Is Everything Salable For Hungarians?

Hungarians who have visited Western Europe often come home with the conviction that huge fashion companies like Mango, Zara and H&M do have good products on offer there, but only boring and less good quality products come to the Hungarian stores. Origo.hu investigated how true this conviction is, on what it depends which items will be in the shop windows, and how our decisions influence our later clothing opportunities.

“In 2014, the age of internet and social media a global brand can not sell different products in Eastern Europe than in other parts of the world”, says Szűcs Péter, editor in chief of inStlye magazine.

At the same time, widely traveled people often insist coming home that they’ve seen different clothes in the abroad stores of Mango, H&M, Zara, Bershka, Promod and C&A (or in brief, fast fashion shops) than in the domestic stores.

In given periods the same campaign photos appear on the skyscrapers of New York and the buildings of Budapest, but it’s a fact that the demands of people differ from country to country and it has a great effect on the supply. “As people watch different kinds of films, there are also different cultural traditions in the field of clothing”, says Szűcs Péter.

“People used to say that fashion is global, but it is seen from the dynamics of the fashion market that it’s not. Although all clothes of the world are identically produced in Bangladesh and Thailand and the fashion world treats the European market as a unity, different continents have different target-specific collections”, explains Zanin Éva social historian. People have distinct styles even in the neighboring countries, for instance women in Belgrade pick different dresses than women in Budapest for the reason that Serbian women have more Italianate and sophisticated style, while simpler, bit sporty and at the same time bit designer clothes are popular in our country, she adds.

Our decisions influence the future

Does the decision of the majority have an effect on which clothes will be popular and fashionable in the near future? At some extent it will, claims an employee of an international company which has twelve shops in Hungary at the moment, and which is one category better in prices and in quality than fast fashion chain stores. Their method is that the leaders of the twelve shops travel to the regional center where they choose those items that they want in the shops from the current collection. “There’s a standard line which is present in our every shops, since our catalog advertise them. Besides them we have freely selectable options”, he says. It actually means that a shop director may choose only three or four different types of a sweater which originally have five different types. “This way customers can buy the same items in our every store, there’s only a minimal difference between the stores.”
“I think there’s nothing wrong with it if the shops bring those products to the country which they can actually sell”, tells Szűcs Péter. “In every country stores order more from those items which definitely will be sold. There are cases when only five pieces of an interesting product come to Budapest, but fifty to a city which has 10 million population – and it’s completely logical.”

Shop window rules

By some fast fashion chain stores, the store managers’ latitude is much smaller. Origo.hu talked to two former employees of two very popular brands in Hungary, who asked not to write down their names and employers. One of them (let’s call her Tímea) was working with a large international company where every single shop in the world got the same picture about how the shop window had to look like. Tímea and her colleagues had to follow this method even if only 3 pieces of the item shown in the shop window were on offer in the store, and they were sold under two days. It resulted in situations when the customer wanted to buy the dress which the mannequins wore, but there was none of them in the shop. “We couldn’t modify anything in these cases. It occurred sometimes that we saw that the dress was available in the system, we sent an order but we didn’t get it. We still had to show the last one in the shop window, but there was no such item in our storeroom.”