Hanna Andersson just walked onto Amazon with a catalog you mostly can't buy anywhere else. Clever hedge, or a very expensive experiment? Fashion Business Daily. Today, Hoka's trying to own a marathon before the starting gun. Van Cleef is letting AI play shopkeeper. And Knix has been obsessing over underwear. First, what's actually sitting on that Amazon shelf. This one's from Modern Retail:
Children’s clothing company Hanna Andersson is making its official debut on Amazon. The Oregon-based brand will launch an Amazon storefront on Oct. 1. Notably, 90% of the brand’s inventory on Amazon will be unique to the platform. To create its assortment, Hanna Andersson went back to its archives and sorted through its best-selling prints, fabrics and silhouettes.
So the biggest brand move on my sheet today is a kids' pajama company opening an Amazon storefront. But, okay, they went into the archives for it. Best-selling prints, old silhouettes, and 90% of it you won't find on their own site. Somebody actually curated that. Somebody also ran the margin math, hopefully. Archive reprints mean the design cost is already sunk, and that matters once Amazon takes its referral and fulfillment fees. The 90% is company-stated, and so is 'incremental growth.' I want the reprint margin after Amazon's cut. My friction's the shopper, though. Deep-cut archive prints are a fan move. The mom Lapic's describing needs a Spirit Week outfit by tomorrow. She typed 'kids pajamas' into a search bar. She has no idea that's a beloved print from five years ago. She doesn't need to know. She needs it by Thursday. Playwear and sleepwear go on Amazon, the sixty-plus new family pajama prints stay on the DTC site. Clean split. What I'd watch is whether she ever shows up at Hanna-Me-Downs, where the company says unique buyers are up nearly 20%. This one's from Modern Retail:
Hoka’s newest campaign marks its latest attempt to corner the loyalty of running enthusiasts across New York City in the run-up to the city’s marathon in just over a month (Nov. 2). It’s a sign of how important the running community has become to major sports apparel brands, including Hoka and rivals such as Nike, New Balance, Brooks, Adidas and On as they compete to carve out and keep their share of the long-term running revival.
So Hoka doesn't even sponsor the New York marathon, and it's still trying to own the calendar for it. There's a sponsored Strava challenge, digital billboards scoring the boroughs against each other, a block party this Saturday. The race is basically a drop date now. And the one figure I'd actually want, the cost? Allie Tsavdarides declined to share it. Paid TikTok and Meta, six creator partnerships, citywide out-of-home, a block party. I'd like to see that as a slice of Hoka's revenue before anybody calls it loyalty. Yeah, but a leaderboard doesn't move a single pair if the shoe's mid. Nobody's grinding through mile eighteen in Hokas because Queens beat Brooklyn on a billboard. It's the foam. You still need footwear people actually want. Fine, so measure it. Over fifty-nine thousand finishers last year, and Nike, On, New Balance, Brooks, Adidas are all chasing the same feet before November second. If Hoka's share of that start corral doesn't budge, those were some very expensive scorecards. From Glossy:
A Shopify report from this summer found that half of people in the country and two-thirds of luxury customers are now using AI for inspiration and product discovery. As a result, every customer, luxury or not, is expecting a high level of personalization at every stage, according to Bouzalis.
Van Cleef's AVP, Crystal Bouzalis, says the friend's tip, the social scroll, and the store visit all have to feel like one relationship. Honestly? The most personalized tech Van Cleef has ever had is a sales advisor who remembers you bought the Alhambra in onyx. Also, note the stage. This was Perfect Corp's own tech forum, and Perfect Corp sells AI tools. The number everyone's leaning on is Shopify's: half of U.S. shoppers, two-thirds of luxury customers using AI for inspiration. That's a survey of habits. Tells me nothing about sell-through. And Carney's line, that the journey 'isn't linear'? That's the Hanna Andersson problem we just hit. Somebody lands on you from a search bar with zero loyalty. AI can surface the dress. It can't make the dress worth buying. Half agree. What I want from The Wires is one metric off a personalized feed on FashWire or GlossWire. Basket size, repeat rate, anything. Until there's a number attached, 'really personal' is just a panel quote. From Anna Hensel at Modern Retail:
All in all, it took about 18 months and 31 prototypes to develop the seamless cotton underwear. In early trials, the product would burn after being placed on the bonding machine. In other instances, the product initially would look fine after being bonded, and then Power and her team would discover tiny holes in the fabric.
Thirty-one prototypes. Eighteen months. And in the early trials the cotton was literally burning on the bonding machine. Honestly, that's the most I've liked an underwear story in years. That's how you earn a price point. It's also a cost line. Eighteen months of design time, 1,700 hours of wear testing, a proprietary combed-cotton fabric, and that's all before one pair sold. That money has to come back through the register now. Right, and look at it next to the Hoka piece we just did. One brand buys the moment with a marathon campaign, the other spends it in the lab fixing tiny holes in bonded cotton. I know which one I'd rather wear. Wear-testing hours aren't sell-through. It launched last week, so what I want is where Invisible Cotton's priced against the core leak-proof line, and whether that bonding process is actually hard to copy or was just hard the first time. If you're enjoying Fashion Business Daily, please subscribe or leave a review wherever you're listening. Reviews help other people find the show, and they help us keep digging into the business behind the brands.
We're watching for Hanna Andersson's Amazon storefront to go live October 1, and Hoka's New York City block party on October 3, ahead of the November 2 New York City Marathon. Links to every story are in the show notes, so check out the ones that caught your eye. That's Fashion Business Daily for today. We'll be back tomorrow. This is a Lantern Podcast.