Drapers wants to hear your views

The previous 18 months have not been effortless for impartial fashion merchants. Recurring lockdowns compelled non-vital retail to near across the United kingdom, cutting off a lot of independents’ most important route to market place almost right away.

How customers shopped, and what they purchased, adjusted dramatically, and companies were compelled to adapt at velocity to endure. Several started buying and selling online for the initial time, even though some others had to rapidly grow their digital business.

But Flexibility Day – the complete lifting of all Covid restrictions in England – lastly arrived on 19 July. With it must appear a return to far more standard buying and selling situations for impartial fashion merchants, as stores start out to dispense with social distancing needs and footfall on the significant street ideally enhances as persons return to workplaces and social lives in higher quantities.

Drapers wants to have an understanding of how the pandemic and other ongoing troubles have adjusted the impartial fashion retail landscape. To do so, we have launched our next Indies Indicator, a detailed survey that aims to drill down into the ongoing troubles companies are struggling with.

To build an correct snapshot of the recent point out of the impartial fashion retail field, we need your assistance.

We need to know how you coped with Covid, including what authorities assistance you accessed and your inner thoughts about the top quality of the grants, loans and strategies accessible. We want to have an understanding of the long lasting effect on the significant street of the pandemic’s change to online shopping and how this has adjusted the character of your business and no matter whether these changes are beneficial and long lasting.

While “Flexibility working day” marks the commencing of the close of pandemic restrictions, its outcomes are however becoming felt as freight charge rises, shipping delays and inventory shortages threaten to effect retail in the operate-up to the peak buying and selling time of Xmas. For that reason we want to know what unique issues you really feel lie ahead and what assistance you need – and from whom – to enable your business to thrive in the coming months and yrs.

The pandemic arrived on the back again of Brexit, which has remaining companies dealing with included administrative costs, paperwork and protocols, and the ongoing problem of business fees and their reform. We also would like to know feeling about how these troubles must be managed and how they are influencing your business and your confidence in foreseeable future buying and selling situations.

Drapers Indies Indicator 2021 features you the possibility to have your say on these vital troubles: simply click in this article to acquire the survey.

We will use the info to detect the issues independents experience and what assistance they need to thrive in the foreseeable future.

All solutions will be addressed anonymously. The results will be revealed in Drapers.