Harrington Collection

The Organization

The Harrington Collection has 1.83% of the women’s apparel market share in terms of retail sales in 2007. The company has a chain of company owned retail stores, and also sells products to upscale department stores and specialty stores Harrington Collection is not only a retailer for designer women’s apparel, but also manufactures clothing under 4 distinct divisions. The divisions are Harrington Limited, Sopra, Christina Cole and Vigor. Below is a chart which breaks out the different groups, divisions and channels with Harrington Collection uses:

The company has the strengths of its strong reputation for having the finest quality and brands for woman desiring elegant, high-end fashions. The company uses their differentiating factors of having top in-house designers as a way to get customers in the door, and to keep them coming back. Their customers become extremely loyal to their brands, and their brands became synonymous with high-class fashions. They achieved this in the 1980s by capitalizing on the demand for professional and stylish attire desired by women entering the workforce.

Harrington Collection also has the strength of a strong sales staff, and this comes from their thought that sales people are the most important factor in the consumer decision making process. Thusly, they spent significant resources training their sales people and also offer them attractive commissions. They supplemented their outstanding customer service with extensive national advertising campaigns in order to get their customers first coming into their stores.

Another strength which the company has is that they were the first company to successfully introduce a ‘lifestyle’ branding strategy. This is what they attest their ability to charge their premium prices to the market which they are able to capture.

Harrington Collection does have some company-owned stores and within them they use cutting edge technology to track inventory and sales information. This allows the manufacturing group to quickly react to market demands, improve productivity and shorten manufacturing cycles. This means that they have always followed the market trend of integrating backwards because they can integrate their two divisions of the manufacturing and retail stores. Even though the company started off as a manufacturing and design company they saw the financial opportunity to have company-owned retail stores.

Harrington Collection has expertise in analyzing their market data to prevent overproduction in the manufacturing group. This would than in return reduce the number of overproduced goods sold to discounters, who as noted under the industry section, are a direct competitor. Preventing this overproduction of goods is important to the potential profits of their business and this benefits their non-company owned retail