Day to Day - New Look

Fast Fashion Model

New Look's fast fashion operating model is centred around the delivery of our core brand pillars, obsessive customer focus, emphasis on in-house design, daily product ordering, fast product development, manufacture and delivery and strategic long-term supplier partnerships.

Fashion Forward

• Higher risk – hits and misses
• Low volume

Crest of a Wave

• Lower risk-trend taking hold
• Quickly react to momentum with significant volume
• Requires fast and flexible supply chain

Fashion Follower

• Low excitement
• Risk that momentum has passed
• Week volume demand

In-house design

New Look's design team has grown from a team of seven in-house designers as at 27 March 2004 to a team of over 30 designers as at 26 March 2011.

Strength in supply chain

New Look has a well-established supplier base, with relationships developed during the course of the last 40 years, including strategic partnerships with suppliers based in China, Taiwan and Turkey. This supplier base facilitates speed of product development, manufacture and delivery to stores, whilst avoiding the risks associated with the ownership of factories. For example, New Look is able to take delivery in the UK of trend items from China within five to six weeks of placing an order, or as quickly as two to three weeks from countries such as Turkey and Romania.
We also have the ability to produce and deliver to stores some of our simpler products (such as t-shirts with slogans printed on them) within a 24-hour period in order to capitalise on newsworthy events. However, it is not just about having everything produced as fast as possible; it's about being proactive ahead of season with low commitment levels and having the flexibility in season to react rapidly to changing trends.

Obsessive customer focus

We are committed to listening and responding to our customers. This requires internal co-ordination and a single, shared view of the customer. We therefore relocated our core buying, merchandising, design and marketing teams from split sites to one office near Oxford Circus, London. As well as providing access to one of the world's fashion capitals, this move has made it easier for almost 250 people to work together to deliver the fashion our customer wants.

Our customers drive every aspect of our business
We have a dedicated in-house Customer Insight unit focused on sourcing customer information using traditional methods such as quantitative and qualitative market research, activity-based panels and focus groups. We also spend time listening to our customers all over the world. We talk to them in the stores, in groups and one-on-one. We also have over 1.6 million facebook fans who we regularly listen to, as well as our very own customer run TV channel on YouTube where we post regular video content to help inspire our customers. It is this obsessive focus on our customers that means we can keep delivering new ideas, new looks and new reasons to keep coming back.

Over the last year:

• Launched our Customer Dashboard to track New Look performance across brand, market and channel to help educate and inform management actions
• Extended our insights coverage to support decisions across our growing range of online channels – expanding from traditional ecom to include M-comm and our full multi-channel offering
• Undertook two seasonal price benchmarking studies across the business, ensuring New Look maintains its competitive price position
• Launched a quality feedback programme to enable staff to feedback regularly on the quality and fit of our New Look products
• Interviewed over 30,000 customers and conducted over 40 focus groups with high street shoppers to ensure we are continually learning how to improve our business and give our customers what they really want