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Fashion is uncertain when it comes to Boomers
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Talk about shifting sands.
On the one hand, clothing lines are discovering the buying power of Baby Boomer, middle-aged women. On the other hand, there's the story of Sigrid Olsen, whose successful line of clothes for those Baby Boomer women was dismantled by one of the country's larger retailers.
Here's the issue, as posed by a recent feature story in USA Today: Middle-aged women don't want to dress like their daughter, and they don't want to dress like their mothers. So who has the styles and clothes that appeal to their need? It doesn't look like anyone has found the magic potion just yet.
As USA Today noted: "One of the strategic blunders that both department and specialty stores made, retail experts say, was to write off Baby Boomer women for too long."
Talbot's, Chico's and Ann Taylor have seen sales erode. Liz Claiborne retooled its Dana Buchman line for sale at Kohl's to appeal to a more youthful market. It was Liz Claiborne that pulled the plug on Sigrid Olsen, whose clothing line reached a peak of $100 million in sales and had a strong following among middle-aged fashionistas.
"It is a curious development in the ... business of fashion that clothing labels like Ms. Olsen’s, made by and for the baby boomer generation, are among those being hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail retrenchment," the New York Times said in a story about Olsen, who at 55 is re-engineering herself as an artist living in Gloucester, Mass.
Bloomingdale's says it is trying to get a clue, hearing from women that it's clothes were too frumpy. It came up with Quotation and Portfolio to overcome the dowdy image. As well, Talbot's is looking at ways to pump up its image to Baby Boomer women, who despite the economy are seen as a powerful buying force.
As Wendy Liebmann, president of WSL Strategic Retail, told USA Today: "Once this group has a little of the financial pressure off their backs, they're certainly willing to spend again. They've got long memories. It's a big group, and you don't want to lose them."
That ship has sailed for Olsen who speaks of frustration that Liz Claiborne abandoned the line altogether as opposed to finding a buyer. She is now working as the artist she was before she got into fashion designing.
"Ultimately, it made me want to make sure that the years I have left I’m doing what makes me happy and that I don’t have to spend a lot of time doing what other people tell me to do,” she told the Times.
Sigrid Olsen Art
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