Political tensions between Beijing and Seoul have been affecting sales at South Korea's department stores: Hyundai reported a decline of 16% compared to a year ago, Lotte has said that sales from Chinese tourists have halved. Shinsegae has been less affected since Chinese tourists account for only 10% of sales. In total, the number of Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea plunged 66.4% to 255 000 in June, year on year. The Chinese government has tightened its control on tourists visiting Korea as part of its retaliation over the deployment of a US missile defence system in Seongju.

Ralph Lauren is speeding up its supply chain to be more reactive to fashion trends. It is also ending peripheral brands such as Denim & Supply to concentrate on main brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren. Third it is trimming underperforming stores. Finally, it is rethinking its relationship with department stores. This last measure has also been considered by Coach and Michael Kors, for example. This involves reducing department store shipments so that fewer products get sold on markdown. It also involves cutting down on department store distribution points.

Ralph Lauren, like other brands, is very dependent on department stores for business. In the US, 10% of Ralph Lauren business comes from Macy's, 8% from Hudson's Bay, 5% from Dillard's, 1.6% from Kohl's and 1% from Nordstrom. Wholesale is the most profitable segment of the apparel brand's business (69% of Ralph Lauren operating profit comes from department stores and other retail partners). But if they cut back their presence in department stores, there is a risk that the stores' outposts become deserts which then may drag down the department store company, drain resources and damage the department store brand in the eyes of the customers. A department store chain is an ecosystem and the defection of big-name brands threatens to throw the whole environment out of balance. The brands dependent on department store retailers need to think carefully about their strategy.

Online luxury retailer Matchesfashion.com unveiled plans to invest in a new east London tech and design studio, creating 150 jobs over a four-year period. The business has signed a lease for 24,000 sq ft at Here East, the former Olympic media centre, and will build 20 photography bays and video sets at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park site. The site is in addition to its HQ at the Shard in the City of London which houses 500 staff. The new premises will enable Matchesfashion to produce website content for over 2,000 products a week, up from around 1,000 currently.

El Corte Ingles of Spain and Samsung have unveiled a partnership that allows El Corte Ingles card holders to pay for their purchases in store with the Samsung Pay app. The deal concerns 11 million El Corte Ingles card holders for whom creating a digital card on Samsung Pay will mean access to a faster and safe payment method. The El Corte Ingles card is the first private label card to be integrated into a mobile payment system.

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China's JD.com is reportedly in talks with Thailand's Central Group to launch a joint e-commerce venture in a total investment worth 500 million dollars. If this venture goes through, it would help JD.com expand their overseas presence beyond Indonesia and to compete with rivals like Alibaba and Amazon who are ramping up their presence in Southeast Asia.

After the purchase of online fashion retailer Zalora last year, Central Group is on a quest to dominate Thailand's e-commerce market, which is currently valued at 900 million dollars. The retail conglomerate is an established name and one of the top five business groups in Thailand; it owns several department stores including Robinson, Central Department Store, La Rinascente, Illum and KaDeWe.

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Digital-only bank Tandem has announced that it has signed an agreement to take over the banking arm of the famous UK department store Harrods. It will acquire 100% of Harrods Bank and benefit from around £80m of capital coming into the business. The acquisition will accelerate the launch of savings accounts for customers. Tandem which does not yet offer bank accounts is available as a Personal Finance Manager in iOS App and Google Play Stores, and Tandem credit cards are set to launch in the next few months. The acquisition gives Tandem a push against rival "challenger banks" with a £200m loan book and over £300m deposits, even though Harrods Bank owned by Qatar Holdings is itself loss-making.

Galeries Lafayette announced its intention to acquire fashion and homeware e-business La Redoute, as the upmarket French department store chain seeks to accelerate its digital transformation. Upon completion of the transaction, the size of which was not disclosed, Galeries Lafayette would hold 51 per cent of La Redoute through its holding company Motier, with the aim of owning 100 per cent in the future.

Family-run private group Galeries Lafayette, which employs 14,000 people in France, recorded retail sales of €3.8bn last year. Meanwhile La Redoute recorded €750m revenues in 2016. Internet sales represent 85 per cent of La Redoute's sales in France, and laredoute.fr claims to have more than 9m unique visitors each month.

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As announced earlier, members of the Nordstrom family are seeking to take the company private. The family group owns 31.2% of the business and is looking for partners to fund the buyout of the 116-year old retailer worth around $8bn. Privatising the company would make it easier to invest in certain key areas such as e-commerce, the Nordstrom Rack off price chain and also to close underperforming stores. Interested parties include Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, and KKR.

According to Forbes, trade credit insurer Euler Hermes has notified vendors to Galeria Kaufhof of Germany that factoring merchandise would be reduced by 80%. This essentially means that it has lost confidence in the company and that many vendors will ship only after receiving advance payment. Although parent company HBC has a global credit of around $2.3 billion, this comes at a bad time for Kaufhof which is currently confirming orders for autumn and winter season and needs full cooperation from vendors. Apparently Kaufhof, with 97 department stores in Germany and 16 Inno stores in Belgium, has been losing market share to its competitor Karstadt, owned by Signa Holding. Some commentators are speculating that the latter might be interested in taking over Kaufhof to create the "German department store".

Marui department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo, is trialling bitcoin payments until 31 October 2017.  It is fixing an upper limit of $900. It is working in partnership with cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer. A number of Japanese retailers are showing an increasing interest in cryptocurrency, one that finds them out of step with their international peers. While the number of retailers accepting bitcoin in Europe and the US is declining, it is increasing in Japan with Marui following electronics seller Bic Camera earlier in the year.

Dillard's department store is under pressure from an activist investor to unlock the value of its rea estate portfolio. The company, which operates 268 stores and 25 clearance centres, is described by the investment group Snow Capital Partners as "an unleveraged real estate company masquerading as a low productivity retailer". Dillard's owns 90% of its store square footage. Some 50 stores have been closed since 2008. Snow Capital owns 2% of Dillard's stock.

Activist shareholder Land & Buildings Investment Management has said that it may call for new directors at Hudson's Bay if management does not "unlock value" at the company, for example by selling Saks Fifth Avenue. The shareholder which owns 5% has been pushing to close the gap to underlying asset value. The stock has fallen 35% in the last year. Several options have been floated including adding boutique retailers on the first three floors of the Fifth Avenue flagship and redeveloping the upper floors to high-end condominiums.

The small town of Ubrique, around 100 km south of Seville in Spain, is where many of the top fashion brands source their leather goods. Far away from the fashion centres of Milan, Paris, New York or London, without airport or train station, Ubrique artisans are used to make handbags wallets and belts for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, Chanel, Chloe, Loewe and Carolina Herrera. Although for a time, some of the work was shifted to Asian countries, the problems of quality and especially counterfeiting led the brands back to Ubrique, known as the pueblo blanco for its whitewashed houses (see picture). Here all factories and workers sign a confidentiality contract and cannot take any pictures. Some 200 years ago, the town specialised in tanning. This evolved into precise leatherwork which it has become famous for. The skills have been passed down from generation to generation and it is these which brought in the big brands. Although some of the factories have started using an assembly line to speed up the process, many refuse and hand the production of the whole item to one craftsman.

A piece by Reuters describes the extraordinary development of Amazon which has returned over 8000% to investors over the last 15 years. Founder Jeff Bezos, who owns 16.7% of the company, is now the richest man in the world. The business, which now includes cloud computing, movies, AI, appliance retailing etc. is venturing into newspapers and space travel. It has the ambition to reinvent philanthropy.

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The top retailer based on sales per square foot in the US is Apple, according to CoStar, with $5546 per sq ft. While average brick & mortar retailers reach $325, compared to $375 in 2000, some stand out: as well as Apple, top names include Tiffany at $2951 and Lululemon with $1560, the top productive apparel retailer.

Last year, Parkson of Malaysia closed its last department store in Hanoi after eight successive years of losses. In Ho Chi Minh City, the Parkson Paragon was closed in May 2016, just five years into a 19-year lease. It now appears that the remaining seven stores (five in HCM City, one in Hai Phong and one in Danang) are also due to close, putting an end to the retailer's presence in the country. Parkson arrived in Vietnam in 2005, opening in Saigon, expecting to dominate the middle retail market, and bringing a number of brands. However, the competition was fierce, notably from Japan and Korea, who set up rival businesses. Parkson is not the only retailer to bow out of Vietnam: Metro Group has abandoned its Cash & Carry operations, French Casino Group and others have also left. The latest casualty is FamilyMart UNY from Japan.

The Japanese fashion chain Lumine will open its first outlet outside Japan in Singapore in November. It will occupy 10 000 sq ft in Clarke Quay Central. Founded in 1966, Lumine is described as a premium lifestyle-destination store with 16 stores around Japan including Shinjuku and Ikebukuro in Tokyo. Some commentators claim that Clarke Quay is more about F&B and nightlife, while others feel that the Lumine presence will strengthen the position of the mall as a Japanese one and complement the offer.

Neiman Marcus announced last week that it will eliminate 225 jobs as part of its ongoing reorganization effort. The struggling department store chain is said to have reported it also ended efforts to sell itself. Canadian department store company Hudson's Bay, which already owns Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue in addition to its flagship stores, was in talks about a takeover until June. As it continues to stem falling sales, the company has begun to scrutinize the size of its Last Call off-price fleet.

In collaboration with the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and the Institut Français de la Mode, Saint Laurent has launched the 'Couture Savoir Faire Training Program', a project aiming to support up and coming talent and to preserve French fashion heritage. The Saint Laurent training program will focus on two notions: innovation and durability. It's a top of the range program which focuses on handicraft, expertise and creativity, but also on fine tuning skills and developing fashion culture. In March 2018, a special project worked on over the 6 months will be presented in front of a jury comprising fashion school professors and Saint Laurent staff. Only students from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and the Institut Français de la Mode can apply to the program, which will launch in September 2017.

Yoox Net-A-Porter Group (YNAP) has opened a Tech Hub in London's White City, "reaffirming its commitment to London and investment in the UK", the online retail giant said. the new hub "is key to [its] growth strategy" and part of an investment of more than €500m in technology and logistics across the group, designed to help double the size of the business by the start of the next decade. The 70,000 sq ft unit at White City Place will bring the firm's UK tech teams under one roof with 500 staff and a further 100 jobs created over the next two years. Work there will include developing Artificial Intelligence capabilities, such as personalisation and image recognition, and "creating the next wave of mobile technologies, that will keep YNAP in the vanguard of digital innovation." It should open in September 2017.

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UK fashion department store Selfridges has teamed up with the Beatles' Apple Corps to launch Sgt Pepper clothing. The '50 Years of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' capsule collection launches in London, Birmingham, and Manchester, and online; it coincides with the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. It is part of Selfridges' Music Matters campaign, which aims to celebrate the relationship between music and style, and which runs in store from 26 June to 18 October. The collection comprises T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and a custom denim jacket.

Amazon just took another step in its quest for world domination. The retail giant unveiled its trendy new private-label shoe and handbag line called The Fix. The collection is available to Prime members only, and it features shoes and handbags that start at around $49 and are all priced under $140. Unlike most footwear collections, the line won't be rolled out seasonally; instead, merchandise will change on a monthly basis.

Stockmann of Finland has announced that it is selling its Delicatessen business operations in Finland to the S Group's regional cooperatives. It is the latest move in the Stockmann strategy to find partners to complement its product mix and offer new services and experiences. The competitiveness of the Delicatessen operations have been impacted by changes in procurement and logistics operations. The final decision is subject to approval from the Finnish Competition and Customer Authority. The operations in Helsinki, Tapiola and the Jumbo shopping centre will be transferred to HOK-Elanto, Turku will go the Turku Regional Cooperative, and Tampere to its own regional cooperative. Other elements will be transferred to SOK. The Delicatessen operations in the Baltics will remain with Stockmann.

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Sephora is entering Germany with a store in Munich operated in partnership with Galeria Kaufhof. The 1,445-square-foot "Shop in Shop" retail concept, an updated version of a format debuted at Manor department store in Switzerland last year, has been conceived to allow people to try out products in a "beauty playground" setting. In Galeria Kaufhof, the beauty seller will offer a range of services, such as the Gift Factory, where any item can be wrapped in a range of brightly colored paper, and the Sephora Beauty Bar, where makeup artist are on hand to help clients. A selection of the beauty products sold in the new Sephora location will also be offered on galeria-kaufhof.de.