Shaping the luxury menswear market

Find out how our competitive intelligence platform enables brands to monitor competitor strategies in real-time and adapt their own collection accordingly, avoiding guesswork and remaining ahead of the curve. Retviews, the AI-powered benchmarking platform, enables your company to enhance its assortment strategy and establish the best pricing strategy, reducing time spent on manual benchmarking.

• The menswear market is witnessing an “unprecedented” boom, fueled by a fashion reset.
• With Retviews, it is possible to get the right pricing strategy for each country and increase profits, while analyzing your price positioning per category.
• Luxury brands are lacking in extended size ranges for menswear, filling this gap could be a key factor in boosting a brand's performance.

The menswear apparel market is experiencing an unprecedented boom. According to Euromonitor, global menswear sales are expected to reach $547.9 billion by 2026, with the apparel market valued at $60 billion in 2021, in the US only. With the menswear market growing at a faster annual rate than womenswear, luxury brands are currently seizing this opportunity and increasing investments in menswear.

As the current situation is characterized by unpredictability, due to price inflation, supply-chain disruption and changing consumer preferences, find out how Retviews can help your brand nail your menswear collection and stay ahead in this growing market. 

Retviews’ data have highlighted how the global pandemic reset the male dress code, reducing formal attire in favor of smart casual wear, leading to the decline of ties and the rise of casual suits. Retviews’ automated competitive analysis platform enables brands to analyze leading assortments, compare strategies, and identify new opportunities.

A key difference between accessible luxury and high-end luxury brands lies in their share of leather goods. Retviews’ data show that Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton dedicate 30% and 28% of their assortments to leather goods, making it one of their leading categories. In comparison, only 19% of Gucci’s menswear assortment consists of leather goods, with accessories taking the lead.

Burberry’s upmarket shift is also reflected in its menswear assortment, which includes a larger share of leather goods than accessible luxury brand Armani. This reinforces Burberry’s ambition to move closer to the high-end luxury market.

Overall, high-end luxury menswear places greater emphasis on accessories and leather goods, while accessible luxury brands focus more heavily on ready-to-wear categories such as tops and bottoms, with smaller leather goods collections.

Another major trend is the dominance of sneakers over formal shoes. This is partly driven by Louis Vuitton and Gucci expanding into streetwear and activewear through collaborations with Supreme and Adidas. However, sneakers are gradually losing ground to loafers, one of the most popular shoe styles of 2022, recording a +54% YoY increase in leading brand assortments according to Retviews.

Accessories have also emerged as a growth category, driven by increasing demand for sunglasses, bags, and jewelry.

As indicated in the graph above, bags recorded a +9% YoY increase within leading brand assortments, with cross-body bags standing out as the most prominent style and achieving a +38% YoY increase.

When targeting the luxury menswear market, brands must position their offer with the right product mix. Thanks to Retviews’ real-time data, luxury leaders can monitor competitors’ assortments and pricing strategies to deliver the right collections, at the right price and the right time.

When it comes to benchmarking, brands’ purchasing teams monitor pricing structure per category, to make sure that their brand is aligned with competitors, in terms of pricing strategies. Retviews makes it possible to save time on manual benchmarking thanks to its accurate, real-time data.

Burberry has recently been trying to elevate its offer, however, as Retviews data show, its outerwear and suit ranges still have lower prices than accessible luxury brand Armani. This could indicate an opportunity for the UK luxury leader to reposition its prices for the two categories in its upmarket move. Retviews enables brands to get an in-depth view of their pricing strategy compared to their competitors’, and spot opportunities for improvement, boosting revenues.

For brands’ purchasing and merchandising teams, developing an international pricing strategy is a challenge, seeing as markets are subject to change. With Retviews, your brand will be able to see your competitors’ strategies to draw comparisons and improve positioning.

As shown by the data, high-end luxury players all maintain a higher price point in China, compared to the US. Accessible luxury brand Armani, however, has a lower price within the Chinese market. The brand could increase prices within China and optimize revenue. Armani also has the strongest price difference between markets, as the Chinese, UK, French and Italian markets all have a lower average price point than the US market.

Could this be an accessible luxury strategy or does Armani have significant room for improvement? With access to Retviews’ real-time data, your brand can pinpoint the ideal positioning for your collection, on an international scale.

The US plus-size men's apparel market was worth 848.9 million dollars in 2021, and its value is expanding twice as quickly as overall apparel sales in the United States. From a business standpoint, this represents a tremendous opportunity for companies. The luxury industry is known for lacking inclusivity, especially for menswear.

Retviews data show that Burberry and Prada are the only brands offering a wider range of sizes, with Burberry stocking size 3XS and Prada’s offer reaching 4XL. A lack of inclusive sizing results in brands missing out on a wider range of potential consumers.

With Retviews, it is possible to confidently build a size inclusive collection, as the platform allows your brand to spot where your assortment is lacking or spot gaps in your competitors’ assortments and find potential opportunities for your own collection. Retviews helps your brand not only analyze the size assortment of your competitors, but also compare how their strategy differs between countries and even by style of a specific product.

Delving deeper into Retviews data showed that each luxury leader’s assortment differs by country. Burberry and Prada have a wider size range for their US assortment, whilst Armani has a wider size range in the UK. On the other hand, both Celine and Gucci have larger assortments in China. This is a strategic move for Gucci, where the Chinese market provides more than half the brand’s total revenue.

With a 360° overview of competitors’ size structures, your brand will be able to avoid the guesswork of manual benchmarking and nail your size inclusive collection.

By adopting Retviews’ tools in their daily tasks, purchasing, merchandising, product, and digital teams will be more efficient and save significant amounts of time on manual benchmarking, by accessing data in real-time. Retviews’ data will allow your brand’s teams to be proactive towards the fashion industry’s ever-evolving dynamics and adapt their strategies with ease.