It's OK for intellectual feminists to like fashion

Since opening their first stand-alone stores in the UK in December 2010 on King’s Road, Carnaby Street and St Christopher’s Place, French brand The Kooples has been mushrooming around London. According to their website, they now have 13 stores around town, in locations ranging from Oxford Street to High Street Kensington - all traditional shopping meccas. The brand is benefiting from a high level of exposure through adverts on buses, in magazines and earned media in all the major glossies.

0ver the past year, The Kooples has announced plans to open additional stores in the UK, to launch in the US, to collaborate with Pete Doherty, to start a TK by The Kooples casualwear line and to add a music component to their brand extension. Strategically orchestrated, the announcement of each initiative has gathered additional buzz. So far, the brand has striven on overexposure with nearly 200 stores and corners across France, the UK, Spain and Ireland. The public is following:  last year, the company generated £21.7m in profits, suggesting a strategic expansion with strong knowledge of the market.

The Kooples are exploiting their brand momentum, but are they at risk of wearing it off by sin of overexposure? Can their image of painfully cool couples survive being seen everywhere and on everyone?

In an article in The Independent, Jonathan Owen defines a “cool” brand as one with “a strong brand name” (The Kooples, wordplay on the couple/le couple, with the advertising concept to back it up), the ability “to defy gravity while the fortunes of many other companies have suffered a reversal in the recession” (Strong financial results) and our desire to “buy them in the hope that they will add lustre to our lives” (Who wouldn’t want to be as young, hot, stylish, international and in love as Fahrani and Luke or Corinna and Johnny?).

To this definition, CNN adds the importance of style and being true to one’s roots (From the clothes to the stores, The Kooples offers an aligned shopping experience), of not trying too hard (Disputable - The Kooples adverts can be perceived as annoying or even fake), of constant evolution (Again, disputable - The Kooples recipe seems to be an endless take on a well-tailored, dark silhouette with few forays into colour), of being protective of the logo (The Kooples is a font logo not displayed on most clothes - instead, it relies on skull buttons for recognition).

No matter how many boxes The Kooples ticks, Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the CoolBrands expert council argues that “cool is clearly not here today, gone tomorrow, as some might assume, but about lasting the distance and maintaining one’s edge over rivals.” We currently don’t have the perspective, on a three-year-old brand, to predict whether it can last at least another three years without wearing off and starting to bore its once core customers.

Posted at 9:06am and tagged with: Brand communication, high-street, advertising, The Kooples,.