At a recent Brand Leaders Dinner hosted by Glossy and our sister publication Modern Retail, leaders from brands in the fashion, beauty, home and CPG spaces came together to discuss some of the challenges facing their respective industries. The dinner was hosted in collaboration with the e-commerce tech company Swap.One of the common themes of the evening was just how much retail today is a battle of inches. Margins are being eroded little by little by third-party fees, tariffs, rising operating costs and a thousand other small things.
“We’re seeing a lot of margin erosion in the business,” said one attendee, the founder of brands in the fashion and CPG spaces. “From supply chain pressures to raw material costs to shipping costs, there’s all this pressure from the margin standpoint. We are in a space where pricing is really sensitive. We don’t want to risk our prices just to make up the margin. Something we’re thinking about a lot is how to get more efficiency out of the business. We did end up raising our prices a little bit, which releases some pressure, but you can’t go up and down too much in price without confusing the customer.”
The dinner was conducted under Chatham House Rules, meaning attendees can be quoted anonymously, without mentioning the companies they work for. Attendees came from a wide variety of businesses, some with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue while others were at an earlier stage.
