What: Battling e-commerce natives, dealing with high acquisition costs, unpredictable inventory and demand and difficult profit targets are leading some department stores such as Selfridges or Nordstrom to team up with other multi-brand retailers.

Why it is important: To combine merchandising prowess, share customer crossover and leverage each other’s scale or social reach, multi-brand retailers are partnering in different ways as a chance to experiment and improve connectivity.

Choosing the right partner is important, as is navigating the risks around stock management, cannibalisation and feasibility.

The trend of cross-retail partnerships is not new and has proved popular within beauty as can be seen through Sephora’s partnership with Kohl’s or Ulta’s Target shop-in-shops. For fashion retailers, Barneys New York’s example of a wholesale deal to sell its private label collection through the South Korean boutique Boon The Shop started in 2018 and ended only when the store closed in 2020.

Already, Selfridges has partnered with Machine A and Smets to offer a curated selection of products from the two external multi-brand retailers as part of its plan to inject new brands and styles in-store. Nordstrom has partnered with 11 Honoré, a luxury e-commerce platform, and Asos.

Multi-brand retailers team up for success