7 facts behind Sézane success: Parisian fashion goes worldwide

The queue line to enter Sézane goes around the entire building this afternoon before Christmas. And it’s like that almost every Saturday.

From selling vintage products on eBay to opening large retail stores in Paris, London, and New York, Sézane is one of the greatest French fashion success stories of the past five years. The brand has helped put Parisian fashion at the top of the industry and has become a benchmark for modern fashion retail.

From mass-market brands to the most fashion-forward creative studios, every fashion professional wants to understand the secret behind Sézane’s retail success and its ability to build such a loyal customer base.

But what is behind Sézane’s success? Thanks to RETVIEWS data, here is the explanation.

Considering its brand identity and product offering, Sézane takes the niche of the affordable-luxury market along with other French brands such as Sandro, Maje and The Kooples.

Price is often a reason why consumers turn to Sézane instead of institutional brands. Below is a price comparison of Sézane against its direct competitive brands.

Sézane’s products prices, on average, are half those of its competitors. It’s a huge difference. More than half of their products are priced below €100, while it’s only 15% on average for other brands.

The maximum price you can find in Sézane’s collection is €390, which creates a feeling of affordability for consumers.

One major reason is that the brand has significantly fewer brick-and-mortar stores, which helps reduce operating costs.

Looking at Sézane’s lower price positioning than other brands, we’ve analyzed how they deal with discounting. These rates include all price decreases even if not shown as a discount to customers.

As many people may know, Sézane does not rely on discounts. The above chart informs us that the average discount rate over the last semester was only 5%. These are in fact price adjustments to optimize sales rather than traditional discounts.

Recently, Sézane offered unsold products under the name Archives. This is one of the few strategic tactics the brand cleverly uses to maintain desirability, a core element of its expertise and brand positioning.

Sézane’s offering strategy is based on a mix system of product delivery : a permanent collection and regular limited-edition drops.

The limited-edition drops are products on a discount available for a short period of time. The message is clear : buy it while it’s hot, soon it will be gone ! The brand uses this strategy to quickly sell remaining stock and bring new products to customers.  

This strategy is familiar to luxury brands to help maintain desire. In that sense, Sézane is unique compared to direct competitors by applying a successful strategy from other markets.

One might think that black would be a significant share of Sézane parisian fashion color identity for its products. But interestingly, this is not the case. The French brand’s collection is colorful with only 10% of black compared to an average of 30% for other brands.

Using Retviews, you are able to quickly see the assortment structure. Here are the results.

The most significant difference between Sézane and other affordable-luxury brands in the smaller share of outerwear : 4.4% vs. average of 11.8% for competitors. On the contrary, accessories represent more than 38.8% of the collection, the first highest proportion followed by Maje.

On this very trending topic, Sézane is much more successful than the rest of the market with an average of 4.5 sizes available while the average is only 2.5

This is reflected in significant products available in small and large sizes. Sézane offers five times more of size 34 and is the only brand proposing a consistent selection of size 44.

All in all, Sézane maintains a high desire by quickly taking products off the shelves and limiting discounts on the permanent collection. Products are colorful and half price compared to direct competitors. They offer a wide size range so that every customer is able to purchase the product they want to wear.