It has shown that the fashion design retail market has been buoyant in the 1990s growing from £16 billion in 1992 to £24 billion in 1998- (Goldsmith 1996).
Fashion is all about self image, and using products, but more often, brands, as symbols which say something about what your are, or probably more of what you want to be. "Every successful fashion brand is based upon an image- (Martinez and Polo 1996) The way that you make the image is though your advertising . Fashion thrives on advertising. Advertising is what crates the identity and attraction. .
The area of fashion retailing in which this report is going to investigate, are women whose fashion budget is very limited, such market sectors as, students and lower paid workers aged between 17-24. The Scottish city in which will be analysed for its fashion retailing, is the city of Edinburgh. The report will also study a number of factors including an overview of the UK market in respect to women's wear and how the retailers being investigated target their market segment. The retailers includes: Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Gap, New Look, H&M, River island and Oasis. .
In many cases retailers forget that the lower income earners and student equals a large variety of customer. Retailer often tend to focus on one of these sectors which severely limits their consumer market. The criteria in which a retailers could use as a guide, is their ability to produce a range of garments that would be both affordable and durable for their market segment, thus allowing the purchaser to vary their wardrobe to suit the various social occasions in which they may be involved in. .
In order to analyse which factors a company has to consider when targeting their market, is the overview of the retailers which are successful, but also the retailer which struggle to attract this sector of the consumer market and the reasons why they are unable to achieve this .
