Price VS Quality. Good stuff doesn’t come cheap and cheap stuff is not of good quality.

Price offers a fast and direct way to communicate a brand. In other words, it helps a brand to determine their positioning too, whether they are a premium or economic type of business. A company makes use of price to control;

1. Financial performance,

2. Pricing strategies in both short and long term,

3. Marketing program considerations.

4. Customer perspective

When people start business, they always try to earn profit. A company need price to control financial performance such as budget plan, estimated profit or loss, or financial overview. The price must be correctly targeted to achieve their goals. In fashion industry, a brand usually sets higher price to new collection due to fast changing trend. They are realize that the product need to be sold at a certain time until further discount maybe adding to last stocks. It shows no matter how is quality, company can set the price differently due to their strategy.

Some of companies set the price depend on cost production. Maybe they take raw material from same source, however the way they pay for material, manufacturing, transportation, warehouse, and inventory make price of product that they produced different. Some company will have extras cost in several section. Again, it is determine different price in market, which is not based on product quality. Low quality product that supported with a nice packaging, high marketing strategy, will increase the value and influence people’s mind to higher quality product they made.

Besides, nowadays many people are more focused on price and image rather than quality. They don’t mind to buy expensive thing as long as it is trending and make you feel special to have it. For example; consumer are crazy of limited YEEZY shoes. Yes it is good stuff perhaps cost like 300SGD. However, the main concern will be more on Adidas strategy that brings people curious about the design. They start re-sell it for 1,200SGD, which actually we don’t really know how’s the exact quality of that shoes which can be the same as other quality product that they sell. It is just collaboration which make consumer think the quality better.

(Kiscksfoot, n.d)

For me, I believe that quality of product doesn’t really affect price in fashion industry nowadays. For the example, a same quality of product can be cost differently depends on quantity. Wholesaler will set price lower if customer purchase more. It doesn’t mean price cheaper because of bad quality. This picture below can explain more of pricing strategy. It is divided into 4 parts, which are Premium pricing, Skimming pricing, Penetration pricing, and the last Economic pricing.

(ABCI, n.d)

If you see clearly, skimming strategy set a high price in low quality. High quality can be set in both high price and low price as well. Good stuff doesn’t always expensive, and cheap stuff doesn’t always come in low quality. For example; Paul& Shark is one of a luxury brand that focused on men’s yachting wear based in Italy. They sell a piece of polo for 400-600SGD in the retail, while sometimes the over left stock can be sold in their office for under 50SGD. Can you imagine how much money to cost that same quality product in those?

(Lanecrawford, 2016)

Another example; True Religion is a California based clothing company which claims to sell premium handmade denim. The true religion brand jeans are the most expensive pair of jeans you will ever find, costing anywhere between 300$-600$. The clothing owes its high cost to fancy part production in America, but there is a large profit involved. No doubt the quality is much better than any ordinary jeans but the truth remains that nothing in the world can make a pair of jeans cost more than $75. However, there are still have some of products that expensive just because of their quality such as cheese or wine, price is set depends on the time produced, which means the longer they are made or the higher quality, the higher price will be cost. Hermes set high price because the hand crafted bag and high quality product.

(Truereligion, n.d)

Thus, there are many ways to control and affect price in fashion industry. Price does not always based on quality, which mean good stuff sometimes cost expensive or maybe inexpensive, and cheap price doesn’t always mean low quality although a lot of it happens like that. In the end it is just matter of what strategy that a brand prefer wants to deliver to customer.