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Catalyst issue 4 | 2024: Fashion's second act
- 24 October 2024
This issue of Catalyst takes on a personal flavour for me as we approach the tail-end of the year. The final quarter is typically one of frenetic professional activity for marketers, but it’s also matched with a good deal of change at home.
In September, I ferried the eldest back to university for his second year. There may have been fewer maternal tears, but there was still the same shock to the bank balance. My wallet was taken for an outing round the supermarket, the estate agent, the gym and the transport hubs, haemorrhaging cash as I went.
So, it’s with great interest that I read our cover story on thrift, our article and debate on Black Friday, and our profile on personal finance.
Students are, of course, artists when it comes to stretching their cash, and ‘charity shop chic’ is a hallmark of university style. But what can the rest of us learn from the thrift sector? As consumers, we’re allegedly making more of an effort to incorporate sustainable behaviours into our daily lives – carrying reusable water bottles and coffee cups for starters. Has this translated across to fashion, though? We may shop with a growing number of sustainable brands, but the simple fact is, we’re still buying new.
As consumers, we want to hark back to an age where we ‘made do and mended’ a bit more. The popularity of TV programmes like The Great British Sewing Bee show that we’re keen to get hands-on with our clothes. That said, could you really claim to be able to fix a zip or mend a hole? And for every one of us that has time to take items to the repair shop, I’ll be willing to bet there are hundreds more who put things in the clothes recycling pile and go off to buy replacements.
How companies solve this is yet to be seen. There are steps, with companies like M&S mooting the possibility of in-store repairs, but it’s not a fully working model yet. Like some of my eldest’s assignments post-freshers’ week, the prevailing mood is ‘could do better’.
Of course, thrift – as the name suggests – is about being financially savvy as well as sustainable. Who among us doesn’t want to make our money go further? Looking at the opposite end of the scale, how we maintain financial health and wealth well into our old age is a preoccupation for Ben Rhodes, group brand and marketing director at Phoenix Life and our profile subject this issue.
Even though I often find myself writing about finance, how pensions work is still a mystery to me. I’d love to be someone with a sensible approach to financial planning but I rather worry I’m a bit of a short-term Susan about it all. Rhodes is looking for nothing less than a nationwide rethink on how we plan to finance later life and it will be very interesting to see what he achieves.
Money matters are certainly the prevailing theme, with an article on Black Friday from our editor-at-large, Lucy Handley, teeing up a debate on whether the festival of discounting – and spending – is a positive thing for consumers. And finally, Catalyst Clinic explores effective ways marketing contractors can work with their clients to establish fair remuneration in a sector where services can be notoriously hard to define.
As ever, I hope you find the content in this edition of Catalyst stimulating and we’d love to hear your views.
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