Amazon is known as the gold standard of e-commerce sales and an innovator in cloud storage, video streaming, and connected devices. Soon, Jeff Bezos’s company may also be a major player in the world of fashion. Amazon launched at least seven private-label apparel brands in 2016 alone. Of those, Slice Intelligence reports that Lark & Ro is currently the best-selling apparel brand in Amazon’s current fashion line.
However, Amazon has a long way to go in order to compete with established private-labels offered by Macy’s and Nordstrom. Slice Intelligence looked at private label brand sales and found that Nordstrom’s Halogen generated 11 times the revenue of Lark & Ro in the months since January 2016. Sales of the majority of Macy’s brands have surpassed those of Amazon’s Lark & Ro with Alfani netting over nine times the revenue of Amazon’s signature brand.
Amazon's private label shoppers say yes to the dress
Amazon’s private label customers are filling their closets with the retailer’s dresses, comprising over 40 percent of Amazon’s private-label apparel sales. The story at Macy's–– whose labels are long established––is quite different, with shoppers distributing their spend across apparel types.
Still Amazon private label sales are up
Even though the e-commerce giant’s private-label sales are small compared to Macy’s and Nordstrom, Amazon’s brands are growing. Sales of Amazon house-branded apparel jumped 67 percent in the last quarter of 2016 compared to the third quarter.
"Consumers are willing to buy private label apparel brands online, particularly from the brands that they are familiar with in the offline world." says Ken Cassar, principal analyst, Slice Intelligence. "Amazon’s new private label brands will need time to develop that familiarity. Still, competitive apparel brands––both private label and national brands––should keep a close eye on Amazon. It has a ton of data about what consumers like, what consumers are willing to pay, and has control over a wide array of levers to create awareness of its brands."
About this data
With a panel of over 4.7 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.
Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.
Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.