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Uniqlo: Asia’s Top Clothier Goes Back to Basics By Naoko Fujimura and Shunichi Ozasa

As Zara and H&M are targeting at low price fashion wear, Uniqlo saw the market and opportunity, joined the war of clothing to satisfy the growing demand on clothing. Uniqlo, a popular Asian clothier focus on providing low price and basic style casual wear, launched its first set of fashionable clothing in the last year. However, the results were clearly not desirable for the sales Uniqlo dropped by 25 percent and left plenty of stocks until the spring of 2011.

Uniqlo’s basic style fleece jacket from spring of 2010.

Uniqlo’s trendy style line in spring of 2010

It is never a strength of Uniqlo to produce fashion wear, and the company is driven by the surface trends too much. The major problem is branding. Uniqlo is known for durable and casual style clothing, but by introducing numerous styles of fashion wear temporarily tarnished its brand image. Due to the unfamiliarity to the consumers, the acceptance of trendy apparel in Uniqlo stores is relatively low. Significantly, it is a good example to show confusion can result in a marketplace, when a company bring in brand extension with products that are too different from the existing ones.

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Wal-Mart Brazil Thinks Green By Andrew Winston

Nowadays, people often talk about going green and improving environmental sustainability. At the Summit 2009, Wal-Mart Brazil announced its goals to tackle some popular environmental and social problems in the world. For example, within the supply chain of Wal-Mart, the companies cannot employ slave, in other words, forced labour. Also, Wal-Mart would not buy beef sourced from any newly cleared Amazonian land. Furthermore, Wal-Mart brought in twenty top corporations such as PepsiCo and Unilever to sign these green agreements together.

Clearly, Wal-Mart is showing their contribution of social responsibilities. However, there are unexplained issues concerning the implementation. There are certain higher cost on supplies to go green both towards the supplier and the retailer, so the cost will be put onto customers. Thus, the customer choice and motivation has possibilities to be affected by the rising price of goods. That is potential threat and high opportunity cost to Wal-Mart in trade-off for business ethics. Moreover, the actual time and plan to make agreement with suppliers to operate under environmentally friendly conditions is not yet estimated. While Brazil struggles in managing competing economic developmental needs, achieving such goals seems particularly difficult.