Reasons for Failure of Forever 21:

Forever 21 Marketing Strategies

Price: 

Communication:

Distribution:

Supreme:

Price: Supreme’s product costs range from standard industry pricing to premium pricing, and vary depending on the product type. In general, shirts range from $40 to $140 and jackets range from $180 to $900. Smaller accessories including keychains, lighters, or stopwatches range from $30 to $200. Apart from Supreme’s private label products, they also collaborate with other brands including Nike, The North Face, and multiple high-end luxury brands. For example, in 2017 Supreme and Louis Vuitton released a collection branded with both companies’ logos. The launch was extensive, offering six main product categories including footwear, clothing, leather goods, small accessories, skateboards, and a novelty trunk. Bandanas were priced at $215, making it the lowest priced item in the collection, while the trunk was priced at $6,174, the highest priced item (Campbell, 2017). In addition, Supreme products are most prominent in the secondary market, and their resale prices value upwards of 1200% over their retail prices (Von Wilpert, 2018).

Communication: Supreme’s key attribution channel is digital media and video content. Their website is very minimal and not user-friendly. The only social media platform that the brand utilizes is Instagram. Supreme makes little effort to interact with their audience, however, their followers are still highly engaged with the brand’s posts, and their content reports high amplification rates. Of similar streetwear and skate wear brands, Supreme has the most viral and reposted content (Von Wilpert, 2018).

In addition to their minimal online presence, Supreme is known for using viral and guerilla marketing. Examples of how they used viral and guerilla marketing include handing out Supreme Subway cards to passersby in New York, posting multiple branded posters on main urban-metropolitan streets, and putting their logo on controversial media content online (“Supreme: Modern Guerilla Marketing”, n.d.)

Distribution: Supreme has an online store and eleven brick-and-mortars worldwide: NYC, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and six locations in Japan. They will also be opening a twelfth location in San Francisco (Hughes, 2018). Their products are not distributed to other retailers, and their current collections cannot be found on other websites. However, because of Supreme’s presence in the secondary market, their products can be found on marketplace websites including eBay or StockX at premium prices.

Supreme launches new product releases on Thursdays at 11am EST. Only a handful of items are ever remade or restocked, and demand always exceeds supply. Customers wait in line for hours before the stores open. For online shoppers, customers sometimes use bots in order to automatically checkout their items at the time of launch in order to secure the purchase (Christian, 2017).