Ouai founder Jen Atkin’s 10-year-old editorial hair care site Mane Addicts has effectively shut down.

The company eliminated all editorial roles related to Mane Addicts this week. Some non-editorial roles were eliminated as well, with an estimated total of five layoffs, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Mane Addicts was founded by Atkin in 2014 as both an editorial site dedicated to hair care and a talent agency. Her hair-care brand Ouai soon followed in 2015, and was sold to Procter & Gamble in 2021.

In 2023, Atkin’s new beauty venture, hair tools brand Mane, launched for sale on the Mane Addicts editorial site. In addition to editorial content, the Mane Addicts team began working on brand content for Mane. Mane launched at Sephora in February 2024.

In early 2024, Mane was moved to a separate standalone e-commerce site. The Mane Addicts site is still online, but official communications by the company’s representatives refer to it as “Mane (previously known as Mane Addicts).” According to a representative for Mane Addicts, its talent agency portion was transitioned to Highlight Artists, which was announced in March 2024 with Atkin, Justine Marjan and Mary Phillips as co-founders.

Learn more:

Celebrity Hair Guru Jen Atkin Says to Tune out Bad Advice and Hire Women

The entrepreneur behind Ouai and Mane Addicts shares her experiences going from hairstyling assistant to A-list beauty influencer and brand builder.

It’s been nearly two years since the US introduced a strict ban on products from China’s cotton-producing Xinjiang region over forced labour concerns. And yet cotton from the area is still everywhere, according to a study published this week.

Traces of the restricted raw material were found in nearly a fifth of products analysed by researchers using isotopic testing, which matches a fibre’s chemical fingerprint to the geography where it was grown — a kind of forensic CSI for fabric.

“Think of the products in your closet, or somewhere in the kitchen or shoe cabinet; one in five of those products could have Xinjiang cotton,” said Meilin Wan, vice president of textiles at Applied DNA Sciences, one of the firms behind the new study. “It’s the elephant in the room that there is so much of this cotton in the world’s supply chain.”

The findings highlight just how challenging it remains to effectively police fashion’s supply chains, even as governments step up the pressure on brands to do just that. While the US has flagged plans to ratchet up enforcement, Europe is moving ahead with its own ban on goods linked to forced labour. Meanwhile, by the end of the year sanctions against Russia and new EU deforestation rules will amp up scrutiny on supply chains for raw materials from diamonds to leather and palm oil.

If cotton is a testing ground, the industry has a tough road ahead.

The raw material has become a flashpoint in the controversy around Xinjiang, where the US government says China is committing genocide against Uighur Muslims. China denies the allegations, which have made cotton from the country (almost all of which is grown in Xinjiang) a liability for any company looking to do business with the massive US market.

Brands have scrambled to rejig supply chains and invest in traceability technologies to prove their products are free from links to the region and so avoid costly delays or costlier seizures at the border. But while imports of raw cotton from Xinjiang into the US have fallen, the volume making its way into the country in products hasn’t shifted much, said Shawn Bhimani, assistant professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University. Instead, supply chains have become more convoluted, making it harder to trace, he said.

US officials have stopped more than 1,400 shipments of apparel and footwear with a combined value of $56 million since the import ban was brought into force in June of 2022, according to the latest official data. More than half of those were shipped from countries other than China. Most of the cotton traced back to Xinjiang in this week’s study, which examined more than 800 items ranging from clothes and shoes to cotton swabs, had been blended with fibres from other regions.

What can brands do about all this? Continued investment in more sophisticated supply-chain management tools and compliance capabilities can help. So can closer relationships with suppliers and greater collaboration and transparency across the market.

Meanwhile, pressure is continuing to grow, with the the US planning to escalate its scrutiny of textile imports.

THE NEWS IN BRIEF

FASHION, BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY

L Catterton to take Tod’s private. The LVMH-linked firm is betting its $545 million stake in the Italian shoemaker will yield the double-digit returns private equity typically seeks. L Catterton has offered €43 a share.

Ferragamo sales fell 17 percent in the first quarter. Revenues totalled €227 million ($244.5 million), below analyst expectations of €237 million according to a LSEG consensus. Performance was impacted by continued volatility in the Chinese market, as well as a persisting weakness in wholesale and travel retail, said CEO Marco Gobbetti.

Tapestry misses quarterly revenue expectations. Tapestry’s net sales came in at $1.48 billion in the quarter ended March 30, compared to analysts’ average estimate of $1.50 billion, according to LSEG data. The company is contending with slowed demand for its handbags and accessories in the face of high inflation.

Prada heir says the group is open to more M&A. His comments fuelled speculation about the future of the Italian luxury industry, where many companies are still independent and family-controlled. Prada has made a string of investments in manufacturing suppliers in Italy over recent years as it works to increase internal production and shorten its supply chain.

Richemont acquires Italian jeweller Vhernier. While the jeweller is small, Richemont has a history of turning small brands into larger successes. Vhernier has annual revenues in the €50-100 million range, according to Bernstein estimates.

Zalando returns to growth thanks to premium brands. Quarterly gross merchandise volume rose 1.3 percent to €3.27 billion ($3.52 billion) from €3.23 billion a year earlier. Revenue from Zalando’s business-to-business service was up 13 percent at €215 million.

Puma returns to sales growth in the Americas despite a ‘volatile’ market. The German sportswear group’s shares rose 4 percent. Puma’s wholesale business fell by 2.9 percent, its direct to consumer sales grew by 13.5 percent, helping its gross profit margin improve to 47.5 percent.

Boohoo dives into debt as losses soar and sales slump. The company cut more than 1,000 jobs and dived into debt after sales slumped 13 percent amid heavy competition from the Chinese online seller Shein. Boohoo’s share price fell more than 3 percent.

Shopify falls on surprise loss. The company posted a loss of $273 million after a profit of $68 million a year earlier. The loss per share was 21 cents on revenue of $1.86 billion, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

Allbirds’ sales dip continues in 2024 and losses narrow. Revenue dropped 28 percent year over year to $39 million in the first quarter of the year as demand for its sneakers remains weak. The company’s revenue will likely drop as much as 25 percent year over year to $190 million in 2024.

Warby Parker’s sales and profits soar in 2024. Revenue jumped 16 percent year over year to $200 million in the first quarter of the year as other brands in the sector struggle to grow sales. The eyewear seller expects full year sales to climb as much as 13 percent to $761 million in 2024.

Canada’s competition bureau opens greenwashing investigation of Lululemon. Climate-advocacy group Stand.earth asked the agency to investigate whether Lululemon’s “Be Planet” messaging misled consumers. It alleged the brand benefitted from a “carefully constructed image of environmental sustainability and wellness” that conflicted with its fast-growing emissions.

US online retail spending up 7 percent. Sticky inflation has forced shoppers in various categories to trade down to more affordable products. Total online spending in the period from January to April 2024 grew to $331.6 billion, compared to $309.8 billion in the same period last year.

Thousands of shoppers swapped London for the EU since ‘tourist tax.’ New analysis shows that 162,000 tourists from outside the European Union sought refunds on VAT exclusively in Britain in 2019. The tourists who have shifted their tax-free shopping from Britain have also ramped up their spending from an average of €2,900 ($3,622) per person in 2019 to €3,800 in 2023.

Levi Strauss ends lawsuit against Brunello Cucinelli over trademarked tab. Levi notified a federal judge in Oakland, California on Tuesday that it was dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again. Settlement talks began shortly after Levi sued in January.

THE BUSINESS OF BEAUTY

Beautycounter will not return until late 2024. The company will be on hiatus while it establishes a sustainable path to return as a new company, BoF confirmed. Gregg Renfrew went on to say that when she purchased Beautycounter back, its economic situation was worse than expected, and it lacked enough funds to pay down debt.

Coty sales rose 8 percent, an increase led by prestige beauty. Coty’s third-quarter e-commerce revenue growth was nearly 20 percent, helped by new launches such as Cosmic Kylie Jenner and Marc Jacobs Daisy. The company’s shares were up about 3 percent in aftermarket trading.

Kenvue beats quarterly profit estimates and will cut 4 percent of jobs. The company’s skin health and beauty segment recorded a 5 percent drop in first-quarter sales to $1.05 billion. The New Jersey-based company posted first-quarter revenue of $3.89 billion, beating estimates of $3.79 billion.

PEOPLE

Gap names PepsiCo exec as global marketing officer. Fabiola Torres’ new role is new for the company, and will oversee the brand’s marketing, creative, visual merchandising, store experience and operations teams. Prior to PepsiCo, Torres has served leadership roles at Nike and Apple.

MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

TikTok sues US government to block divest-or-ban law. The company has argued that the law will stifle free speech and hurt creators and small business owners who benefit economically from the platform. TikTok has asked the court to issue a judgment that the law violates the Constitution and to prohibit the Justice Department from enforcing it.

Condé Nast and Union strike a deal avoiding Met Gala disruption. The new contract includes $3.6 million in wage increases, and eight weeks of severance for laid-off employees, according to a statement from the NewsGuild of New York, the union’s organising body.

TikTok to label AI-generated images and video from OpenAI and elsewhere. The company said would adopt “Content Credentials,” a digital watermark that denotes how images were created and edited. The Content Credential technology was spearheaded by Adobe but is open for other companies to use.

Compiled by Yola Mzizi.

So far, the 21st Century has been good to “big luxury” players. The Great Recession in the late 2000s threw luxury brands a curveball. But they soon bounced back as new wealth creation, notably in China, continued to generate legions of shoppers eager to signal their arrival.

In 2000, the world had 15 million millionaires; by 2022 that number had roughly quadrupled to 60 million. At the same time, appetite for luxury goods grew fast among middle-class aspirants and the industry met them halfway with new product categories like streetwear that added a novel element to the marketing machine at the heart of luxury’s business model.

Through glittering megastores, celebrity-fuelled campaigns and shrewd strategies like category segregation that confined image-driving products such as evening dresses to high price ranges, ensuring they were unattainable to most, while pitching others, such as beauty, at price points for the masses, luxury brands have long managed to sell “exclusive” goods by the millions.

The marketing was so effective that as brands produced ever-higher volumes of goods, including millions of units of sneakers and sweatshirts, they were able to sacrifice quality standards to help meet growing demand and pad profit margins, all while deploying price hikes that far outpaced inflation, without triggering a backlash.

As long as the world kept producing newly minted millionaires and aspirants had access to cheap credit, the sales kept coming. But things have changed.

After a period of post-pandemic exuberance, aspirational consumers have sharply pulled back on luxury shopping, hit by rising interest rates and a cost of living crisis, while China’s millionaire-making machine has stalled, sharpening competition for the smaller pool of wealthier clients who are still spending.

In part to protect margins, brands have pushed prices higher still. The average price of luxury goods in Europe has increased by 52 percent since 2019, according to HSBC.

But it’s safe to say, the price hikes have not gone down well. They’ve succeeded in pushing aspirants further away. And though the rich have the means to keep shopping, nobody likes to be taken for a ride: on social media, critics now routinely discuss rising prices and reports of deteriorating quality and wonder aloud whether luxury brands are worth it.

The bottom line: prices are up, quality is down and social media has made it plain for all to see. In a slowing market, that’s not a great place to be.

Eventually things will bounce back, but marketing stories are hard to build and easy to break. Big luxury brands need to reinvest in quality and reexamine their pricing — or risk damaging their carefully crafted mythology.

Eugene Rabkin is the editor of StyleZeitgeist magazine.

The views expressed in Op-Ed pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Business of Fashion.

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Chanel Scales spent three years dreaming up window displays for a global fast-fashion retailer’s stores across the Midwest. She hoped her skillful styling of mannequins and clothing-and-accessories setups would someday lead to a corporate job where she could set the visual strategy for the chain’s locations nationwide.

But, every time she tried to make the leap, she hit a dead end.

“I’d have meetings with my store manager to let them know ‘I’ve been at the store level for a while and I would like to move up,” she said. “Nothing ever really came from it.”

Scales quit seven years ago, and is now a clothing designer. Over the years, she’s heard from former colleagues who stuck it out longer, only to eventually share her disillusionment about ever advancing into a corporate career.

The post-pandemic labour shortage has forced retailers to get serious about improving working conditions in stores. Companies have raised pay, expanded benefits and rebranded sales associates as brand ambassadors and style advisors.

Most of these measures are designed to convince store employees to stay in their roles longer. But though many companies talk up training programmes and tuition assistance designed to give low-level workers a leg up on the corporate ladder, many retail employees who spoke with The Business of Fashion say they see no viable path from their stores to headquarters.

Historically, that wasn’t the case. While never an easy transition, the fashion industry is full of executives who got their start selling shoes, stocking shelves or building window displays. Today, more corporate roles, even at the entry level, require advanced degrees and specialised skills that aren’t easily obtained while ringing up customers — more supply chain experts and digital marketers, fewer buyers and merchandisers.

But fashion companies overlook what their sales associates could bring to the table at their own risk. Retail’s frontline workers directly handle customer issues, manage merchandise returns, and see firsthand what resonates with shoppers. Their feedback can be crucial to shaping corporate strategy and driving revenue growth. What’s more, retail’s corporate ranks are predominantly white men but its stores are far more diverse when it comes to age, gender, and race.

“The store staff is extremely close to the customer and the consumer experience — getting them in corporate is going to help you become more customer-centred in your strategies,” said Kyle Rudy, a senior client partner at Kirk Palmer Associates.

On the Front Lines

Often, training programmes run by brands and retailers cater to recent college graduates and other professionals looking to transition into the sector. They offer a crash course in areas like fashion merchandising, inventory and customer experience. Other programmes, such as the National Retail Federation’s Rise Up, offer training (to anyone looking to break into the retail industry) in areas such as marketing and logistics, but doesn’t guarantee a corporate job at the end.

A few companies specifically target the store-to-corporate pipeline. Vans and Timberland parent VF Corp. launched Powering Potential in 2021. The programme provides training, mentorship — and a guaranteed job in areas like marketing, product and merchandising — for store associates who participate.

Powering Potential serves multiple purposes: attracting and retaining store associates who want to transition into corporate roles, but also helping VF gather more firsthand intel on its customer needs and diversify its corporate talent pool, said Lauren Guthrie, VF’s vice president of global IDEA & talent development. (IDEA stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Action.)

“Our richest diversity is in our retail stores — and that’s not just demographic diversity, but cognitive and experiential diversity, too,” Guthrie said.

To date, Powering Potential has graduated 21 employees, with two thirds moving into permanent corporate positions. Those who opted out often did so because they weren’t able to relocate to the company’s headquarters in Denver, Guthrie said.

Among its success stories is a sales associate who accepted an apprenticeship with Vans. During the programme, she helped the brand’s women’s skate team identify and correct some of its blindspots when it comes to marketing to women in stores. She landed a full-time role with the same team.

“We’ve had a few retail apprentices who’ve come in with bones to pick and rightfully so — they’ve been at the end of the line where things aren’t connecting or resonating or where they feel we’re lacking in authenticity,” Guthrie said.

Rebuilding the Pipeline

The best retailers have integrated the notion of developing store talent into their “larger talent vision,” Guthrie said.

Most fashion firms will need to hone in on the kinds of corporate roles where store sales teams can offer the most value and have the smoothest transition, Rudy said. Often, though not always, that means marketing, e-commerce and merchandising, he said.

Companies also need to set realistic expectations. Though her managers may have indicated otherwise, Scales’ visual merchandising role was never likely to lead to a corporate job, as even at the highest level it’s usually a hands-on position, said Liza Amlani, principal and co-founder of Retail Strategy Group, an advisory.

“To transition to corporate, companies are looking for more of that selling experience — the ability to work with numbers and data,” Amlani said.

Ensuring that there are enough viable opportunities for retail associates is part of the reason VF has kept the number of apprentices it accepts relatively low, Guthrie said.

“We’re being cautious because the last thing we want to do is bring folks in that we don’t have the potential of converting to full time roles at the end,” she said.

Even in the post-pandemic work-from-home era, most corporate roles will require relocation to the company’s headquarters or frequent travel to and from other corporate sites, Rudy said. So if companies aren’t willing to be flexible in this regard, they should be upfront with candidates and also recognise that their store-to-corporate pipeline may remain weaker in stores farther from the headquarters.

Whatever the tinkering required to pull these programmes together, the results are worthwhile, Guthrie said.

“We’re all trying to figure out the right way of motivating, inspiring, advancing our talent … and it requires vision and certainly investment to make programmes like this real,” she said. “But, for us, it’s a massive opportunity to do more. We’ve scratched the tip of the iceberg.”