainsbury’s stores, and online, from today. It is the new hero piece in Sainsbury’s Tu Premium range which also includes, for the first time ever in a British supermarket, a £30 cream shirt made from real silk.
So now you can grab some silk with your milk . . . and the rest of your weekly shop.
It’s all part of the quiet gentrification of Sainsbury’s, transforming it into a onestop shop to lure the middle-class woman whose natural habitat is more Waitrose.
The evolution includes new concept stores in London which feature mini Habitat concessions (wood and marble cheeseboard for £30 or an Emerald velvet sofa for £1,600) and — wait for it — a sushi bar with Japanese chefs making fresh salmon Californian rolls and prawn maki.
But the most radical, and some would say exceedingly brave move, is the way Sainsbury’s is upping the ante on its fashion offering.
With swaggering confidence the supermarket has thrown down the gauntlet to upscale High Street fashion retailers LK Bennett, Hobbs and Whistles with its new Tu Premium collection.
The £95 biker jacket is a testcase in itself. Never before has Sainsbury’s sold such an expensive item of clothing. Until now the sweet spot was around £25.
While the price and quality of the biker jacket compares favourably to other High Street retailers — in many cases it’s half the price or less — the big question is, are we quite ready to shop for a new season wardrobe next to the threefor-two offer on quilted loo rolls?
If someone stops you to admire your jacket, are you really going to admit it came from Sainsbury’s?
Hannah Mallett, buying director of Sainsbury’s, is so confident the premium shopper is ready to drop almost £100 worth of grey leather into her supermarket trolley that she has already ordered a run of a navy version for February.
Her confidence stems from new Sainsbury’s research which has identified two kinds of premium shopper: The Confident Stylist and the The Inspiration Seeker, who want more than your average supermarket fare of cheap and cheerful disposable fashion.
These women are over 35, working, retired or at home with children, and are already doing their weekly shop in Sainsbury’s and favouring the cut-above-therest, Taste The Difference range.
So why not tempt them with status fashion, too? Hannah says: ‘They read fashion magazines, they are aware of new trends and want to look fashionable.
‘They don’t want cheap, throwaway fashion, they want classic pieces of great quality which they can keep in their wardrobe for a very long time. They are very much the kind of woman who shops at John Lewis. So that is what we are giving her — a collection focused on beautiful, elegant investment pieces.’
RATHER than blindly copying catwalk trends as many High Street stores do for the youth market, Sainsbury’s head of woman’s wear design, Toni Salters-Warner, says her team creates a small, 22-piece collection every four to six weeks for a customer who wants classic fashion rather than trendy looks.
They then keep the prices down by sourcing silks and leather from ethical Indian suppliers. ‘ Some trends just aren’t right for our customer,’ she says. ‘For example, for Spring 2017 we filtered through all the catwalk looks and picked out what’s relevant to her and then interpret it for her.’
Best- sellers from the first Tu Premium collection launched in September, included a camel wrap coat for £50 and a denim tencel shirt for £25. Looking at the new collection due out next week, you’d be hard-pressed to identify which store the pieces came from. The knee-high leather boots with an elegant block heel and rich, burgundy finish (£80) could fool even the sharpest fashion eye.
Extraordinarily, Toni says The Confident Stylist and the Inspira- tion Seeker shop for clothes up to 44 times a year — that’s almost once a week.
‘It could be a pair of socks or tights, or something as substantial as a new winter coat,’ she explains. But you can see why Sainsbury’s is targeting highspending, fashion- conscious women — they are gold dust.
In a UK clothing market worth £35.7 billion, 65 per cent of us buy from supermarkets — £1 in every £10 spent on clothing, footwear or accessories is in a supermarket, according to retail analyst Kantar.
This includes Tesco’s F&F range, asda’s George line and even Morrisons has recently launched a Nutmeg line for children. Supermarkets make it almost irresponsibly easy to load more stuff into our trolleys, with offers and the added temptation of store-card points.
I hate to think of the number of times I walked into my local store for a pint of milk and came out £40 poorer with a trolley full of clothing I didn’t know I needed.
Now it’s only going to get worse. But while many of us might fling the odd pair of socks or children’s underwear into our trolleys, seducing us with a serious coat purchase is quite another thing.
But as friend who spent £25 on a Tu black puffa jacket with a faux fur collar said: ‘I love it – but I’m never going to tell anyone where it came from.’