Drop. It’s the current triple word square in the Fashion Scrabble’s. Following Supreme’s huge success based on very limited – therefore rare – editions, insuring a high resale and desirability value, each luxury brand (Moncler, Tods’s, Gucci, Balenciaga, Vuitton) is experimenting the drop concept. It must be said that the technique checks all boxes.

To launch a drop means to immediately give the buyer a rare feeling of exclusivity and belonging: being in-the-know…Drops allow a brand to cause a positive novelty effect on its agenda: the small dose of adrenaline any consumer wants in order to give their life a smidgen of originality and express themselves on social networks. It’s enough to nourish, enrich or refresh a brand’s storytelling, which should never be neglected. Drops also make it possible to understand better the customers’ tastes and expectations. Why always want to produce large quantities and take risks while only a few products released on the market can be enough to test the water? Ideal to set things right and avoid falling. Drops finally have the virtue of attracting Millennials to the real-world stores they could one day forget. A good way for brands to reveal their vitality by showing they are still “with it”.

So the drop strategy would consist in mythicizing a product, embodying the brand while creating a legend around it, supporting its awareness and desirability. Beat that. It is, finally, not very far from the last century’s “flash” sales, except that, if exclusivity means desirability, from now on what is rare also gives community a reason to exist. Another facet of “I buy, therefore we are”…