The Asociación de Creadores de Moda de España presents the report “Spanish Fashion Design, in Numbers”, a document that aims to shed light on the economic reality of designer fashion in Spain. This document, prepared in collaboration with Modaes.es, was presented in streaming from La Tecnocreativa, and enjoyed the participation of Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Minister of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Community of Madrid; Rocío Ortiz de Bethencourt, president of La Tecnocreativa, Modesto Lomba, president of ACME; Pepa Bueno, executive director of ACME, and Pilar Riaño, director of Modaes.es.
For the first time, In this edition of the report “Spanish Fashion Design, in Numbers” promoted by ACME, data from two years, 2019 and 2020, has been incorporated, with opposite results due to the fact that the pandemic halted what already was four years of uninterrupted growth. The study, carried out in collaboration with the Community of Madrid and sponsored by La Tecnocreativa, focuses on ACME’S associated fashion brands and seeks to be an instrument for analysing the designer fashion sector while additionally recording its evolution with respect to previous years.
Covid-19 slowed the development of Spanish fashion design. Spanish author fashion, whose businesses until 2019 had a constant growth rate, has taken a step back in 2020 due to the health and economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The companies that are part of the Asociación de Creadores de Moda de España (ACME) generated an aggregated turnover of 618 million euros in 2020. This represents a drop in sales of 36% compared to the 967 million euros with which they closed the 2019 financial year. A drop aligned with that suffered by the entire fashion sector in Spain. In 2020, according to the Business Association of the Textile and Accessories Retailers (Acotex), the sales of fashion retail fell by 41.26%, hence the decrease registered in the pandemic’s year in author fashion is lower than that suffered by the whole of the fashion sector.
The report also highlights the turnover increase in ecommerce. Online sales of ACME’s associated design companies skyrocketed from previous years. In fiscal year 2020, the Spanish fashion design sector achieved an online turnover of 67.4 million euros. This figure is 17 million more than in 2019, the year in which 50.6 million euros were billed. Sales in online stores are the only ones that have presented a growth trend, among all those that make up the report.
Other data is gathered in “Spanish Fashion Design, in Numbers”, such as those related to the internationalization of fashion companies. Spanish designer brands sales abroad have also contracted due to the pandemic: the sector registered a combined turnover outside Spain in 2020 of 236 million, compared to 375 million euros in 2019, which registers a decrease of 37%. On the other hand, when analysing the countries where Spanish author's design is a top seller, the United States, Portugal, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan appear among the first. These results are very similar to those of the report’s previous editions, so a clear stabilization of Spanish fashion design industry in these countries can be observed.
The report collects the jobs created by the Spanish designer fashion industry. Thus, the companies associated with ACME ended the 2020 financial year with 5,702 employees, 1,058 workers less than in 2019 the year in which they employed 6,760 people. Therefore, the decrease in employment generated by Spanish fashion design has been 15%.
In this edition of the report, the companies associated with ACME take stock of the impact of Covid-19 in Spain prompting the consequences that, in their opinion, the pandemic will have in the sector in the medium term. Among them highlighted are, the disappearance of signature brands and the commitment to a fashion consumption linked to slow fashion concepts, in which quality prevails over quantity.
Modesto Lomba, president of ACME, pointed out during the report’s presentation, that this year has evidenced "the need to deepen the digital transformation processes of signature fashion brands", to which he adds that " the data provided by this report confirms that digitization has become the best vaccine to mitigate the impact of the crisis caused by Covid-19 in designer fashion”.
On the other hand, Pepa Bueno, executive director of ACME, highlights the artisan component and the qualified workforce of Spanish design fashion professionals, emphasizing that the companies that make up the association “have within them their most precious wealth. They know it very well and that is why they have fought to take care of it: the petite mains that make signature fashion are those that consolidate a type of consumption more related to quality rather than quantity, and that is the future ”.