A.k.a. Brands offers its shoppers products that are on trend. Just don’t call those efforts fast fashion.
Being demand-led is important to the conglomerate, which has a portfolio of brands that includes Princess Polly, Culture Kings, Petal & Pup and Mnml.
“We’re certainly not fast fashion,” Ciaran Long, who officially became A.k.a. Brands CEO in January after being its interim chief since 2023, recently told an audience attending Shoptalk. “Quality is really important to our brands. It’s really important to our customers,” Long said.
A.k.a. Brands is fast to market and introduces around 150 new styles a week because its customers respond to newness, according to Long. However, for any of those styles, the company goes about 100 units deep and, as it sees success, will invest more on specific products.
For example, when the Petal & Pup Betina dress debuted in March 2024, the company introduced 100 units in two styles. With the popularity of the product, it has been expanded into seven different colorways, and the brand has sold around 15,000 units.
“We do a small bet on newness, and then chase back into it and just continue to build on that repeat business,” Long said.
McKinsey & Company wrote about the rise of on-demand fashion in 2019, as apparel companies began to respond to social media increasingly dictating trends. Instead of products being predicated on buyer forecasts, operations surrounding procurement, production and distribution are based on what customers want. On-demand production requires lower capital investment, produces smaller runs and enables a company to be more agile.
Currently, around 70% of A.k.a.’s product comes from repeat products, and therefore has a longer lead time. But when it comes to quicker turns, the timeframe is six to eight weeks. “With that model, it does allow you to be very much on trend,” Long said.
Long spoke in August with analysts about the company’s on-demand approach. “Core to Princess Polly’s successful merchandising strategy is its demand-driven test-and-repeat model, which enables the brand to frequently deliver new styles to its customers. This deeply resonates with Gen Z shoppers,” he said on a call.
The strategy of shorter turnaround times in order to leverage what is on trend is also being adopted by other retailers. Target revealed that it shortened its go-to-market cycle to eight weeks, down from 27, for trending items so they can reach store shelves faster.
“We’ve got to be obsessed with listening to the consumer. Obsessed with what’s going on in culture,” Target Chief Commercial Officer Rick Gomez said in January regarding the process. “And then ... we’ve got to change the way we work so we can get things to market faster.”
A.k.a.’s store plans
A.k.a. Brands is also furthering its brick-and-mortar strategy. Its first Princess Polly store opened in Los Angeles in 2023. The brand currently has 11 stores with three additional locations announced, according to its website. Next year, the brand plans to open between eight and 10 additional stores.
Meanwhile, Culture Kings is open in Las Vegas in a 13,000-square-foot retail space which contains a fully licensed bar, a half basketball court and a recording studio.
“With these brands until about 18 months ago they were pretty much exclusively online. We hadn’t done anything else,” Long said. “Our strategy now is, let’s put our product in front of our customers wherever they are.”
Petal & Pup started testing products on Nordstrom’s website in March last year, and now the brand is in all Nordstrom stores.
A.k.a. Brands going after physical retail is the company’s “biggest bet,” Long said. “That’s certainly from a capital perspective where we’re putting our money .... As we open each store, going to the openings, when you see a huge line outside and people getting excited to come into the store — when you see the smiles on the customer’s faces, it’s such a plus.”
