Open-source luxury menswear

It’s easy to make clothing.  It’s one of the world’s oldest industries, and production houses are everywhere.  But what’s harder, and what sets luxury apart from ordinary, is the ability to break the whole down into its fine details, to develop expertise in each, and bring them all together into one single, uncompromising whole.

Last year I researched and ghost-authored a book for the Boston Consulting Group titled Globality: Competing with Everyone, Everywhere for Everything.  The book will be coming out in June.  One of the things we talk a lot about in the book is how the world’s best brands today are the unified, public face for very complex supply chains where stuff gets pulled together from the world’s four corners.  (Boy, time to retire that metaphor, eh Columbus?)  

You see it all the time in technology companies.  Apple famously “designs in California; assembles in China” — as the back of every iPod proclaims.  Foxconn, the Longhua, China-based manufacturing firm that cranks out the popular music player, is a de facto global logistics hub: over 400 components from suppliers the world over converge on their assembly line.  

The same is true in luxury goods.  In her recent book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Dana Thomas documents the extent to which global luxury houses, from Prada to Dior to Armani and Hugo Boss, have relocated large chunks of manufacturing and materials sourcing to China and other low-cost countries.

But like Apple, Prada product is more than the site where it’s assembled.  Final assembly is just one factor in product quality, and the simplest to send off-shore — it’s mostly machine-work anyway.  Prada may stitch in Shanghai, but their stylists are in Milan.  Buttons and clasps may be laser-etched in Tokyo.  And their trademark-embossed leather, a carefully-controlled commodity, is probably stamped at a wholly-owned factory and exported to production shops with scrooge-like audit trails.

So the challenge for Moniker is to duplicate the sophisticated sourcing habits of high-end brand houses.  Some new entrants into fashion figure they can go to China, buy something cheap, and resell it back home at a profit.  That’s been done already.  

And it’s boring. 

That’s not luxury; that’s commodity.  Luxury-level quality is hard.  It comes from sourcing the best components globally and then bringing them together to some optimal place for final, skilled workmanship.  When you have done that, then you have a platform upon which you can build a brand and sell a product at a substantial premium.

Or, if you want to, you can open it up.  

 Welcome to open source luxury.