Telfar Clemens wants you to decide how much his clothes cost. And if that sounds crazy—well, that’s the point.
Next week, when his eponymous fashion label drops its latest unisex clothing collection online, Clemens will also launch a radically new pricing model. When customers start shopping, they’ll find that prices aren’t fixed. Instead, there will be a dynamic pricing tool on the website that ensures the most popular, fastest-selling products are cheaper. The whole experience is designed to flip the script on the fashion industry, where brands tend to charge more for popular items. And it reinforces Clemens’ mission of making his products affordable, so they are accessible to anybody who wants them.
“Many brands use price as a barrier to entry,” says Clemens. “I never wanted that for my brand.”
The Anti-Luxury Brand
These days, Clemens is one of the hottest names in fashion. Big names including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Dua Lipa have carried his logo-embossed tote bags—priced between $157 and $250, depending on size. They’re now ubiquitous on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, selling out within seconds online, and going for nearly double their retail price on secondhand sites like Rebag. Even Beyoncé is a fan. In her latest album, Renaissance, she drops a lyric about how she’s putting her Hermès bags in storage in favor of her Telfar tote.
Clemens could easily try to position his label as a luxury brand and charge higher prices. After all, he won the fashion industry’s most prestigious award, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, in 2017 and has shown his collections alongside Louis Vuitton and Givenchy at fashion weeks in Paris and Florence.
But from the time Clemens launched his brand as a teenager in 2005, he’s been committed to affordability. Over the years, he’s chosen to partner with brands the fashion industry considers lowbrow. While most designers seek sponsorship from beauty brands or credit card companies, Clemens asked Kmart to sponsor his 2014 fashion show. He designed the uniforms for White Castle employees in 2017. Last year, he did an in-person shopping event at Rainbow, a store known for selling cheap, trendy clothes in low-income neighborhoods.
This latest pricing model is an extension of his ideology. Clemens came up with the idea with Babak Radboy, his creative director, about a year ago. The two of them were trying to figure out the prices of an upcoming collection, and it dawned on them that pricing clothes was somewhat arbitrary. Radboy stared at a hoodie and realized the brand could charge $100 or $600 for it. Most brands charge the highest possible price they think consumers will be willing to pay, and they often try to charge more for items they think will be popular. But Radboy says this goes against Telfar’s fundamental ethic. “If we charge $600 for the hoodie, then only one class of person would buy it—the person who can afford it,” Radboy says.
Radboy thought a fairer and more logical way to determine price was to figure out exactly how popular the hoodie was. If they knew there would be a lot of demand for certain products, they could place larger orders with the factory for future collections and negotiate a cheaper price, and then pass on the savings to the customer. “The more we thought about it, the more it became clear that the pricing model in fashion doesn’t make any sense,” says Radboy.
After that conversation, Radboy and Clemens hired engineers to develop a new pricing tool. When customers arrive on the website next week, every item will be at the wholesale price, but the price will go up over time, at a rate of about one cent every 20 minutes or about $10 to $20 every week, according to Radboy. And importantly, Radboy says that the final price at which it sells out will remain the price for all subsequent collections. “The sell-out price will be the forever price,” he explains.
In some ways, the real point of the pricing model was to help gather data about demand. As customers swarm the site, it will become obvious how quickly products sell out, and items that sell out within 30 seconds are clearly more popular than those that sell out within a minute. “This will give us information about how much of each product we should order in the future,” Radboy says. “And the larger the order, the cheaper it costs to manufacture.”
If the whole system seems confounding, that’s partly because it’s so different from what we’ve come to expect from the fashion industry. “It’s the opposite of a sale,” Clemens explains. By that, he means most brands start the season with their highest prices, then as time goes on, they sell any extra inventory at a discount. Here, Telfar is starting with its lowest prices, which will rise over time.
The Future of Pricing
For now, Clemens and Radboy expect this dynamic pricing system to be an experiment that will run on all new clothing drops through April 24. The goal is to help them determine pricing on future collections. But besides being a practical way to collect data, it is, on some level, a stunt designed to show how broken the fashion industry’s traditional pricing model is.
This is something that fashion experts have talked about for years. Many brands don’t have an accurate sense of how much inventory to order, and as a result, they discount heavily as the season goes on. This dilutes the brand. It is also bad for the planet because it floods the market with product that customers don’t really want.
Telfar’s dynamic pricing model is yet another way for Clemens to push back against the imposed boundaries of the fashion industry. But it is also a little wacky and complicated. It’s unclear whether his customers will fully understand the broader philosophical objective of the exercise, but they’ll no doubt be excited to snag Telfar merchandise for lower prices than ever before. And that’s equally important to Clemens. “I want people who want my clothes—and will look cool in it—to be able to get it,” he says.
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