It’s becoming more and more of a solidified trend isn’t it, that of how when you walk into a clothing retailer you tend to see what looks like complete outfits already put together for you? This is of course presented to you as an alternative to having to walk down the different isles with the view of picking out singular pieces of clothing and then putting them together to make up your outfit…

For many people who are conscious about how they look, taking special care in the manner through which their appearance is presented, this growing trend can be a bit annoying, but then again as you go along you start to realise that whoever it is that put those outfits together seems to know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve effectively saved you a lot of time because then you’d have to mull over whether or not this or that t-shirt works with these or those trousers, etc…

More importantly though, they save you a lot of money, not just because time is money, but in more of a direct manner.

You’ll notice a rather intriguing fact – if you were to buy that complete outfit as it is presented on the display mannequin as is, it often works out cheaper than if you sourced each and every one of those garments making up the complete outfit individually. This is often true even in the case of buying those clothes from the exact same store. Go to the individual departments to pick out the jacket, t-shirt, jeans, etc, all of which come together to make up the complete outfit you see sold as a single unit, and you might even pay a couple of hundred dollars more!

Why is this though?

It’s simple really – retailers tend to sell more individual items more proportionately when they can have the customer visualising them in action beyond the shop environment and so they take every opportunity to do so. Also, it’s just a matter of how supply-chain management works in action in the general sense, i.e. if you can get many different items in one place then it works out cheaper for you than if you otherwise sourced them from different locations, with associated costs such as the fuel, the profit each member in the supply chain seeks to make, etc.

Looking beyond the fashion industry one can probably spot the exact same trend of more complete solutions turning out to be more affordable than if you went and sourced each of those items making up the solution individually. There are many examples we can explore, one of which is perhaps the gifts industry.

The gourmet gift baskets you buy are filled with all sorts of delectable goodies, but you’d spend so much more if you tried to source each of those goodies individually from the various specialist shops which produce them.

So it all comes back down to the retailer of the more complete solution having mastered the value-retention-and-transfer chain in order to offer the whole solution cheaper.